Give a cat a bicycle, a fashionable outfit or a place at a formal dinner and something happens to the people in the picture, even when there are no people in it. Their routines begin to look slightly ridiculous.
Louis Wain made a career from that transformation. His cats can be charming, busy, pompous or absorbed in ordinary social life. They offer a whole human world at a feline angle, and there is far more to look at than the handful of images commonly arranged into a story about his mental health.
The cat as a social performer
Bethlem Museum of the Mind’s account describes the enormous popularity of Wain’s cats from the 1880s to the First World War. They appeared in books, magazines, postcards, prints and annuals, carrying the artist’s work into everyday visual culture.
They played cricket, rode bicycles and took part in fashionable society. The joke depends on recognition. The viewer sees a familiar human activity, then sees whiskers, ears and paws performing it with complete seriousness.
This is a different use of an animal from a natural-history illustration. We are not primarily being asked to learn what cats do. We are being invited to notice what people do by seeing the routine assigned to another creature.
Why the domestic scale works
A scene of social vanity does not need a villain. A pose, an accessory or a self-important expression can carry it. Cats are especially useful for this because they already invite human readings of composure, irritation and self-possession.
Those readings tell us something about ourselves. A cat cannot actually be embarrassed by a dinner invitation. Yet a drawn cat can make that embarrassment legible immediately, giving the viewer enough distance to laugh at it.
Looking at Wain this way also changes the pace of viewing. Instead of scanning for the strangest image, pause over who seems to be in charge, who is watching whom and which tiny social rule everyone appears to be taking seriously.
Be careful with the supposed progression
Wain experienced serious mental illness and spent his later years in hospitals, continuing to make art. Those facts deserve care. They do not justify treating every change of style as a medical measurement.
In its discussion of the kaleidoscopic cats, Bethlem describes later attempts to arrange his pictures into a supposed clinical progression. A sequence assembled for that purpose is not automatically an established chronology of the artist’s work.
The familiar online arrangement is powerful because it offers a story at a glance: recognisable cat, increasingly elaborate cat, abstract pattern. But the persuasive shape of a sequence is not proof that it accurately records a person’s condition. The pictures deserve attention as pictures, too.
Look for range, not a single explanation
Start with the museum’s collection and move between ordinary scenes and more decorative work. Compare the use of repetition, the relation between figure and background and the ways a face remains readable within a busy design.
You do not have to choose between enjoying the humour and taking the artist seriously. Humour is part of the work. Nor do you need to invent a diagnosis to find a complex picture interesting.
For another cat whose cultural life exceeds one familiar image, our piece on the Cheshire Cat follows a grin through language and literature. Wain’s achievement is similarly difficult to contain in a single label. His cats keep their expressions, while the human world around them becomes wonderfully strange.
