Louis Wain | Postcard artist

Louis William Wain (1860-1939) was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats and kittens.

Wain was born in Clerkenwell, London.

In 1881 he sold his first drawing and the following year gave up his teaching position at the West London School of Art to become a full-time illustrator.

He married in 1884 but was widowed three years later.

In 1890 he moved to the Kent coast with his mother and five sisters, and, except for three years spent in New York, remained there until the family returned to London in 1917.

In 1914, he suffered a severe head injury in a horse-drawn omnibus accident and ten years later was certified insane.

He spent the remaining fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals, where he continued to draw and paint.

Some of his later abstract paintings have been seen as precursors of psychedelic art.

Wain produced hundreds of drawings and paintings a year for periodicals and books, including Louis Wain's Annual which ran from 1901 to 1921.

His work also appeared on postcards and advertising, and he made brief ventures into ceramics and animated cartoons.

In spite of his popularity and prolific output, Wain did not become wealthy, possibly because he sold his work cheaply and relinquished copyright, and also because he supported his mother and five sisters.

In December 1881, Wain's first drawing to be published appeared in the Christmas 1881 issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News.

It was a picture of bullfinches on laurel bushes, given the wrong title of "Robins Breakfast".

The following year he was offered a position on the magazine and was able to give up his teaching position at the West London School of Art.

On 30 January 1884 Wain married Emily Marie Richardson, who had been the governess of his sisters, in St Mary's Chapel, Hampstead.

The couple lived in Hampstead and were joined by Peter, a black-and-white kitten.

Emily developed breast cancer soon after the marriage; Peter was a comfort to her and also, as Wain would later say, laid the foundation of his career as a cat artist.

Encouraged by his wife, Wain sold his first published cat drawings to The Illustrated London News in 1884.

At this time he was also reporting on agricultural shows and pet shows, and taking commissions for animal portraits.

By 1886 his cat pictures had been more widely noticed and he was commissioned by Macmillan to illustrate a children's book, Mrs Tabby's Establishment.

His fame became established with the publication in the 1886 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News of his first drawing of anthropomorphised cats, A Kitten's Christmas Party, which shows 150 cats celebrating Christmas in eleven panels.

Wain had little time to share his success with his wife; Emily died in January 1887 after just three years of marriage.

As a young widower, Wain rented rooms in New Cavendish Street in the City of Westminster and moved in somewhat Bohemian circles that included journalists and artists such as Herbert Railton, Caton Woodville, Linley Sambourne, Harry Furniss, Melton Prior, and Phil May. At musical evenings, he would improvise on the piano.

He worked to build up his reputation by taking on commissions for a variety of subjects, including architectural and landscape drawings as well as animals, for a number of journals.

By 1890 he was a household name, and, in acknowledgment of his expertise on cats, was elected president of the National Cat Club.

Two illustrations of cats' Christmas parties in 1890 marked a new development in his style of drawing cats, as they took on more human features with Wain often doing preliminary sketches of people in public places.

Wain's father had died in 1880. His relationship with his mother and five sisters, none of whom married, had been strained as they had not approved of his marriage to Emily.

But in 1890 there was a reconciliation and the family moved to the seaside resort of Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, where they rented a house belonging to Sir William Ingram, managing director of the Illustrated London News. Wain took up gardening and walking, as well as various sports including running, swimming, ice skating, boxing and fencing.

Two of Wain's sisters, Claire and Felicie, were talented artists, but it was Wain who had to support the whole family and, although he was a popular and successful artist, money was always short. Bills were sometimes paid with pictures.

Selling his pictures together with the copyright cheaply to publishers meant that he did not receive royalties when his work was reproduced and left him in straitened circumstances in later life.

Wain was a prolific artist, completing hundreds of pictures a year. His early work was mostly for periodicals but in the 1890s he turned his hand to illustrating children's books; over his lifetime there would be more than 100.

He wrote many of the books he illustrated, and, as an acknowledged expert on cats, contributed the section on the domestic cat in Hutchinson's The Living Animals of the World (1901).

In 1901, Wain produced the first Louis Wain Annual, which were published every year from 1901 to 1915 and in 1921.

Between 1900-1940, 75 different publishers, including Raphael Tuck and Sons and Valentine and Sons, produced over 1100 of his images in postcard form.

His work was also used in advertisements.

Wain worked with a variety of media including watercolour, body colour,[a] pen and ink, pencil, silverpoint, chalk and oil.

His period of greatest popularity was in the years before World War I when he portrayed Edwardian society at leisure.

His cats dressed as humans took part in sports, went to the seaside, tea parties, restaurants and celebrated Christmas, with activities sometimes ending in mishap and mayhem. Wain's world was "funny, edgy and animated".

In 1907, while his mother and sisters remained in Kent, Wain left for New York, where he was offered a contract by Hearst Newspapers.

He returned to England in 1910, following the death of his mother.

In 1914, he produced a series of "futurist" ceramic cats, described by one reviewer as "the latest thing in freak ornaments".

In October 1914, Wain fell from the platform of an omnibus in London and suffered a head injury which left him in a coma.

He spent three weeks in hospital and was ordered to rest for six months.

In 1917, Wain and his four surviving sisters left Westgate and moved to Kilburn in London.

Marie Louisa had died in 1913 after twelve years spent in the East Kent County Lunatic Asylum.

His eldest sister, Caroline, died of influenza soon after the move to Kilburn. | Source: © Wikipedia

Louis William Wain (1860-1939) è stato un artista Inglese, noto soprattutto per i suoi disegni di gatti e gattini antropomorfi. Wain nacque a Clerkenwell, Londra.

Nel 1881 vendette il suo primo disegno e l'anno seguente rinunciò al suo incarico di insegnante alla West London School of Art per diventare illustratore a tempo pieno. Si sposò nel 1884, ma rimase vedovo tre anni dopo.

Nel 1890 si trasferì sulla costa del Kent con la madre e le cinque sorelle e, fatta eccezione per i tre anni trascorsi a New York, vi rimase fino al ritorno della famiglia a Londra nel 1917.

Nel 1914, subì un grave trauma cranico in un incidente con un omnibus trainato da cavalli e dieci anni dopo fu dichiarato pazzo.

Trascorse i restanti quindici anni della sua vita in ospedali psichiatrici, dove continuò a disegnare e dipingere.

Alcuni dei suoi ultimi dipinti astratti sono stati considerati precursori dell'arte psichedelica.

Wain produsse centinaia di disegni e dipinti all'anno per periodici e libri, tra cui Louis Wain's Annual, che uscì dal 1901-1921.

I suoi lavori apparvero anche su cartoline e pubblicità, e si cimentò brevemente nella ceramica e nei cartoni animati.

Nonostante la sua popolarità e la sua prolifica produzione, Wain non divenne ricco, forse perché vendeva le sue opere a basso prezzo e rinunciava ai diritti d'autore, ed anche perché manteneva la madre e le cinque sorelle.