Louis Wain and cats: art through schizophrenia

The writer h. g. Wells he once said that the cats in england that don't look like the cats painted by louis waineThey are ashamed of themselves.

It was not for less: Louis Wain was one of the most renowned artists of the Victorian era, and everyone knew and adored his funny representations of cats that acted and expressed themselves as human beings.

• You may be interested in: "We raffle 5 copies of the book "Psychologically Speaking"!"

Louis Wain: journey into the work of an artist obsessed with cats

However, Wain did not go down in history simply because he was a good painter. It is also one of the classic examples used to show how the schizophrenia, a mental illness that could have been captured pictorially in the development of his last paintings.

His love for cats

Louis Wain has liked drawing animals since he was young. He never missed an opportunity to create representations of the living beings he saw and the bucolic scenes in which they were involved. However, it was when his wife fell ill with cancer that he began to draw what would characterize his work. cats.

Specifically, cats adopting attitudes and activities typical of human beings. At first, yes, timidly: the felines that he painted at this stage have the anatomical characteristics of the ordinary cats, but they try to adapt their bodies to human tasks, such as reading the newspaper or smoking. Wain drew these cats to cheer up his wife in the last years of his life, and for this he resorted to portraying his cat Peter of him in somewhat ridiculous situations.

louis waine he started drawing and painting clearly anthropomorphic cats shortly after his 30th birthday. In these images, markedly comic in tone, cats were a means by which his creator caricatured the English society of the time: cats waving to each other, smoking, throwing drinking parties, playing Golf... In fact, Wain used to go to crowded places, such as squares or restaurants, and portray the people he saw as if they were felines that acted just like the people he was seeing did.

Almost everything that Louis Wain drew was so humorous that the painter did not have to change much of his style when he had to illustrate some children's books, also resorting to the figure of animals anthropomorphic.

The stage of decay

Louis Wain was famous and admired throughout England, but he was far from rich. In fact, he made little profit from his own work, since sometimes he worked practically for free, and he also used part of the money to support his family. He soon began to have so many financial problems that he had to emigrate to the United States, from where he returned even poorer.

The situation was complicated when Wain began to show symptoms of mental illness. Although the development of psychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century does not allow us to know much about the painter's mental illness, today Louis Wain is believed to have developed schizophrenia, although some researchers point out that it is more likely that he met the diagnostic criteria of the Autism Spectrum Disorders.

His internment in a phrenopathic

Wain he was first admitted to a psychiatric institution in the mid-1920s, when his behavior had become so erratic and occasionally aggressive that he had difficulty relating even to those in his inner circle. However, this detention center was in such poor condition that several important personalities, including H. g. Wells and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom himself intervened so that he was assigned to a better place.

In this way, Louis Wain arrived at Bethlem Royal Hospital, a place that had a garden and a cheerful colony of cats. He would spend the last 15 years of his life here.

Journey into the abstract

The Louis Wain of Bethlem Royal Hospital was certainly different from the suave, crowd-loving painter who had been coddled by every newspaper in the country. But not only had he changed: so had, apparently his handiwork..

Dating of his paintings that were made years after his death show a clear pattern in his paintings, which they range from figurative art featuring animals acting like people to highly abstract combinations of lines and colors. and hardly reminiscent of anything that exists on our plane of reality. In these paintings, kaleidoscopic shapes appear, a wide variety of colors and fractal or symmetrical motifs. They seem like paintings from another planet, or based on the mythological folklore of some Asian culture.

A pictorial work that teaches us the reality of people suffering from schizophrenia

That is why the work of Louis Wain is often used as an example of how the way of perceiving reality progresses in some people with schizophrenia.

However, and if it is true that these abstract paintings correspond exclusively to the time in which schizophrenia had severely limited Wain's abilities, we can also take this story as an example of self-improvement. Art can also bear witness to the creative impulse of people, and although the paintings of the English painter could have varied incredibly to the point of appealing to logic and rules of representation that only he understood, are still proof of a highly acute artistic genius that continued to develop even in the most difficult conditions. hard.