Discover real-life 1800s painter Louis Wain: the original king of cat memes

From AI chatbot CatGPT to social accounts that guide tourists to bodega cats, our feline friends are the internet’s overlords. But long before the dawn of the digital age, one man’s cat memes already had the world obsessed. Between 1890 and the early 1910s, British artist Louis Wain’s illustrations of cats doing everything from going to the theatre to throwing bachelor parties were a smash hit in newspapers, nursery books, advertisements and postcards. He was the king of cats. Now Benedict Cumberbatch plays the eccentric cat artist in the biographical drama The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. 

Louis was working as an illustrator to support his mother and five sisters when he fell in love with their penniless governess, Emily Richardson (Claire Foy). Their brief, tragic marriage was filled with joy thanks to a stray kitten named Peter, whose antics inspired floods of drawings that Louis first shared first with Emily, and then the world. Louis became a publishing sensation, but poverty, death, mental illness and war plagued the Wain family. The film follows Louis’ slow descent into madness, and the public outcry and rescue when journalist Dan Rider (Adeel Akhtar) stumbled across him in a psychiatric hospital ward for paupers in 1927. 

Kaleidoscope cats and futurist cats 

You might already be familiar with Louis Wain’s “kaleidoscope cats”. In 1939 psychiatrist Dr Walter Maclay came across eight undated paintings signed by Louis Wain in a junk shop. He placed them in what he guessed to be date order, and despite never having treated or met Louis Wain, he used them to illustrate the supposed progressive deterioration of the artist’s connection with reality and his artistic capabilities under the influence of schizophrenia.

In doing so, Dr Maclay ignored a massive body of work that Louis had left behind showing his connection to the most exciting modern art movements of his time and their fascination with pattern and abstraction – including the growing reputation of Vincent van Gogh in the late 1890s, symbolism, expressionism, cubism and futurism – demonstrated in the “Futurist Mascot” ceramic cat planters and vases that Louis designed between 1910 and 1912. Dr Walter Maclay also wasn’t aware that Louis grew up surrounded by complex decorative patterns. His father, William Matthew Wain, was a textile trader who specialised in fabric and carpet designs. His maternal grandmother designed tapestries, and his mother designed church embroideries and Turkish-style rugs.  

The current view of these illustrations is that, far from showing an artist losing his grip on his ability to faithfully reproduce reality, Louis’ abstracted paintings and drawings of cats show the work of an artist who was finally freed from the crushing pressure of making a living. Given free rein, Louis was able to explore ideas, capture the fractal patterns of nature using his favourite subject, and even play with his knack for being ambidextrous. It also allowed him to give form to something he saw as the “electrical” connections between living things.  

An electrical world 

When Louis called cats “excellent conductors of electricity”, he wasn’t talking about rubbing a balloon on their fur to generate static. Born in 1860, Louis Wain came of age at the peak of the Victorian fascination with electrical inventions. He was just 24 years old when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were engaged in their pitched battle to pioneer household systems of electrical current in 1884. But electrons were only discovered in 1897, and until then, scientific debate hinged on the ether theory and electromagnetic waves. 

Theories of the ether captured the attention of the Victorian Spiritualist movement, who saw it as a point of connection between worlds and beings on the spiritual plane. In the narration of the film, narrator Olivia Coleman tells us that for Louis Wain, electricity was “a mysterious elemental force that on occasion, he could feel shimmering in the ether, and the key to all of life's most profound and alarming secrets.”  

Electricity promised everything – connection between the living, reconnection with the dead, a link to the past and future, and even salvation from suffering. In the film, when Louis’ sister Marie (Hayley Squires) becomes delusional, Louis announces, “I have been working on a psychiatric patent that I meant to show you. It's for an electric suit made of copper and silken steel, attached to a large mechanical motor that transmits a positive current through the nervous system and into the brain, thus curing the patient of all harmful thoughts and eradicating their lunacies entirely.” Sadly, there were no takers, and eventually Louis’ sisters would have him committed, too.   

Catman: seeing the man in cats 

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain opens with a quote from author HG Wells (Nick Cave), who was one of the people driving the effort to move Louis to more comfortable surroundings than the pauper’s mental ward. In his plea to the public, HG Wells noted that people across the world had come to love cats because of the gentle humour in Louis’ creations: “The artist Louis Wain made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. Cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves … He undoubtedly raised up the cat in society and he changed our world for the better.” 

The trick, for Louis, was making people see the inner person in a cat, and recognising that both humans and cats were rather silly, but still worthy of affection. When Louis wasn’t his own model for the facial expressions in his cat drawings, he turned to the public. In The School Girl's Annual in 1922 in an article titled How I Draw My Cats, Louis wrote: “There is another way of sketching cats, and this way I often resort to. I take a sketch-book to a restaurant, or other public place, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible … These studies, I think, are my best humorous work.”  

Also watch: Reel artists on Showmax 

These 10 biographical dramas place revered artists in the context of their lives and times.  

• Elvis: Austin Butler plays the king of rock-n-roll, Elvis Presley, in director Baz Luhrmann’s biopic about Elvis’s entire life, and his relationship with his manager, Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).  
• Respect: Jennifer Hudson plays soul singer Aretha Franklin in this film covering three decades of her life and struggles.  
• The White Crow: Ralph Fiennes directs this biography of the early life, career, and defection of Russian ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev, played by Ukrainian dancer Oleg Ivenko (a principal dancer with the Tatar State Opera in Kazan) 
• Julia: This mini-series takes us inside the life of pioneering cooking show host Julia Child (Sarah Lancashire), during the creation of her long-running TV cooking series, The French Chef.  
• Judy: Renée Zellweger plays actress and singer Judy Garland in this story covering her difficult career and personal issues later in her life, particularly her performances in England shortly before her death. 
• The United States vs Billie Holiday: In this film based on based on the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Andra Day plays blues singer Billie Holiday in a story that reveals the political backlash and malicious targeting she faced from the FBI over her song Strange Fruit, which criticised the public lynching of Black men. 
• Straight Outta Compton: This stellar "rockumentary" follows the rise and fall of the hip-hop group NWA and its members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr Dre, MC Ren, and DJ Yella. Ice Cube's oldest son, O'Shea Jackson Jr, plays his dad. 
• Mary Shelley: Elle Fanning plays Frankenstein author Mary Shelley in this story about her life and romance with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). See inside their intimate circle including the poet Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), and Mary’s struggle to get her book published.  
• Colette: Kiera Knightley plays French novelist Colette, whose husband Henry "Willy" Gauthier-Villars, a failing author and publisher, published her work under his name in the early 1900s and became a runaway success.  
• Dream: The Lebo Mathosa Story: KB Motsilanyane plays the adult version of kwaito and hip-hop star Lebo Mathosa, while Bahumi Madisakwane plays the younger Lebo in this star-studded biopic of the South African musician’s short and dazzling life and career.