Rebecca Raybone, registrar at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, said: “Louis Wain loved cats, and cat lovers loved Louis Wain.” The artist’s later life, she added, “can be viewed as a colourful, compelling argument for the possibilities of animal therapy and the enduring ability of animals to lift human spirits. The exhibition will include works such as A Cricket Catastrophe, with anthropomorphised cats in a scene of great commotion, and Patent Cork Screws – an experimental, abstract sketch of cats as corkscrews.Īlso featured will be Cats’ Christmas, Carol Singing Cats and Cats with Plum Pudding – which Wain painted directly on to mirrors as part of Christmas festivities at Bethlem, and which remained within the hospital when he left it in 1930. Now, Bethlem Royal hospital, the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital – most commonly known by its nickname “Bedlam” – is putting on a major exhibition exploring the life and work the artist who spent many of his days there.Īnimal Therapy: the Cats of Louis Wain will go on display at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in south-east London from December. Humorous and whimsical, or psychedelic, Wain's cat images were much loved in the Victorian and Edwardian era, and remain so today. The eccentric artist, who was eventually admitted to hospital for schizophrenia, continued to produce many drawings of gleeful and often outlandish creatures, and his body of work demonstrated the therapeutic and restorative effect that closeness with animals can have on a person’s mental health. After more than a year's absence from the museum, for exhibitions in Brent Museum and the Nicholson Art Gallery in Leek, the Louis Wain collection is back at Bethlem for a winter show, which opened earlier this month. Photograph: © 2021 StudioCanal SAS – Channel 4
Louis wain kaleidoscope cat series#
Indeed, the colourful nature of these detailed works perhaps renders them more artistic in some ways than much of Wain’s earlier, more illustrative work.A picture in Wain’s Kaleidoscope Cats series of drawings. While Wain certainly had a breakdown, and his work did change – in many ways becoming more experimental – it is hard to describe the pictures as deteriorated.
However, as Dr O’Flynn recognises, the paintings are still beautiful. The doctor believed that the images fitted the contemporary understanding of psychotic deterioration: as Wain’s mental health declined, so he became less able to represent cats coherently. Maclay found the eight “kaleidoscope cat” paintings in a junk shop in Notting Hill and, in 1939, wrote to a friend about how fascinating they were. In his talk, Dr O’Flynn discussed the connections between Louis Wain and Dr Walter Maclay (1902 – 64). It provides a fitting conclusion to our Louis Wain exhibition, which ends this week. An edited version of Dr O’Flynn’s talk is now up on the SLaM You Tube Channel, and can be watched below. In December, we were lucky to have Dr David O’Flynn, consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals and Chair of the Adamson Collection, to give a talk on the so-called “Kaleidoscope Cats”, about which we have blogged previously.
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