Louis Wain’s Cat Pictures

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I have
had Louie Wayne on my list for an episode for
a while. He was a commercial illustrator and popular artist

(00:24):
who's most well known for his many depictions of cats.
We've had some listener requests for an episode on him
as well, and most recently on Twitter, listener Theodor asked
if we had done one. Uh, we had not, but
that bumped him up to the top of the list.
Louie Wayne's art was extremely popular in the late nineteenth

(00:47):
and early twentieth centuries, especially in the UK, and some
of his later work also became an inspiration for the
psychedelic movement of the nineteen sixties. Sometimes that later work
is also interpreted as documenting the progression of his mental illness,
although there are some problems with that interpretation that we
will be talking about and the language of the time.

(01:11):
Louis Wayne was declared insane in ninety four, and he
spent the last fifteen years of his life living in
asylums and psychiatric hospitals. But while he was there, he
continued to create artwork that whole time. Louis William Wayne
was born on August fifth, eighteen sixty in Clarkenwell, London.
His father, William, was an embroiderer and textile trader who

(01:34):
had been disowned by his family after converting to Catholicism.
Louis mother, Julie Feliciebeau, was the daughter of French immigrants
to the UK, and she usually went by Felicia Marie
among English speakers. She also worked in textiles, designing things
like embroideries, carpets and altar cloths for the Catholic Church.

(01:54):
Louis was their oldest child, named after his maternal grandfather,
and he had five younger sisters, Caroline, Josephie, Marie Claire,
and Julie also known as Phelisi. Louis was born with
a cleft lip, and that's something that was probably treated
with surgery while he was still a baby. As an adult,
he grew a mustache to conceal it. When he was

(02:17):
very young, a doctor advised his parents to have him
taught at home rather than sending him to school, although
they never told him specifically why that was. He was
frequently sick though. He had a serious case of scarlet fever,
among other things, and he also described having particularly vivid
dreams and nightmares that could be really troubling to him.

(02:41):
When Louie was ten, his parents decided that he was
ready to go to school, but he really didn't like it.
He was bright and curious, with a particular interest in
electricity and magnetism, and he loved going to scientific lectures
at the Royal Polytechnic Institution which later became the University
of Westminster, but when it came to his actual class work,

(03:03):
it just didn't hold his interest. He was also shy,
and his classmates found him to be a little odd,
so he struggled to connect to his peers and he
sometimes got into fights. For most of his youth, he
regularly skipped school and went to wander the countryside around London,
immersing himself in observations of nature. When Louis was thirteen,

(03:24):
he was enrolled at Joseph's Academy in Kennington, which had
started out as a village south of London and is
considered part of London today. He continued to skip school,
but he also started developing some new interests, including chemistry, boxing,
art and music. For a while, he wanted to write
an opera, and he thought that he might make a

(03:45):
career in music. He gradually started focusing most of his
time on music and art, and eventually decided to become
an artist. He enrolled at West London School of Art
in eighteen seventy seven and studied there for four years.
On October eighty William Wayne died, leaving louis Is the

(04:06):
primary breadwinner for his mother and sisters. He tried his
hand at teaching, becoming an assistant master at his art school,
but that only lasted for a year. He was just
so shy that he had a hard time effectively instructing
his students. At the end of eighteen eighty one, Wayne
published his first piece of artwork, which was a picture

(04:26):
of bullfinches on a laurel bush that was in illustrated,
sporting and dramatic news. At this point, most newspapers and
magazines that wanted to include some kind of visual imagery
were relying mostly on illustrations. Although various types of photography
had been invented, a cost effective method to rapidly print

(04:48):
photos onto paper had not. There were, however, more commercially
available methods to print illustrations. Publications that printed a lot
of illustrations usually worked with multiple illustrators, some of them
on staff and some of them freelance, and Louie Wayne
was particularly suited for this kind of work. Number One,

(05:09):
he could draw images that were accurate and visually appealing,
and he could do that really quickly. He was also
good at some of the subjects that newspapers and readers
really wanted, like drawing all of the winning animals at
livestock and agricultural fairs, or detailed illustrations of people's country homes.
Soon Wayne had a staff position at Illustrated, Sporting, and

(05:31):
Dramatic news, and he supplemented his income by doing portraits
of people's dogs. When Louie was twenty three, he started
a relationship with Emily Marie Richardson, who was ten years
older than he was. She was living and working at
the Wayne family home as a governess and tutor to
Louie's youngest sisters. His family really did not approve of

(05:53):
this relationship at all, both because of the difference in
their ages and because of her position in their how
hold and in society. Louie and Emily got married in
spite of those objections on January four at St Mary's Chapel, Hampstead.
No one from either of their families attended the wedding.
Their witnesses were Matilda Humphreyson and louis longtime friend, artist

(06:17):
and illustrator Herbert Railton. We mentioned earlier that Louis had
a hard time making friends at school, but while he
was still thought of as eccentric and maybe a little odd,
he did have more friends in his adulthood. After getting
married Emily, Louie and their pet bird lived in a
little house in Hampstead, and soon they also got a

(06:37):
black and white kitten named Peter. It's not totally clear
where Peter came from. He eventually became part of the
sort of lore surrounding Louis Wayne and his love of cats,
and multiple people took credit for giving him to the couple.
Regardless of how Peter came into their lives, though he
was deeply beloved, it seems just as likely Peter just

(07:00):
wandered up Yes, one of the many Peter could claim
credit for giving Peter. Yes. Sadly, though not long after
their marriage, Emily was diagnosed with breast cancer, and soon
she was spending most of her time in bed with
Peter and Louie for company. Sometimes, Louis is characterized as
abandoning everything else so that he could spend time with

(07:23):
his dying wife, but he was still trying to earn
enough money to support them both, and he did much
of this by traveling to agricultural shows, fishing competitions, and
other events by train, and drawing as many illustrations as
he could as quickly as he could, some of them
while on the train traveling back home. Emily's sister also
came to help take care of her, although she and

(07:45):
Louie did not always get along when he wasn't working, though,
Louie really did spend as much time as he could
with Emily and Peter, including teaching Peter tricks and drawing
pictures of him, all to just try to entertain his wife,
and Emily really loved these pictures. Louie had started working
for the Illustrated London News, and Emily encouraged him to

(08:08):
show the pictures to his editor, Sir William Ingram. Louie
was reluctant at first. Cats didn't have the kind of
popular appeal that they do in a lot of places today.
There were certainly people in the UK who kept cats
as pets or even bred them, but as one example,
the first Crystal Palace Show, which was the first cat
show in the country, had taken place only about fifteen

(08:31):
years earlier, and to a lot of people, cats were
somewhere between an unwanted nuisance and a necessary but dirty
way to control rats and mice. Wayne later said of
this quote. When I first started sketching and painting cats,
they were viewed as detested creatures, looked upon as pests
by hunters. Anyone who was interested in the cat movement

(08:52):
was seen to be a feminine. Wayne did finally show
Ingram his pictures of Peter, though, and it turns out
Ingram really liked them. Louis Wayne published his first cat
picture in the Illustrated London News in eight four. This
was a full page spread of fourteen pictures called Our
Cats a Domestic History. These were realistically drawn cats doing

(09:17):
real life cat things like getting into a sewing basket,
scratching themselves under the chin with a back paw, drinking
from a saucer, and catching a mouse. The panels formed
a loose narrative with the captions at the bottom, describing
a cat who was patterned after Peter. He was forgotten
at home while the family goes to the seaside and

(09:37):
then gets into so much mischief that she's no longer
fit to be shown at the Crystal Palace Cat Show.
In the mid eighteen eighties, Louis Wayne's work as an
illustrator included pictures of lots of different animals, architectural drawings,
some work as a commercial artist on product packaging, and
increasingly cats. In eighty six, he was commissioned to illustrate

(10:01):
a children's book called Madam Tabby's Establishment. He created seven
full page illustrations featuring lots and lots of cats, as
well as the book's protagonist, a little girl named Diana.
In the book, the King of Cats had belonged to
Diana's grandmother, which meant that Diana was allowed to join
Cat Society and go to Madam Tabby's, basically a finishing

(10:23):
school for cats. After this, Wayne asked William Ingram if
he could do a cat illustration for Christmas for the
Illustrated London News. Ingram agreed, and the result was a
Kitten's Christmas Party, which took him eleven days to complete.
Like Our Cats and Domestic History, this was a set
of pictures that formed a narrative, this time over eleven panels,

(10:47):
and in those panels were about a hundred and fifty
total cats. They're not wearing human clothes, but some of
them are doing human activities, including washing the dishes, playing
in a musical ensemble, and sleeping in a bed the
way children often do in picture books, so on their backs,
with heads on pillows and front paws tucked over the

(11:09):
top of a folded down bedspread. Eventually, Wayne's cat illustrations
would become a Christmas time staple. In the Book of
the Cat, published in three Francis Simpson wrote, quote, a
Christmas without one of Louie's clever catty pictures would be
like Christmas pudding without currents. Sadly, Louie's wife, Emily died
on January second, seven, not long after A Kitten's Christmas

(11:33):
Party was published, and just a couple of days after
their third wedding anniversary. Louis, of course was heartbroken. He
and Peter moved into a new home where Louie kept
on drawing cats, and we'll talk about a shift in
Louise cat art and where it went from there after.
We pause for a sponsor break. In eighteen ninety, Louie

(12:02):
Wayne's Christmas illustration for the Illustrated London News included something
that people came to see as really emblematic of his work.
The cats weren't just doing human activities like washing dishes.
They were also highly anthropomorphized and dressed in human clothes.
He did keep creating more realistic depictions of cats, as

(12:25):
well as cats in various human like scenarios who were
not wearing clothes, but cats in Victorian and Eduardian attire
became a big part of his work. He later described
his process as sometimes involving drawing the people he saw
around him, but drawing them as cats. Louis Wayne's fame

(12:45):
and popularity grew over the next few years, and so
did the number of cats in his household. Most of
the time he had more than one, and by some
counts the number was sometimes as high as seventeen. Some
of these were cats that people give to him as gifts,
knowing how much he loved them, but other times it
was more like someone had found astray and just assumed

(13:06):
he would be okay with taking it in. But Peter
was really at the heart of a lot of his
work and was the model for a lot of his pictures.
After Emily died, Peter was Louie's closest companion until his
death in March. By then, Louis Wayne had become a
household name, and in addition to publishing so many pictures

(13:29):
of cats, he was also writing a lot about cats
and their care based on his own experience and intuition.
Some of this more or less holds up, Like he
said that cats hated orange peels and could be kept
away from the garden by burying orange peels near the plants.
He also recommended keeping some grass on hand for a cat,

(13:52):
even if it was just a little bit of grass
growing in a pot. Those are things you still here today. Sure,
my cats hate the smell of citrus and will turn
and run if I hold out appeals. Weren't that? I
think I could produce multiple behavior books that say, if
you have tomcats lingering outside your house marking your doors,

(14:13):
just rub a little orange peel around the doorframe. Works
like a charm. But some of his cat advice was
downright Cockamami Wayne didn't just think that having a pet
cat was good for a person's spirit. He claimed that
people who kept cats were physically immune to various minor illnesses.
At some points he described cats as having weak minds,

(14:36):
although he always said that Peter was extremely intelligent. When
asked how cats who wandered far from home could find
their way back if their minds were so weak, he
said it was because their bodies had an electrical polarity
that told them which way was north. Because he was
such a tireless promoter of cats, and because he at
least theoretically had a lot of expertise about them and

(14:59):
their care, Louis Wayne was made president of the National
Cat Club in I feel like we might get emails
from people that point out various animals that do use
some kind of electrical or polarity too. That was not
what he was describing. It was really like this cat

(15:22):
is a literal electrical compass. That did not really add up. However,
Louis Wayne's cat pictures and writing about cats were published
all over the place and collected into books. He illustrated
children's books, some of which he also wrote, and he
kept working for various illustrated newspapers and magazines, but he

(15:42):
was not able to turn all of this fame and
prolific output into a reliable income. He didn't copyright his images,
so people just reprinted them if they wanted to. That
was something that became a bigger and bigger problem as
his career went on and there more and more of
his work already out there. When he sold illustrations to publications,

(16:06):
a lot of the time he just sold them out right.
He didn't retain his rights to the original image or
negotiate for any kind of royalties or licensing fees for
later use of the artwork. He also just didn't charge
a lot for it. It came easily to him, and
he loved doing these pictures, so it just doesn't seem
to have occurred to him that he should ask for

(16:27):
more money. And there were definitely publishers who absolutely took
advantage of him for this. They recognized that they had
access to this illustrator whose output was prolific and whose
work was really cheap and really popular. Yeah, Louis seems
to have reconciled with his mother and sisters and he

(16:48):
moved in with them in a house owned by William
Ingrin in Westgate On c in Kent. He made ends meet,
but just barely, by selling art, often using artwork to
barter for things like the rent and even basic necessities.
Since they didn't have a lot of money, their lives
were fairly quiet, and his sisters never really had any suitors.

(17:10):
But Louis also tended to buy luxuries that they didn't
necessarily need and couldn't really afford, like at one point
he had a telephone installed, and he also had notepaper
printed that had their telephone number up at the top.
This might not sound all that frivolous, but for context,
in there were only nine thousand telephone subscribers in all

(17:34):
of London, which had a population of well over four
million people. Two years later that was up to a
whopping seventeen thousand, three hundred seventy one subscribers. They did
not really need a phone, there was almost nobody to call.
He's just handing out his phone number, magical notepads, two cats,

(17:56):
uh and the family did have some other struggles as well.
Louie sister Marie had been experiencing delusions, including a persistent
belief that she had Hanson's disease. Also known his leprosy,
and that meant that she refused to let people get
near her. In nineteen o one, she was declared insane
and admitted to a hospital where she was diagnosed with

(18:17):
primary dementia. Some sources have concluded that this was really schizophrenia.
The first Louis Wayne Annual came out in nineteen o one.
This was a book collecting written work by Louis Wayne
and by other people, some of them friends of his,
along with lots of his illustrations. A new annual came
out nearly every year until nineteen fifteen, with the last

(18:40):
one published a few years after that. Louie's creative output
was particularly prolific. At the start of the twentieth century,
he was producing as many as six hundred works of
art per year, some of them depicting multiple cats or
other animals. He worked with as many as seventy five
publishers over the course of his life, and he worked
in multiple media, including pen and ink, oil, watercolor, guash,

(19:04):
Venetian red chalk, silver point, pencil, and crayon. His biggest
publishing year for children's books was nineteen o three, and
that year he published eleven different books. Over the years.
He also did some political cartoons. His political views could
be as eccentric as some of his opinions on things
like cats and electricity, and when he wrote about political

(19:26):
subjects he could be kind of discursive and rambly. Had
a hard time reading these and sort of distilling down
what his general point was. Generally, though he was a
capitalist and a Royalist, he believed in the idea of
free trade. He was also generally supportive of the colonialism
of the British Empire, but also frustrated by the unjust

(19:50):
treatment of the poor, the sick, and immigrants. He also
published letters to the editor of various publications, often about
things that in annoyed him in some way. As one example,
children during the Christmas season caroling door to door or
soliciting subscriptions, which he described as a begging errand he

(20:11):
had kind of a complicated train of thought on this,
simultaneously pointing out the conditions of poverty and deprivation that
led to children needing to beg or sing for money,
but also passing judgment on the people who were experiencing
that kind of poverty. So Wayne's sometimes scornful descriptions of
people who are living in poverty are particularly jarring considering

(20:35):
his own life. In the first decade of the nineteen hundreds,
he faced legal action over non payment of debts, although
we don't have a lot of details on what this
case involved. In nine seven, when he was forty seven,
he went to the United States, and that may have
been at least partially motivated by wanting to get away

(20:55):
from both his financial situation and possible lawsuits for it.
He also might have thought that he could make more
money in the United States, where the market wasn't already
just flooded with copies of his work. Initially, this was
supposed to be a four month trip, but he wound
up staying for three years. In the US, Wayne worked

(21:16):
for her newspapers, and he did a lot of events
and other work with organizations dedicated to cats, including American
Cat Fancy. He reportedly decided to invest in a new
type of oil lamp, one that was supposed to be
remarkably efficient, but which did not pan out. This may
have really happened, but he also still didn't have much money,

(21:38):
so if he lost it all, he was going from
a little money to even less money. It wasn't as
though he was going from having a fortune to having nothing. Yeah,
sometimes sources make it sound like he had a big
break and he blew it, but it that's a little
exaggerated for what really happened. Louis Wayne left the US
and after getting word that his mother was dying, and

(22:01):
after he left, he faced some criticism in American newspapers.
Most of this was related to criticisms he had made
of the United States, like pointing out the contradiction of
Americans praising the effort of millionaires to fund things like
hospitals and institutes while also condemning the idea of everyone

(22:22):
paying their fair share in taxes to fund these kinds
of efforts more equitably for everyone, or pointing out the
way a lot of immigrants were shut out of job opportunities,
enforced into poverty, but then disparaged for being poor at
the same time. Though, some of the things that reporters
harped on when they were criticizing him were really taken

(22:42):
out of context or flatly untrue. Sadly, Louis Wayne's mother
died before he got back to the UK. His sister
Marie also died a few years later, on March third, nineteen.
She had never left the asylum after she had been institutionalized.
In nine fourteen, Wayne produced a set of ceramics known

(23:03):
as the Futurist Cats, which also included a pig and
a bulldog. These were brightly colored ceramic figures. They're kind
of abstract, so sometimes they're called the Cubist Cats. They
clearly were inspired by the Cubist movement. Wayne registered nine
designs for these, and about twenty designs were actually made.

(23:24):
They were produced by Maximmanuel and Company, and possibly We're
also commissioned by that firm. There is another bit of
lore about the Futurist Cats, which is that Wayne put
all his money into making them, only to lose it
all when the ship that they were being transported on
was sunk by a German torpedo. This is pretty hard
to substantiate, though. While some of the cats were made

(23:47):
in Austria or Czechoslovakia, others were made in the UK,
so it's unlikely that the entire stock would have been
all on one ship. There's no record of what ship
may have gone down with them aboard, whether it was
a ship from continental Europe to the UK, or perhaps
a ship headed to the United States. On October seventh
of nineteen fourteen, Louis Wayne fell while trying to board

(24:11):
a bus and he was knocked unconscious. He sustained a
concussion and had to be hospitalized, and after this doctors
advised him to rest for six months. Eventually, this event,
like so many other things in his life, was also mythologized.
The story became that he had fallen because the bus
driver swerves to avoid a cat. Wayne had always been

(24:34):
an anxious, cautious, and shy person, and during World War
One he became even more so. His work had been
enormously popular for decades, but the war made it harder
for him to find work, both because of lack of
money to pay for things like illustrators and shortages of paper.
In seventeen, the Wayne family moved from Westgate on Sea

(24:54):
to Kilburn, and that same year his oldest sister, Caroline
died at the age of fifty three from influenza that
had progressed into pneumonia. Louise sister Felicie, got a job
in office to try to help the family make ends meet.
Both Felicie and Claire were doing artwork of their own,
but they really focused on supporting their brother's career rather

(25:17):
than trying to sell their own work. In nine seventeen,
Louis was also commissioned to work on some cartoons, and
unfortunately the vast majority of those have been lost. I'm
deeply curious about what they may have been. Like The Dream,
The last Louis Wayne Annual, came out in nine. In
the nine twenties also marked a major shift in Wayne's life.

(25:39):
Developments in cameras, halftone printing and photographic plate making, and
methods to transmit photos over telegraph wires had made it
much easier and less expensive to print photographs in newspapers
and magazines, so publishers increasingly relied on photographers, not illustrators.
Wayne had more in more trouble finding paying work, and

(26:02):
since the UK market was already flooded with his illustrations,
none of them protected by copyright, it was harder for
him to sell new pictures. His behavior also started to
become more erratic. He talked about being plagued by spirits
that were somehow electrical. His colleagues at Cat Fancy became

(26:22):
alarmed when he started talking about a big cat show
they were organizing, but that show didn't actually exist. At home,
he started compulsively rearranging the furniture, sometimes in the middle
of the night. He also became really paranoid and started
to accuse his sisters of stealing from him. His behavior

(26:42):
toward them was increasingly hostile, and at different points his
sisters described him grabbing and shoving them. He also wrote
letters to his friends that described his sisters in really
belligerent and abusive terms. By n four, louise sisters didn't
feel safe with him at home, and they contacted a doctor.

(27:02):
Although it had really been in the previous couple of
years that Louis's behavior had become more alarming, his sisters
told the doctor he had started behaving strangely after that
fall from the bus a decade before. It is possible
that his behavior did change after that accident, but describing
a physical injury as the start of someone's mental illness

(27:25):
was also really really common at this point. It's sort
of alleviated a little bit of the stigma that was
associated with mental illness. Louis was declared insane and taken
to Springfield Hospital and Tuting, where he was admitted to
the pauper's ward. We're going to talk about his life
in hospitals. After we paused for a sponsor break. Various

(27:57):
historians and biographers contradict one another regarding Louie Wayne's diagnosis.
I read a lot of resources for this, and some
of them said directly opposite things. Some say that he
was diagnosed with schizophrenia or with an illness that would
be called schizophrenia by today's terms. Others definitively say that

(28:19):
he was never formally diagnosed with schizophrenia. I don't know
which of these is correct either way. Though schizophrenia was
known as an illness at this point, German psychiatrist Emil
Crapelin had first described it as dementia pray Cox in
the late nineteenth century, and Swiss psychiatrist you Can Boiler

(28:40):
had refined that description and coined the term schizophrenia in
nineteen o eight. After Louis was hospitalized, Claire and Felicie
started trying to support themselves by offering drawing lessons. They
also visited Louie every week along with their sister Josephine,
bringing him art, supplies and treats when they could afford it.

(29:01):
While they were there, they would look at what he
had drawn since their last visit and they'd take whatever
seemed likely to sell to help support them all. About
a year after Wayne was admitted to the hospital, journalist
and bookseller Dan Ryder was touring the asylum and recognized
him by his drawing and started telling other people that
Louie Wayne was in a pauper's ward, and that sparked

(29:24):
a huge effort to raise money so that he could
be moved to a better hospital and to try to
financially support his sisters. Initially, the goal for this effort
was to raise a thousand pounds. One of the biggest
organizers of this effort was Ada Elizabeth Chesterton, writing under
the name Mrs Cecil Chesterton, in an appeal for funds,

(29:46):
she wrote, quote, Louis Wayne is in a pauper lunatic asylum.
This must come as a shock to the many thousands
who have loved and admired his work for years. Louis
Wayne's cats decorated our hoardings, adorned the cover's of our magazines,
and were familiarly loved by every child and the majority
of grown ups. No Christmas calendar was complete without this artist.

(30:09):
No annual was issued that did not contain one of
his vivid sketches, and yet at the age of sixty five,
he is so bereft of means that in his affliction
he is compelled to accept the hospitality of a state institution.
Only about two hundred seventy five pounds had been raised
when Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald stepped in and arranged for

(30:31):
Wayne to be transferred to beth Lem Royal Hospital on August.
Some sources say that this was the work of Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin. McDonald and Baldwin alternately served as Prime
Minister from nineteen twenty three to nineteen thirty seven, so
it's likely that each of them were involved in different points.

(30:54):
Three days after Wayne was transferred, H. G. Wells broadcast
a personal message via radio, saying of Louie Wayne quote,
he has made the cat his own. He invented a
cat's style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English
cats that do not look and live like Louie Wayne.
Cats are ashamed of themselves. The Daily Graphic hosted a

(31:17):
Louis Wayne drawing competition. The magazine Animals turned its September
issue into a Louis Wayne fundraiser. After raising fift hundred pounds.
The Louis Wayne Fund raised its goal to three thousand.
Louis surviving sisters, who were now in their late fifties
to late sixties, seemed to have felt conflicted about all

(31:39):
of this. The three of them were trying to support
themselves while also keeping their home mostly as it had
been while Louie was living there. They thought it would
really break his heart if they moved or if they
started selling off their possessions. So they were glad that
their brother was in a nicer hospital and that they
were also getting some financial help, but they were not

(32:02):
consulted about any of this. They felt like they were
alternately patronized and ignored by various fundraisers. It's also not
clear what happens to all of the money that was raised.
Although a lot of it did go to support Louis
and his sisters, almost four hundred pounds of it seemed
to have just apparently vanished. Yeah, I imagine this is

(32:24):
pre a lot of laws regarding how you can handle
charity and fundraiser events, which would now make that a
little bit more difficult to just vanish big chunks of it.
Bethlam Hospital was also known as Bedlam a term associated
with chaos and confusion, and like many psychiatric hospitals, Bethlam

(32:44):
had a reputation for horrific conditions for centuries. That was
something that was exacerbated by a policy of allowing the
general public to basically come in and gawk, under the
idea that seeing mentally ill people in this kind of
situation would offer some kind moral instruction and act as
a cautionary tale. But in the nineteenth century the hospital

(33:05):
had faced hearings and investigations and it had moved to
what was known as the moral model of care that
was focused on humane treatment of patients, moral instruction, rest routine,
and light work. Obviously, this did not solve all issues
involved with psychiatric care, but it was a big step
forward from what had been before. Louis Wayne was given

(33:30):
a private room and supplied with art materials, and he
continued to make new art. He seems to have become
a lot less agitated. He was no longer violent, although
people still thought he was delusional. He talked about things
like feeling like he was filled with electricity and believing
that he could use that electricity to heal people by

(33:51):
laying on of hands. In October and November of nine,
a fundraising exhibition of Louie's work was held at twenty
one Gallery in London, and it included new work that
he had done while living at Bethleem. The exhibition, catalog
called Souvenir of Louis Wayne's work, sold thousands of copies
and went into four printings. One Christmas, Louis and other

(34:14):
patients were invited to decorate the hospital and he painted
the surface of a mirror with a picture of one
cat giving another a Christmas pudding. This painted mirror became
part of the hospital's annual Christmas decor. Wayne also started
producing artwork that some sources have interpreted as being reflective
of his mental illness. In addition to drawing cats, he

(34:37):
drew vibrantly colored and very detailed landscapes. Sometimes their color
palette is a little bit strange, it's almost hyper real,
and it can be a little bit jarring in the
juxtaposition of colors. Sometimes this is interpreted as a decline
in his artistic ability, but Louis was also working with
whatever art materials other people gave him. It wasn't as

(35:00):
he had picked these things out for himself. He also
was not allowed to have a sharpener. Also, while his
sisters were still selling what could be sold, it's possible
that he no longer felt as much pressure to produce
salable work. In addition to money from the Louis Wayne Fund,
the Prime Minister had arranged for his sisters to receive
a small pension, so he just may have felt like

(35:22):
he had more creative room to play. This is also
when some of Wayne's cat pictures started to become more abstract.
There were cats whose faces were surrounded by layers and
layers of colorful, somewhat zig zaggy, almost electrical lines, or
pictures of highly kaleidoscopic cats whose features are embellished with detailed,

(35:44):
repeating geometric shapes, or cats with these spaces that are
perfectly symmetrical and just made up a very colorful, repetitive,
almost fractal like details. These are the ones that became
an influence for psychedelic art of the nineteen sixties. They
also really resemble computer generated representations of fractals, although those

(36:09):
did not exist until the nineteen seventies. These more abstract
pictures became associated with Louis Wayne's mental illness and with
schizophrenia specifically, not long after his death, psychologist Walter McClay
found several of his pictures at a junk shop in
nineteen thirty nine. McClay arranged them in an order that
suggested a progression from a wide eyed, fluffy cat on

(36:32):
a repeating geometric background, to a less realistic cat surrounded
by concentric, jagged lines, to a symmetrical, kaleidoscope like pattern
of colors that barely suggests the features of a cat.
He interpreted this as illustrating the progression of schizophrenia. It
makes sense that McLay would make this connection. The year before,

(36:53):
he and his colleague Eric Gutman had given a group
of artists the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, which was believed to
induce a mental state similar to schizophrenia, and then they
had told them to record their experiences on mescalin as artwork.
Some of what these artists produced had some traits in
common with Louie Wayne's kaleidoscope cats, like repeating elements and

(37:18):
bright colors that didn't quite go together in geometric shapes.
There are some problems with this interpretation, though. For one,
none of the pictures are dated, so we have no
idea whether Louie Wayne created them in the order that
McClay arranged them too. As he was doing these drawings,
he was also still doing illustrations that were more like
what he had done before entering the hospital. Sometimes he's

(37:41):
characterized as exclusively drawing progressively more abstract cats, but that
is not what happened. In May of nineteen thirty, Louis
Wayne was moved to Napsbury Hospital, near St. Alban's Bethlehem
Hospital also moved locations in nineteen thirty. Some accounts say
that wayne move was because the hospital was relocating, but

(38:03):
others describe it as just following an assessment of how
he was doing. It's also possible that that assessment was
part of the decision making process into where patients should
go after the hospital moved. Knapsbury was in a wooded
area with a courtyard and a garden, and lots of cats.
In that aspect, it seems like it would have been

(38:23):
a good fit for Louis Wayne, but he was also
getting older, which seems to have been affecting both his
physical health and his cognitive abilities. He sometimes would lose
track of who he was talking to or become so
tired in the middle of a conversation that he could
not continue. He also broke his collarbone in a fall
after being tripped by another patient. He was still creating, though.

(38:46):
Another exhibition of his work was held in ninety one
as a fundraiser for his sisters. By this point, Josephine
had developed severe arthritis and could no longer make the trip,
but Claire and Felice still that did him regularly, and
they still gathered up whatever art was able to be sold.
Wayne painted Christmas decorations onto mirrors at Napsbury Hospital as well,

(39:09):
some of which have been preserved. He published his last
book in nineteen thirty four. In nineteen thirty six, he
had a stroke that affected his speech and caused weakness
on his right side, but he was still able to
draw afterward. The last exhibition of his artwork to take
place during his lifetime was in June of nineteen thirty
seven at Clarendon House, London. Louie's sister, Josephine, died on

(39:33):
January fourteenth, nineteen thirty nine. Because of her own health,
he hadn't seen her in years, and his surviving sisters
decided it would be best not to tell him that
she had died, although he did ask why she had
stopped writing to him. Louis Wayne died at Napsbury Hospital
on July four, ninety nine, at the age of seventy eight,

(39:55):
and was buried at St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery alongside his
father and two of his sisters. During his lifetime, he
had illustrated more than two hundred books, many of which
he also wrote. There were also postcards of his work
printed all over Europe and North America, and thousands of
individual works of art. One article published just after his

(40:16):
death said of him, quote, Louis Wayne's cats were once
as familiar in British households, particularly as Mickey Mouse and
Donald Duck are today. Frank Bernard, editor of Punch magazine,
called Louis Wayne the ho garth of cat life, and
also said of him, quote, his reasoning is so original,
so imaginative, and so reverent, you say to yourself, here

(40:40):
is a man who thinks his own thoughts, a man
who is determined to live every moment of his life
so that he and others may be the wiser and
better for it. A Louis Wayne memorial exhibition was held
in September of ninety nine, in part to benefit his
two surviving sisters. Bellis died in ninety and Lair died

(41:00):
in An exhibition of his work was held at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in nineteen seventy two. In nineteen
seventy three, a biopic called The Electrical Life of Louis
Wayne came out in one starring Benedict Cumber Batches Louis
and Claire Foy as Emily. An exhibition of his work

(41:22):
was also held at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind
from December of one to April of two, and that
was called Animal Therapy The Cats of Louis Wayne. There
has been some speculation in more recent years about whether
or not Louis Wayne had schizophrenia, even if he had
been diagnosed with it, A lot has changed in the

(41:42):
nearly a century since that would have happened. Of course,
it is not possible to accurately diagnose a person who
is not here to examine, but various medical historians, psychiatrists,
and biographers have noted that schizophrenia cam effect a person's
motor skills, including their fine motor skills. But Wayne's later
work is still extremely detailed and precise. Also most of

(42:07):
the time. Schizophrenia developed by early adulthood, and while Wayne
was described as anxious and eccentric and depressed much of
his life, the symptoms that led his sisters to seek
psychiatric treatment for him seemed to have started when he
was in his late fifties or early sixties. In two
thousand two, psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald published a letter in the

(42:29):
Irish Journal of Psychiatric Medicine that offered a different interpretation,
which was that Louis Wayne had Asperger's syndrome, or, to
use the more modern terminology, that he was autistic. Fitzgerald
noted traits like Wayne's social isolation, unusual tone of voice,
and preservation of sameness. The term Asperger's syndrome was coined

(42:53):
in nineteen eighty one, based on a ninety four treatise
by Hans Asperger. The term autism was coined in the
early twentieth century, so that was in use while Louis
Wayne was alive, but at first it was used to
describe a childhood form of schizophrenia. It's meaning did not

(43:13):
start to shift toward the way that it is used
today until the nineteen forties, after Louis Wayne's death, so
neither of these terms would have been around while he
was in the hospital. Other possibilities are a lot more speculative.
For example, people have pointed out similarities between Louis Wayne's
kaleidoscopic cats and the artwork of Canadian scientists and Adams,

(43:37):
who created brightly colored visual depictions of Ravel's Bolero after
developing a degenerative neurological disorder. Yeah, regardless of any of that,
why do I love these pictures kitties? Do you love
some listener mail too? I do? I have listener mail

(43:57):
from Kristen. Initially, at the beginning of email, Kristen talked
about um E. Pauline Johnson's poems featured in a series
of piano lesson books, so it was like a name
that uh that Kristen recognized immediately. This is a series
of books that's been around for many decades, and if

(44:19):
you find the older ones their favor and favors piano adventures,
older ones are a little dated and insensitive. U. Unsurprisingly,
Kristen went on to say, I also am a big
fan of L. M. Montgomery and although the Inn of
green Gables books are wonderful, it's the Emily series that
I adore so much that I named my oldest daughter Emily.

(44:42):
I finally put together that Montgomery grew up in Canada
at the same time that Johnson was publishing her poetry
and making a living through her writing. I would imagine
she was a great inspiration to the young author, as
the closing poem that you read is very similar in
style and subject. Now truell beauty too much of Montgomery's
writing The main theme of the Emily books as a

(45:04):
young Canadian woman striving to make her career through publishing
her writing, and then to realize that the E initial
in Johnson's name actually stands for Emily. What a fun
connection to make. Mind blown. Kristen then said no pets here,
only allergies with a little sad face emoji. Thanks for
your great work, Kristen. Thanks for this email, Kristen, I

(45:25):
had meant to say, and I don't think that I
did that. When I was doing research into the Pauline
Johnson episode, one of the things I found was a
controversy that had happened in schools in very recent years
when a school performed a song that was based on
Pauline Johnson poem and there were concerns about whether it

(45:46):
was racially or ethnically and sensitive, and that reminded me
of the start of this email that was about like
the dated, slash and sensitive piano lesson books um drawn from,
among other things, Pauline Johnson's work, And aside from that,
I just wanted to put it out there again that

(46:07):
that LM. Montgomery is on my list for an episode sometime,
but I super just want to have an excuse to
take a vacation to Prince Edward Island and that general
region of Canada first, because it feels very close to
me living in Boston. It's not. Actually it's kind of far,
but it's closer than it it would be from Atlanta,

(46:29):
much closer than if I were still living in Atlanta.
So um, so, thank you so much Christen for this email.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, we're at History podcast that
I Heart Radio dot com and we're also all over
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and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on

(46:51):
the I Heart Radio app or where every else you
get your podcasts stuff. You Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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