Louis Wain

Louis Wain married Emily Richardson, his sisters' governess, in January 1884, and soon afterwards she was found to have breast cancer. Through her illness a black-and-white kitten called Peter kept her company, and Wain drew him over and over to cheer her up. Emily died in January 1887. Wain later wrote that the foundation of his career belonged to Peter.

At Christmas 1886 the Illustrated London News had printed his Kittens' Christmas Party, some 150 cats across 11 panels. Within a few years his cats stood on two legs, wore clothes, went to school and gave tea parties in annuals, magazines and more than a thousand postcard designs. The novelist H. G. Wells said he had invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. Wain stayed poor all the same. He sold drawings cheaply, gave up his copyrights and supported his mother and five sisters.

In 1924, after years of erratic and suspicious behaviour, his family had him certified, and he was placed in the pauper ward of Springfield asylum in south London. A public appeal backed by Wells had him moved in 1925 to Bethlem Royal Hospital, and in 1930 to Napsbury Hospital near St Albans, where he died on 4 July 1939. He drew throughout. A popular story says that a series of his late patterned cats charts a descent into schizophrenia. In fact the psychiatrist Walter Maclay bought eight of them in 1939 and arranged them in that order himself, with no evidence of when each was made. Some researchers now doubt the diagnosis itself, and at Napsbury Wain kept drawing ordinary cats alongside the patterned ones.