Kaleidoscope Cats III

The Roman numeral in this title is left over from a theory. In 1939 the psychiatrist Walter Maclay found eight of Louis Wain's cat pictures in a shop and laid them out in a row, from a fairly lifelike cat to one dissolved almost entirely into pattern, as a record of a mind breaking down under schizophrenia. This sheet became number three. The row was reproduced for decades in books on psychology, and as late as 1972 an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London still labelled work like this psychotic.

According to the Wellcome Collection, Maclay's order was an assumption with nothing to support it. The sheets carry no dates, and the diagnosis itself has been disputed, with some researchers suggesting autism instead. All eight pictures are now kept together at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind.