Louis Wain’s endearing drawings of lovable cats made him a star of the Victorian era – but his work morphed into intense, delirious visions as his mental health fell apart
Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.
It really looks like holy art for a new cat religion. You can see that too in another picture of a white cat, who stares at you and seems to say: “I am happy because everybody loves me.” Wain had already depicted, as his contemporary HG Wells put it, “a cat society”. Born in 1860, he was a star of the golden age of British illustration. Pictorial magazines such as The Illustrated London News were hugely popular and still used drawings, not photographs. Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up.
