A Feline World: Louis Wain's Profusely Popular Cat Culture

Abstract

Kathryn Hughes's 2024 study Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania examines the life and times of the late Victorian/early modernist artist famous for producing and publishing thousands of well-loved and culturally influential paintings and drawings of cats. Wain dubbed his realm “Catland,” a designation Hughes takes as her starting point, extrapolating her subject's panoply of pleasantly droll domestic felines into a kind of Weltanschauung: What would the world look like if cats, rather than people, were the measure of all things? She probes Wain's career and life, his aesthetic style, and his impact on British society's attitudes toward cats, which became significantly warmer over the decades that the British public was charmed by his art that suggested there was more to feline communities than met the eye. Both literally and allegorically, Wain's anthropomorphic images challenged anthropocentrism by suggesting that cats are not so far from us in their hopes and fears; their social complexities, class structures, and political inclinations; and their personalities.