You have almost certainly seen the images, probably in a psychology lecture or a listicle. A row of cat paintings. The first is a charming, wide-eyed Victorian tabby. Each one after it gets stranger, more geometric, more electric, until the last is barely a cat at all, just a shimmering kaleidoscope of colour where a face should be.
The caption always says the same thing: this is what schizophrenia looks like from the inside. The artist is Louis Wain, the most famous cat illustrator who ever lived, and his mind is coming apart on the canvas in front of you.
It’s an extraordinarily powerful sequence. It’s also, as evidence, close to worthless. Because nobody knows what order Wain painted them in.
What the sequence actually is
Wain’s abstract cats reached the public through Psychotic Art, a 1960s book that presented a set of his works as a progression. The images had been collected by a doctor interested in how mental illness affects art, and once they were laid out that way, the story wrote itself and never stopped being told.
Here’s the problem, and it’s a fatal one: Wain did not date these works. The chronological order they’re usually presented in was assigned, not recorded. There is no evidence the abstract pieces came late, and there is decent evidence they didn’t come only late, because Wain continued producing conventional, realistic, human-like cats well into the period the progression narrative says he’d already dissolved.
Which leaves you with a very different possibility, and a much more ordinary one: an artist with a long career dabbling in a decorative, patterned style alongside his commercial work, the way artists do, and a later generation arranging the results into a story about his brain.
There’s a further wrinkle that gets less attention. It isn’t even settled that Wain had schizophrenia. The diagnosis was applied to him in an era whose diagnostic categories were not ours, and modern writers have argued for other explanations of his later behaviour. The single most reproduced illustration of schizophrenia in the history of art may not depict schizophrenia at all.
Why the myth is so sticky
Because it’s a very good story, and because it lets people do something they enjoy: look at a piece of art and diagnose the person who made it.
The Wain progression flatters us. It suggests that mental illness is legible, that it has a visual signature, that if you look hard enough at what someone makes you can see the disorder taking hold. That’s a comforting idea. It is also, in the specific case that made it famous, unsupported.
And it does real harm to Wain, whose actual life was more interesting than the myth. He was the man who taught Britain to love cats.
The thing Wain actually did
In the Victorian era, cats were largely working animals. Vermin control. You didn’t hang a portrait of one over the mantelpiece any more than you’d frame a photograph of a mousetrap.
Wain drew cats in waistcoats. Cats playing cricket. Cats at the opera, at tea, at the seaside, having arguments and love affairs and small social disasters. He anthropomorphised them relentlessly and hilariously, and he did it in the popular press, at enormous volume, for decades. He was, in his prime, everywhere.
And the effect was cultural. The idea of the cat as a companion, a personality, a member of the household rather than a utility, is one that Wain’s work did an enormous amount to build. He became a central figure in the emerging “cat fancy,” a movement that turned cats into creatures people chose, named, and loved.
Every person who has ever put a cat’s face on a mug owes him something.
His own life was less charming. He was a poor businessman, he lost his wife Emily early to cancer, and his later years were marked by financial collapse and institutionalisation. He was eventually rescued from a pauper’s ward by a public subscription campaign, a national fundraiser for the man who had drawn the nation’s cats. He lived out his final years in comfort. It’s a strange, sad, oddly redemptive ending, and it doesn’t need the madness-in-the-paintings narrative to be moving.
And the film
The 2021 biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is, in some ways, a fairer custodian of this story than the internet has been. It places the abstract works late in his life, but it notably declines to draw the line between them and his diagnosis. It doesn’t say: here is his mind breaking, and here is the proof on the canvas. That’s a restraint the meme version never shows.
Where it’s less careful is in how it handles his mental health overall. For most of the running time, his difficulties are rendered as a sort of pleasant eccentricity, an endearing quirkiness, and then, near the end, the film snaps abruptly into full crisis. There isn’t much between those two settings. Illness as whimsy, then illness as catastrophe, with the actual texture of a life somewhere in the gap.
And a warning for anyone watching it for the reason you’d expect: there are far fewer cats in it than there should be. The film bookends itself with them, and there’s a lovely stretch in the middle when Wain acquires the cat who starts everything, but for long stretches the animals are set dressing. The second half is drenched in cats as an idea while being fairly thin on actual cats.
It is warm, family-friendly, and sincerely about finding wonder in ordinary things. Just don’t go in expecting a cat film.
What newer scholarship adds
The debunking has been steady rather than dramatic, and it comes down to a few durable points that anyone re-sharing the progression should know:
The order is invented. The works are undated. The sequence they’re shown in was constructed after the fact, by people who already believed the story it appears to tell.
Wain didn’t stop painting normal cats. He was producing conventional work years after the point where the progression claims he’d departed reality. A linear decline that includes a decade of unremarkable tabbies is not a linear decline.
The diagnosis itself is contested. Whether Wain had schizophrenia is a live question, not a settled fact.
And the related myth is worse. The old suggestion that his cat obsession gave him toxoplasmosis, which gave him schizophrenia, has been thoroughly picked apart. The evidence that toxoplasma infection causes schizophrenia in humans is weak and heavily disputed, and it has been used to make cat owners anxious about something that does not hold up. If you take one practical thing from this article, take that.
Bottom line
The most famous “picture of madness” in art history is a sequence that nobody sequenced, by a man whose diagnosis nobody has confirmed, used to illustrate a progression that his own later work contradicts.
Louis Wain deserves better. He drew tens of thousands of cats and, in doing so, helped invent the idea that a cat could be family. That’s the legacy. The kaleidoscopes are just what happened when a decorative artist got interested in pattern, and history got interested in a story.
References
- Fitzgerald, Michael. “Louis Wain and Asperger’s Syndrome.” Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, vol. 19, no. 3, 2002, pp. 101–102. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0790966700007205
- Dale, Rodney. Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats. Michael O’Mara Books, 1991.
- Sutherland, Michael. “The False Progression of Louis Wain.” Mind Hacks, 26 Sept. 2007. https://mindhacks.com/2007/09/26/the-false-progression-of-louis-wain/
- Sugden, Karen, et al. “Is Toxoplasma gondii Infection Related to Brain and Behavior Impairments in Humans? Evidence from a Population-Representative Birth Cohort.” PLOS ONE, vol. 11, no. 2, 2016, e0148435. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148435
- “Louis Wain.” Victoria and Albert Museum collections. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/
