Artist who made Britain

CATLAND by Kathryn Hughes (fourth estate £22, 416 pp)

On Winston and Clementine Churchill’s wedding day in 1908, one of the many good- luck cards they received was a Louis Wain cat card, with the title A Happy Pair.

the Churchills were cat-lovers, so the card hit the spot — and they would remain A Happy Pair for the next 56 years.

the garish card depicted a beribboned bride cat with a love-sick smile, clinging on for dear life to her bridegroom cat, who looks apprehensive and stressed. this was typical Louis Wain cat-card humour.

in her excellent book about the life and work of this cat-obsessed artist who became a household name for his artistic anthropomorphising of cats, Hughes reveals a fascinating, forgotten aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: how the British fell in love with felines, and how Wain capitalised on the new wave of cat sentimentality. Hughes coins the word ‘Catland’ to describe this new cat-centric universe, in which cats were brought in from the wild, tamed, carefully bred and taught good Victorian manners — which Wain subverted in his art, for which there was a commercial craze.

Born in 1860 with a cleft lip, Louis was bullied at school in daily ‘playground hell’. that immersion in violence formed the psychological backdrop for his future cat art. one of his early pictures was called ‘Mrs tabby’s Academy’, and depicted a cat classroom saturated in violence: cat teacher unable to control her cat pupils. Among many horrors, two male cats are happily torturing another by slamming his tail in a wooden chest.

Wain’s genius was to home in on and satirise human nature. He depicted male cats lingering in their club, refusing to come home and submit to domestic discipline. His Valentine cards, far from being sentimental, depicted cats full of rage and anxiety. ‘i thought you loved me fond and true, but if i’m stung, what shall i do?’

Whether you like or hate Wain’s pictures — Hughes loves them — there’s no doubting that the population of the time adored them. By the 1920s, when the craze for postcards took off, 100 publishers were issuing Louis Wain postcards. they were propped up in millions of households.

Hughes intersperses her chapters on Wain’s life and work with witty and