Louis Wain—an illustrator who boosted the popularity of cats at the turn of the 20th century—is a meme. If you search his name online, you’ll find the “famous series” of eight colorful drawings, at least six of which feature a cat, looking progressively more “psychedelic,” long before taking psychedelic drugs was a fad. It’s true that the drawings were made in the 1920s and 1930s, after the artist had been committed to a mental hospital at age 63.
But the meme’s assertion that the vivid kaleidoscopic patterns and fractals he drew reflected the progression of his mental illness, now thought to be schizophrenia, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Similarly, there’s no proof the famous cat lover was afflicted with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite some cats carry that, despite popular assumptions, has not been proven to alter human behavior.
It is, however, appropriate that Louis Wain be a meme in our Age of the Internet Cat. Wain is the godfather of the cat craze. Without Wain, there’d be no Felix, no Cat in the Hat, no Garfield, no Keyboard Cat, no International Cat Video Festival. Before Wain, cats were still largely treated with suspicion and contempt in the United Kingdom and the United States. In Medieval times, Europeans blamed cats, thought to be witches’ familiars, for disease, infertility, drought, and crop failure, even though many farmers and merchants quietly let cats kill rodents. Felines were so reviled that live cats were frequently burned at Christian festivals. In England, squalling cats were set afire in a large wicker effigy at 17th-century celebration honoring an anniversary of Queen Elizabeth I’s rule.
Slowly, attitudes toward cats softened around Europe. The French adaptation of the Italian fairy tale, Puss in Boots, which portrays an upright, talking cat as a clever helpmate to his owner, was published in 1697 and quickly became popular across the continent. Stylish 18th-century French courtesans began keeping kitties as cuddly pets, while major potteries started making cat figurines. But the transition took time. Chris Beetles, a London gallerist and world-renowned expert on Louis Wain, says that even in the 19th century, ferals roamed the streets of London, and “a lot of cats that people saw were mangy and dirty—they barely looked like animals; they were in such a disgusting state.”