Louis Wain’s cats as he progressed into schizophrenia.
Louis Wain could have seriously been a Batman villain. A successful English artist he began to paint exclusively cats after extensively painting his dying wife’s cat. He then made a living on children’s books and illustrations of anthropomorphic cats often parodying everyday life. After about 30 years he began to suffer from schizophrenia, theorized to be precipitated by toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be contracted from cats. After he became too paranoid and violent for his sisters to care for, he was institutionalized at the relatively pleasant Napsbury Hospital , with a garden and colony of cats. Over the next 15 years, he continued to paint cats in increasingly psychedelic depictions.
