Artists and Cats A Purrfect Pairing for the Holidays

It is hard to imagine the holiday season without cozy blanket, book and a warm feline friend on our lap.

- Heidi Crabtree

We may send Christmas cards featuring cats, or grin at a seasonal cat video on YouTube. Looking at cute cats certainly is not a modern thing; indeed, we can take our cuteness detectors back to the 19th century and discover that our ancestors were just as obsessed with Christmas kitties.

Two popular animal artists from this time period stand out for their feline focus. Despite being contemporaries, their art could not have been more different.

Louis Wain:

Fantastic Feline Art on Many Levels

Born in London in 1860, Louis Wain is well known as the artist who has given so many people a unique visual insight into mental illness. A frequent hooky player, he hung around the docks where he would listen, wide-eyed, to the stories sailors told him of faraway places. Besides the sailors’ tales, both true and tall, young Wain enjoyed other fantasy stories, as well as art and music.

He went on to attend the London School of Art and soon gained notice sketching dogs at animal shows. However, after his marriage to Emily Richardson and their discovery of a rain-soaked kitten, abandoned near their home, he began putting more energy into cat art. The kitten, named Peter, was a close companion to Emily as she suffered and then died from breast cancer. Before her death, Emily urged Louis to publish his renderings of Peter and other cats. She barely lived to see his first publication of cat art, which was titled, “A Kitten’s Christmas Party.” Published in the 1886 Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News, Wain’s drawings portrayed cats doing mischievous human things at a holiday party. It brought Wain a fair amount of publicity and became a popular piece of work. Sadly, Emily lost her cancer battle the following month.