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The man who reinvented the cat
The curious career of the illustrator Louis Wain tells the story of how our feline friends came in from the alley and took up their place at the hearth.
This was a round-faced, wide-eyed, sleek-bodied creature that was pampered, primped, and lavished with affection—like Oliver, a plump, stately, black domestic cat who was a member of a suburban household in the late nineteenth century and who, preserved in taxidermied condition with a yellow ribbon tied in a bow around his neck, is now in the collection of the Museum of London. Consider, too, the proliferating creatures drawn by Louis Wain, an artist born in Clerkenwell in 1860, whose anthropomorphized felines, engaged in activities such as playing cricket or singing in choirs, came to populate the pages of the Illustrated London News no less densely than their feral cousins prowled the warehouses along the Thames. When considering, for example, an 1899 autobiographical sketch in which Wain described himself as a delicate child, she recognizes this as “a standard opening gambit for nineteenth-century memoirists, to the point where you could be forgiven for thinking that no eminent Victorian ever came into the world rosy and bouncing, ready to take life on the chin.” Her purview in this volume, though, is not limited to the nineteenth century.
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