Contemporary people are under a lot of mental stress. In order to relieve mental stress or loneliness, they will raise some creatures. These creatures that are kept for spiritual purposes are called pets. If there is any creature that is more likely to be chosen as a pet, it is cats and dogs. Both of these pets have one thing in common, that is, they are cute. Unlike dogs, cats are obedient to their owners. It is even more unique and charming. It is said that not only modern people like cats, but ancient people also liked them very much.
For example, the famous minister Zhang Zhidong of the late Qing Dynasty, Emperor Jiajing, the great calligrapher Huang Tingjian, the poet Lu You, etc. said that the firewood in the stream was soft and the felt was warm, so Li Nu and I did not go out. There are not a few painters who like cats. Cats often appear in the works of Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Sun Jusheng and others. In foreign countries in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was also a person who liked cats and painted them all his life. But unlike the dexterity of cats painted by Qi Baishi and others, his style changed drastically after he suffered from mental illness, and the cats he painted became more and more weird as they looked like humans.
The name of this foreign painter was Louis Wayne. He was born in 1860 and died in 1939. Just at the junction of the 19th and 20th centuries, Wayne lived in an ordinary family in England and was the eldest son. He also has five younger sisters. Because he was born with a cleft lip, doctors had recommended that he should not go to school before he was ten years old. Relatively speaking, due to congenital physical problems, Wayne was relatively lonely when he was young.
After going to school, he often skipped school and wandered on the streets, but it was obvious that he had artistic talent. After a lot of hard work, he was admitted to the West London Art School and became a freelance painter after graduation. Speaking of Wayne’s painting of cats, there is also a poignant love story. He did not draw cats at first, but mostly painted beautiful pastoral scenes. I fell in love with cats and drew cats entirely because of one person. This person was the love of his life, his wife Emily Richards, who was ten years older than him.
is his sister's tutor. As the two get along over time, they gradually move from acquaintance to love. Wayne has not been particularly insistent on anything or any event since he was a child. He only has love, and he is very determined to marry Emily. Even though Emily was ten years older than him and such a marriage would attract criticism in society, he still married her. Unfortunately, shortly after they got married, they discovered that Emily had cancer.
Three years later, Emily died, and Wayne never remarried. During her lifetime, Emily had a little cat called Peter. The cute little cat was her greatest comfort during her struggle with the disease. Before she died, Emily hoped that Wayne would take good care of Peter for her, and Wayne agreed. This little cat made him fall in love with cats, and he began to draw cats. At first, the cats in Wayne's paintings were as cute and lively as any normal cat.
The change occurred after 1924. Wayne, who had lost his wife, had been living with his five sisters. He could have made money by selling paintings. However, with the outbreak of World War I, the demand for paintings was no longer so high, and Wayne's income still could not make ends meet. As the only male in the family, you can imagine how much pressure he was under, and he gradually began to have mental problems. His temper was so bad that his family couldn't bear it and sent him to a mental hospital.
From this time on, for the last fifteen years of his life, Wayne painted another kind of cat. That is the anthropomorphic cat. The cat in his works walks upright like a human and wears clothes and hats. But the difference is that these cats are definitely not cute. They are full of cunning, gloominess, melancholy, etc. There is a kind of kaleidoscope cat that is even weirder. With a sickly complex beauty, it is no longer cat-shaped, and the viewer may be able to experience the unique obsession with the broken world of Wayne's schizophrenia.
If you watch it for a long time, you will inevitably become addicted to it and develop an unextricable fear. His painting style and spirit are highly integrated, which makes Wayne's paintings not only valuable for appreciation, but also become classic cases in contemporary psychoanalysis. Of course, it was also because of the anthropomorphic cat that Wayne became famous in the history of painting.
It is worth mentioning that the anthropomorphic cats that people saw later, such as the cats in Tom and Jerry, had human movements. It was inspired by Wayne's creativity, but compared to Wayne's cats, the animated cats in Tom and Jerry are relatively cute.