They were out walking their dog one day when they saw two paintings of cats peeking out from a neighbourhood skip. Thinking their daughter-in-law, a cat lover, might like them, the couple took the pictures home.
The daughter-in-law had them in her home for a year or so before giving them back to the couple, who then hung them on their wall for several years. “We always joked they might be worth something one day but we never actually believed it,” they said. “And then one day we decided to research Louis Wain… we were gobsmacked to see how famous he is.”
Yes, that’s right – the paintings they rescued from the skip were by Louis Wain, the UK’s most famous cat lover. His first cat drawing, A Kitten’s Christmas Party featuring 150 cats that took 11 days to create, was an overnight sensation after it was published in the Illustrated London News in 1884. But the success was overshadowed by tragedy: Wain had been inspired to draw pictures of their cat Peter by his wife, Emily, to amuse her as she suffered from terminal cancer. She died just says after the first picture was published.
Wain drew his cats engaged in everyday human pursuits and often he’d sketch the people around him as he sat in public places, and then produce pictures of cats doing everything from playing cricket and having tea parties to riding bicycles and digging up roads.
In his 1968 biography of the illustrator, Rodney Dale wrote that Wain’s images had such an impact that ‘the attitude of the general public towards cats, and their feeling for cats, was greatly affected’.
Unfortunately for Wain, his popularity failed to spill over into financial success, mainly because he had no head for managing money. He suffered declining mental health in his later years and at the age of 63 he was certified insane and taken to the paupers’ ward of a London hospital, but Wain’s story does have a happy ending of sorts: after a public campaign saw him relocated to Bethlem Hospital, his psychiatric care concentrated on encouraging him in his art and he even decorated the wards one Christmas: cats taking part in various Christmas-themed activities began appearing on the walls and mirrors of the hospital.
The Louis Wain pictures discovered by the side of the road had been exhibited at York Art Gallery in 1986 and bore the labels for London dealer Chris Beetles. Both paintings, which were in good condition considering where they had ended up, were offered for sale at provincial UK auction house Roger Jones Auctioneers in late May.
Blue Cat Among the Flowers, a signed work on paper, sold for double its lower estimate at $12,700, and the second work – a double-sided watercolour titled Psychedelic Cats – more than doubled its lower estimate to sell to a London dealer for $18,100. Not bad for a bit of skip diving.
