In the wake of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, interest in his drawings is escalating. ‘When the film was released in Canada in October, I had a raft of new enquiries,’ says Chris Beetles, who is the artist’s principal dealer. The number of forgeries is rising exponentially too – always a sign that an artist’s value is on the rise. ‘I’ve probably seen 10,000 to 15,000.’
Beetles fell in love with Wain ‘because I liked his humour. It can verge on slapstick – remember this is the age of vaudeville – or be ironic. Or it can be completely naff, but that’s funny itself. I just love everything he does. Yes he’s vulnerable, and aloof, but I think he had an exhibitionist, knockabout side to him that can’t be ignored. He’s very easy to like.’
The singer-songwriter Nick Cave is a fellow disciple. His regard for Wain even led Sharpe to ask him to play the role of HG Wells. Cave tells me over email that he was introduced to Wain in his teens, ‘and it completely blew my mind’. Attracted by ‘the defiant nature of his art’, he remains one of the artist’s foremost collectors.
‘I have given a lot away now,’ he says, ‘but they are the one constant in my life, always there on the walls, of whatever place I might find myself in. I have early works, and late works, and everything in between. And in the end it is the compulsive nature of the cats that draws me to them. There is a feeling in the paintings that to produce these beautiful creations was a strategy for survival.’
Wain, the eldest of six children of a travelling salesman for a draper’s company, was born in Clerkenwell, east London, in 1860.
A sickly child with a cleft lip, he endured recurring nightmares in which he ‘seemed to live hundreds of years, and to see thousands of mental pictures of extraordinary complexity’, he later recalled.
Prior to settling on art, he flirted with politics, chemistry, mechanics (he had patents for two bicycles) and music, but not as you or I would know it. The painter Alfred Praga remembered Wain ‘improvising on the piano with most remarkable harmonies’, while another friend described ‘strange melodies played in a very jerky, nervous way’. ‘[Wain] was always unembarrassedly himself, even when that was quite an unhelpful thing to be,’ says Sharpe. ‘I was very moved by that.’
Wain was only 20 when his father died, though the blow was alleviated by the arrival of a governess whom Caroline hired to teach the younger girls. Emily Richardson was 10 years Wain’s senior, but the ‘strange tingly feeling that cracked in his breast and sparkled in his loins’, as the film has it, was strenuously reciprocated, and in 1883, the two married.
‘He found someone who understood him, who validated and encouraged him, and whose love sustained him,’ says Cumberbatch. ‘We all want to be loved and understood in that way.’ His family, however, were outraged. Not one of them came to the wedding.
