In the court of the kitten king
‘kitties are great and I am a kitty’
This is the guy that slipped into madness while painting the kitties right? Cute but bittersweet.
Yeah, I don’t know if he was unhappy though. His art was great right up to his death. He lived a long life.
That’s cool. I don’t mean to throw any shade on neurodivergent people, I just didn’t know if he suffered due to it.
His wife died of cancer and he became obsessed with cats after seeing his cat Peter trying to comfort her during hospice. Later, as his sanity spiralled he assaulted family, leading to incarceration in an asylum back when they were torture prisons for undesirables. He also never got that bag, as despite producing tens of thousands of illustrations which contributed massively to the idea of cats as household lap pets, he was taken advantage of by publishers.
He spent the last years of his life in a countryside sanitarium with plenty of wandering cats after he was discovered by a fan in an asylum, leading to a nationwide charity drive to put him up somewhere better.
As an aside, the trippy cats he’s famous for today weren’t a result of his poor mental health, they were just an experimental phase. He made cutesy cats before and during and after that particular run.
Shoutout to kitties bringing companionship where humankind fails
I always thought he was a case of adult onset schizophrenia as his cat drawings became more and more abstract. I dated someone once who was schizophrenic and she’d draw stuff like that.
I guess he just hit his head in an accident
Then after decades of apparently being the only financial support for his mother and five sisters, his four surviving sisters had him forcibly committed
Fucking evil shit honestly. It’s galling that they were made beneficiaries to the charities later set up for him
He literally assaulted them. And the cats don’t get more abstract, it’s literally a couple dozen from when he was trying a new style and then they go back to normal
That’s tragic, jeez
Thanks for clearing that up, I had no idea. That’s very sad.
He could have, I don’t know enough about him to say.
