Wow – it’s Holiday Wain!

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today’s post is a fantastic item purchased a couple of months ago and framed up to take to New Jersey. As I write this it is a bit hard to know best to show it to you all. I took these photos before it was framed but not sure I can present it as a whole so let’s see how I do. I apologize for the reflections in the photos – I took some before framing it but the ones I am taking today are better I think.

This is an illustrated Christmas insert titled A Kitten’s Christmas Party in the Illustrated London News from 1886, so early days for Mr. Wain. (For some biographical info on Louis Wain and a few of my holdings have a read at posts here, here and here just for starters.) I believe he did a series of these that go into the aughts and maybe beyond – these were his big break I belied. These are noted as pages 24 and 25 in the newspaper and I assume where a centerspread. At the bottom it reads, Drawn by Louis Wain. (Wain also did extremely well with Christmas card designs throughout his career so the holidays were a bonanza for him.)

*The fold was more evident before framing as seen here. This is a close up of “all who came to the party”.*

It is about 18″ x 28″. Considering the age of this newsprint it is in good condition with just the original fold. I did spring for UV protected glass for this when framing. I am afraid that even in a spot that doesn’t get direct sun that it could fade and brown out quickly.

As you can see, you need to get close to it – obviously it was intended for inspection in a newspaper so that is the viewing range. The sort of montage effect has made it a bit harder to get close up’s of each snippet – which are all listed neatly at the bottom as follows:

We write out letters of invitation to the aristocracy and a lot more besides.
Who all come to the party.
Our preparations are extensive.
The after-dinner speeches were a great success.
And so was the ball.
Some of the party seek amusement under the mistletoe.
Others we invite to a mouse-hunt.
And the fun waxes fast and furious, when we form a ring and play at hunt-the-slipper.
Alas! In early morning we are compelled to sit in solemn council to devise a means to break up the party, as the kittens won’t go. A terrier ghost – the very thing!
Our plan is effectual.
And we retire, worn out, and sleep the sleep of peace and dream of mice and dicky-birds.

*Messy kits! Don’t give cats ink. Look at the one with one eye closed as he writes!*

I am a particular fan of the panel of them writing out their letters of invitation. One cat completely covered in ink at the far left, using the spilled bottle of ink, the thoughtful pose as the white cat contemplates his missive and another examines his. Someone needs a nap (such exhausting work) and one tabby is copying off the other – can’t think for himself.

You need to know that there are tiny numbers in the left corner of each image corresponding to the notes above. I mention this because it does not read like a traditional comic strip from left to right. One, two and three are down the left, you jump up to the top again for four and so on. Kim says that this really is early days of comics so it makes sense that the conventions had not yet evolved fully.

*At the ball. Please note that I didn’t cut this off at the left – it is how it was reproduced.*

We see a bit of tidying up for the party – the aristocrat (aristocats dare I say?) all march in subsequently looking a bit like the cat mafia. The scene of the after-dinner speeches is pure Louis Wain for me with the monocled fellow speechifying. The ball, in the center, is only clearly identifiable by the cat band playing in the background, but we see the kitty canoodling under the mistletoe too.

Kissing kitties with voyeurs on the left and speeches on the right.

I have learned that hunt-the-slipper is a game where you pass a slipper (shoe perhaps in today’s parlance?) or small object and try to fool the person hunting about who has it. (I have finally found a good use for AI – it explained this to me.) And we are a bit appropriately huffy puffy here. We are spared too much gore for the mouse hunt with one cat discretely looking in a trap and we see only a mouse tail – although the expressions on the cats faces peering over are also pure Wain-ness with a fillip and dash of pure insanity.

*Cat Council top and the ghost dog chases the kittens home.*

The tale goes a bit off the rails where the kittens won’t go home and a council dreams up the ghost of a terrier to chase them out – which appears to work. Cats run in horror from a ghostly dog form rising up above them.

*Hunt-the-slipper. Could get rough! Wonder who has it..*.Meanwhile cats on the sidelines watching and something going on around a stage in the back.

We end however with another great image which will become classic Wain, all the kitties asleep in bed (some hiding their eyes and noses) and dreaming of mice and dickey-birds!

*Wain has a later print variation on this idea.*

I was lucky and somehow grabbed this from a live auction in Great Britain for very little money – shipping it here and framing it cost far more although very worth it. It is heading to New Jersey with us in a couple of weeks where I intend to hang it in our bedroom or Kim’s studio – some place where we can get close to see it but where it won’t get too much light – even with the UV glass. I think it deserves to remain pristinely preserved. I hope you have enjoyed your trip through it today.

I Was Much Surprised

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Every day that is a Louis Wain day is a good one here at Pictorama! I have had the pleasure of adding many Wain posts to the collection here at Pictorama, including a review of the recent book. (Some of those other posts can be perused here, here and here for additional Sunday leisure reading.)

Like my post a few weeks ago, this is another example where the sender has (consciously or unconsciously) enhanced the card with their message. Somehow when I saw it I just laughed at those words in script under the cat – thinking that he was much surprised by the basket of kittens! Surprise Pops!

Instead the brief missive written on the card is from a grandma to a sick child – chicken pox I suspect. I believe it reads, I was much surprised to hear of your spotty face. I hope its back soon be better & no marks left, don’t scratch it. Your loving Gramms. (The woman didn’t believe in periods for the most part so I have added them.) It was mailed from Paddington at 5:30 PM on May 5 of 1905. It was sent to Master C. T. Travers, Woolfanger (?), Markingham, Surrey.

The card was produced by the Raphael Tuck & Sons Company and declares in tiny print that it is a part of their Write Away postcard series. It also proclaims that it was designed in England and chromographed in Bavaria. I have only started to focus on the Raphael Tuck cards as sort of the sweet spot for Wain. (They also produced a rather fascinating set of Felix holiday cards. I have a few in my collection and find them almost impossible to turn down at auction – although they go very pricey. One is below and the post for it can be found here.)

Finally onto Mr. Wain himself. Grumpy Papa cat drops his pipe at Momma cat coming from behind the door with a basket load of kittens. Is it the first time she is presenting and surprising him with the kits? Was he, like any traditional papa, pacing and waiting pipe in hand (paw) to hear the baby news? Regardless, it is a bit of a sour puss he presents.

He happens to be tabby-spotty (additionally accurate for this card), he stand on hind legs, tail down. Ears are back in a cat look of annoyance which Wain has morphed with a human expression. Mom cat just looks tired and the five kittens (that we can see) are a mix of tabby, marmalade like Mom a white and two grays – ready to hop out of the basket and start causing chaos. Adult cats stand on a carpet of a sort of wild print with this bit of door between them. As always, Wain manages to express much with a brief, somewhat sardonic vignette.

My family only won the kitten lottery once which if Mom was here she would agree was more than enough. Our female tortie, Winkie, escaped out one morning while in heat, teaching us forever to get kits spade as quickly as humanly possible. Her paramour appeared to be a tabby we’d never seen before. And surprise she ultimately produced a gray tabby, a marmalade one, and two grays – so not unlike this bushel.

Honestly Winkie had little use for them after a few weeks of being very possessive. We kept them all (Tigger, Squash, Ping and Pong) and our feline family burgeoned at that point for a long period of time. I think it brought us to seven. The cats were still free range outside in those days so it was a bit less evident than the Jersey Five (plus visits from Cookie and Blackie) are in the (small) house today. Ultimately Winks started to pretend she had no idea where these interlopers had come from and would growl at them or at best ignore them.

Arguably Wain is pretty much at the height of his popularity and success when this card was produced. It is nice to think of Grandma, long ago, going to the shop and picking it out especially for Master Travers who was suffering a bit from this childhood ailment. My guess is that it cheered him immensely.

Posting About Postcards!

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today I am taking a moment to revel in my postcard purchases, but also to celebrate the postcard show itself. To anyone who has been to the current incarnation of this sale this might seem a bit extreme as it is in a small church in the West Village and made up of about nine dealers.

The first reference to this show in my life dates back to college when one of my professors, collage artist Maureen McCabe (her site here), mentioned in passing that she loved to go to a postcard show in Manhattan. She would pick up vintage cards which she would use in her collage boxes. (She mentioned getting vintage paper dolls there which I have never seen!) Frankly, in my naivete I had never heard of or considered such a thing. Antique stores and flea markets were a part of my childhood but shows of such things for sale had never really occurred to me. And postcards no less. It set my brain mulling.

*The art of Maureen McCabe. “Fate and Magic”, 2013, copyright of the artist. That could be a vintage paperdoll right there…*

Fast forward a number of decades and somehow or other it came to my attention that there was a vintage postcard show (the Metropolitan postcard show) at a (then) old and tatty hotel on the far west end of 57th Street. In my memory at the time it was a Howard Johnson, it appears to be called the Watson Hotel now. (Another sliver of memory is that in my 20’s my then boyfriend, Kevin, and I would get day passes just for swimming pool access in hotels in Manhattan in the hottest of summer. This was one of those somewhat cheesy hotels.)

Who would have thought a room with nothing but postcards for sale would be of so much interest? In those years there was probably twice as many dealers and maybe even some ephemera that was beyond postcards. (How big was it when Maureen went?) If memory serves there were a few people of some note signing or roaming the space. I bought fewer cards and spent most of my time and money at a high flying dealer table groaning with Louis Wain cards.

Sadly, with Covid like some many things it shutdown and although I was on their mailing list it seemed to be a number of years before I caught up with them again. Now I find them in the West Village and reduced in size.

Oddly, for me it is perhaps a bit more manageable and I seem to come away with increasingly large scores and yesterday proves the point. It was a miserably rainy day which may have depressed attendance although business seemed reasonably brisk to me. Kim was with me and settled into a pile of photos of early actors and actresses and even made a few purchases and you will probably see those over time too.

*View while digging through a box labeled “Cat”.*

Today’s card was purchased by me early in the show as I made my way through each dealer; it is Mainzer at his best. I have written about Mainzer before (which can be read here and here) who is sort of the later heir to the Louis Wain throne. Mainzer, as a card producer, picks up that ball in 1938 and runs with it, arguably until at least 2005 when taking the reprints of the cards into consideration. Prior to 1955 the production address was 118 East 28th Street here in New York. (On a whim I did a Google Search on the address and it is worth a look, the Kaime Arcade building with a very interesting facade.) After 1955 it is just noted as Long Island City and that is what is printed on this card. Eugen Hartung was the artist.

While mama cat, dressed for a day of shopping with stockinged legs, heels, hat, gloves and fur trimmed coat, chooses between two postcards, her offspring are tearing the place apart – including I might add, her poodle on a leash! In case you are wondering, yes, each of the postcards has a tiny cat drawing on it. (The other prints on the walls appear to be flowers however.) Allow me to note some oddities about the store. It seems to stock not only postcards, prints and fancy wrap boxes, but oddly globes adorn the shelf too. Cut off at the top seem to be some written labels I cannot quite make out and appear to be written in Hartung’s native Swiss German.

*Another view of inside the church where the Metropolitan Postcard show now resides several times a year.*

The well appointed shopkeepers are both in a uniform dress with matching necklaces. While the one with glasses focuses on Mrs. Cat, the other tries to contend with the kits. She has come running with a pen in hand, clearly interrupted in her clerical duties. The kittens, two boys and a girl, are well turned out but unlike mom and the salespeople do not wear shoes – bare paws all the better to climb with. Each magically has their tail come out from their clothing – including the little girls whose pantaloons we see. Mom’s tail, and that of the saleslady, appear from under their overclothes. (I’m always curious about how tails are worked into anthropomorphic cats.)

Several kinds of cat are represented for variety – Mrs. Cat is a tabby, the boys a tabby and a tuxie, little girls is a marmalade. The saleswomen are marmalade and lastly an odd mix like maybe she has some Siamese in her. One final curi-oddity is that the pooch, having opened the cabinet below, has released two large mice. No one, even the dog, is paying any attention to their escape. A pleasant mayhem is enjoyed by all.

*Back of card – how did it find its way back to the US I wonder.*

Someone has penned card b at the bottom right. An addition mystery about this card is the back which shows that this was evidently mailed to Japan from an indeterminate place in 1976 and has, obviously, made its way back to the United States to ultimately be sold to me. It says in a neat childish scrawl, Dear Jacob, the school is very good and close. all the children are kind to me. I am learning and getting better. I will see you in camp. Nathan. It was sent to: Jacob G. Cohen, 1-32-28 Ebisu-nishi, Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo, 150 Japan. (And for your information, a postcard to Japan in 1976 cost twenty-one cents.)

Lastly (because I have clearly droned on a bit) may I just say that curiously this store reminds me very much of one I used to go to in New Jersey, near the house we now have. I cannot remember the name but was a true old fashioned stationary store and carried not only cards and assorted writing materials, but the more esoteric things a stationary store carried before the internet, such as form contracts like leases, which is what my mother used to go there for. It was long and narrow with windows all along one side. There were similar blond cabinets and perhaps more of a dusty business-like feel but something about this card nags at my brain with that memory. It is sadly now a Dunkin’ Donuts, just a few feet from the post office and grocery store we walk to frequently.

So there you have it – the postcard show and our first edition of the acquisitions.

Hamlet Castle Wain

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: I have opined on my devotion to Instagram. While I understand the downsides for many folks, having programmed my feed to be a fairly delightful walk through antique toys, cats (toy cats of course), antique jewelry, and vintage clothing (a shout out to @katestrasdin who I always enjoy – and I never stop being fascinated to what happened to silhouettes in the 1850’s!) generally makes me happy. I have written about it, intertwined with posts about my purchases. I am a rare 100% fan.

The secret may be that, although I will occasionally pause to look at Isabella Rossellini’s pigs, I generally do not follow celebrities and I do my best to avoid all political discourse. Of course I look at cats and watch cat videos. The biggest problem (or advantage, depending on how you look at it) is that I buy things. I buy jewelry (you can see a post about that here) and disparate bits and bobs. The Midwest and the South of the US tend to feed this habit – and of course England, the spiritual home of the early Felix and, like today’s acquisition, Louis Wain. (Several Wain posts exist! A few are here, here and here.)

It probably won’t surprise many of my readers to know that I am crazy enough that while scrolling through Instagram I will pause and happily look as closely as I can at tables packed with wares at far off flea markets. This is usually on my phone and therefore takes a certain kind of skill, gently expanding the image to see bits better.

*This is a photo Steven Phillips sent me after I asked about the doily while still on the table.*

This has actually resulted in purchases but the other day was an exception. This gentleman (@woodenhilltoys) in Britain had two items I decided I wanted if they made it through the day at the flea market. Luckily they were not sold and this doily is the first of the two.

It is very interesting as it appears to have been made contemporaneously with Louis Wain (1920’s), in his style, but not him. Although I found one other example at auction they are not common in my experience. In a sense this surprises me – Wain stuff has long been collectible and you’d think a fair number were sold and would survive but evidently not.

As noted in the title of this post, Hamlet Castle is one sign on the wall and Rehearsal of company 12 noon the other. (The auction site lists the doily by this moniker as well.) A Wain inspired cat (Hamlet?) with a club is getting read to pop this other kit (Polonius??) with a properly maniacal look on his mug. Go cat, go!

I’m not exactly sure how or where I will choose to display this tidbit. I tend to think it will come with us to New Jersey (later this morning as you read this!) where I will find a frame for it and hang it somewhere. It is a real treat. Stay tuned for the other acquisition and a story about a rather splendid item the seller shared with me but sadly he does not wish to part with. It’s a real Pictorama piece!

Two Is Company

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Oh the poor rejected lover kitty! His beloved caroling away with her paramour. So sad! Is she truly fickle? Did they etch their initials together previously in this tree trunk? Or are those the initials of the lovers he he walking by? Or was the affection all on his side? It was not meant to be.

Our third wheel is in a strange stance – partial fight and somewhat flight as the bottom half of him already seems to be walking away while the top half looks back. He wears a nice bow, unlike the singing lover, although Miss Kitty has a red collar on. The cat couple only have eyes for each other so they don’t even see him behind the tree – alas. I’m fairly sure that the toad stools growing at the base of the tree are symbolic. (Danger, poison and no less than Existential Dread according to the internet.)

This card has an embossed quality and was never mailed, nothing is written on the back. It was produced by Souvenir Postcards of New York and Berlin. I assume it was riding the crest of the Wain-esque cat craze of the post-Victorian era. Although anthropomorphic like his these cats are less pointedly satirical. Not sure who you’d send this card to where they wouldn’t feel like you were making some sort of point or message.

This card points to the whisp-o-will nature of cat affection and, shall we say, coupling of felines. I have limited personal experience of this beyond one cat, Winkie, that managed to evade our window of spaying post-adoption slip out and find a tabby with whom she had a brief liaison resulting in four kittens.

*My sister Loren holding the mysterious Miss Winkie.*

In retrospect, it is hard to associate those kittens with her as she made short shrift of her affiliation with them. We kept them, two gray, a tabby and a orange tiger. They became: Ping and Pong, Tigger, and Squash. Ping was a smart female and Pong a (very) dopey male. Tigger was a nice and very pretty tabby who sadly wandered off, was found once and did it again. (Our cats were free range in those days.)

Meanwhile Squash turned out to be a pale long drink of an orange cat – so long it was like he had an extra vertebrae or two. As a result would often sit on his haunches, like a human on the couch or in an armchair, comfortably bent completely in two. (My brother Edward once declared of Squash, Survives but never thrives, which seemed pointedly accurate. I have to admit that I have no memory of when Squash passed out of our lives as I wasn’t living home at the time but neither do I remember the report.)

Squash was in most other ways a rather undistinguished fellow living quietly in a multitude of cat personalities. (The kitten event had swelled the family total to unforeseen highs!) However, his distinguishing characteristic was his affection for one of the other cats. He was the rare cat in that house who would seek out another and sleep with his arms around him.

Peaches, one of the Jersey Five of cats, hates everyone (man and beast) it would seem, except the elderly cat Milty. She stealthily climbs up on a chair and curls up asleep with him. Milty, whose precise age is not known to me but a rough calculation has around 20, is largely the benevolent figurehead of senior male in that house. He likes to have a brief go at every dish of food as it is put down but otherwise he’s pretty chill.

*Peaches, left, with the ever patient Milty.*

Meanwhile, the role of senior cat largely belongs to the four year old enormous all black male, Beauregard or Beau. That said Blackie, of the visiting New York cats, believes himself to be senior cat when we are in NJ. Beau will take a certain amount of that since B doesn’t eat with them which would probably cause the imminent collapse of that small kingdom.

There are occasional blow ups and one took place last summer while I was on a call with the two Board Chairs from work. That said, if you are going to have a cat fight explosion while on an important work call its good that you work for an animal hospital. They are very forgiving about animal interruptions on zoom.

*Blackie, looking entirely black since we can’t see the white star on his chest.*

Going back to Winkie, who was a very smart little polydactyl calico cat. Having produced said kittens (in my parent’s closet, the carpet was never quite the same) and caring for them a scant amount of time she pretended that she had no memory of them nor where they came from and generally treated them with a superior attitude and disgust as interlopers we’d wished on her one day. Such is the attitude of cats.

Tail End

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today I have a somewhat odd Louis Wain card which I have to assume is an early one, before he found his feline métier in the more satirical and representational vision of cats. This black one is loaded up with symbols of luck – a black cat being lucky in Great Britain, if not here in the US. (Proving them to be sensible sorts in this regard – in my opinion!)

This card was never used and is attributed to the Alphalsa Publishing Company in London. This company seems to have existed, under shifting names, between 1910 and 1930, although there is an intimation that the archive from it existed into the 1960’s when it was lost in a fire. The back of the card also identifies it as The Aloha Postcard. Louis Wain and Alpha get credit on the bottom front of this card.

*A somewhat peevish Blackie on my lap the other morning. He wanted my chair.*

This kit is grinning from ear to ear and doesn’t seem to mind the bag of gold piled atop his head. He has symbols of luck and prosperity tied to his tail (don’t try this at home) and around his neck – those ancient symbols (still used for their original purpose in Eastern cultures) which a decade or two later became swastikas. A horseshoe is thrown in for good measure although I was always told that they should go in the other direction in order to keep the luck from pouring out.

In addition to fortune, this card is promoting Health, Wealth and Goodluck to the Very Tail End. I like the idea that this little fellow is good luck to the tip of his tail. While not being especially superstitious about luck symbols – good or bad – I can appreciate picking up a good heads up penny now and then.

*Beauregard during a recent visit to NJ.*

I, of course, subscribe to the black cats are good luck theory – thank you Beauregard and Blackie! Blackie cheats it with a white badge on his chest and some hidden on his tummy. You need to look really closely at Beau (one of the Jersey five) to find a few white hairs on his chest. Kim has a theory that the white star on the chest was an evolutionary move to protect all black cats from superstitious fear.

Meanwhile, I am utterly sold on the friendly good tempered nature of male black cats which I have only discovered with these two – a longstanding tuxedo fancier I love them but they tend to another personality altogether. Cookie is a girl of course which is quite different anyway, but she is comparatively shrill and less easy going than her fraternal counterpart.

Just Like Us!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is further evidence of last week’s bounty – still just the tip of the iceberg as well. I just showed Kim this card again and his reaction was, I almost like it. Ha! Well, I can see it might not be for everyone, but I do like this one and it makes me laugh.

The art is attributable to postcard artist and contemporary of Wain, Maurice Boulanger. Unlike Wain, Boulanger has not left many auto bio tracks and my nosy friend AI on the Google search doesn’t have much to say, nor has Wikipedia lent a helpful hand. He was very prolific at the dawn of the 20th century and is mostly identified with his often (but not always – he had a sappier more bucolic side) sharply satiric cat postcard images.

Someone has noted Boulanger on the back of this card in pencil; it is otherwise not identified on the card and unlike Wain he did not much seem to sign his work. Perhaps he just did not enjoy that privilege. I gather he did some rather pointed politically satiric cards involving animals as well but is less well known for those.

Boulanger, as evidenced by this card, is a bit less charmingly whacky, boffo and nuanced than Wain; he’s a bit of a one note wonder. His cat wears a nifty straw boater but he has a single thought and it is to pop that ducky into his smiling toothy maw. The duck, not surprisingly absent of humanoid characteristics is played as straight man soon to be snack.

Boulanger has made this cat arm a bit extra long and the hat is also a bit big to account, I guess, for ear coverage on one side. (The hat appears behind the visible ear in a way which I guess has a certain logic.) This leering fellow only has ducky murder and mayhem as a tasty toothsome morsel on his feline brain though and his open-wide cat grin does not convince the viewer otherwise.

This is a card which for me benefits from the sender’s addition, Just like us! followed by a slightly illegible signature, Dina or Diana and a surname I cannot read. Just like us! I do wonder what that means – I am not sure I would like to be identified with either of the players in this drama. Gosh – I say what does that mean?

It was sent to Jane Highgate Westerton Villa Shattleston – Glasgow Schottland. There is another word, in German I believe, up at the top I cannot read or translate. I show the back below for any German readers who can help. It was sent on 8.12.04 911 N which to my way of thinking was December of 1911 but maybe someone else can figure that better and let us know. It appears to have been sent from Zehlendorf (outside Berlin) and also it says Wainseebahn.

There is at least one more Boulanger card in this pile, one that runs more to the saccharine than this one. Aside from a New Year’s card which I used to hail the impending arrival of 2020, I think these are the first to join the Pictorama archive. (That New Year’s post can be found here.) More to come on him and his cats it seems – not at all surprising that you’ll find him turning up here at Pictorama.

Party Prep – Dolling Up

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It just seems that periodically nothing will do but to purchase another Louis Wain card. They are a gentle mood enhancer – like champagne. I don’t want to immerse myself, but just sipping a bit of the bubbly is very cheering. I recently read and subsequently wrote about the new book devoted to him and tracking the emergence of the pet cat in the Victorian world (that post can be found here) and it sent me meandering over to eBay where I picked this up.

*I highly recommend this recently published volume!*

Presently, none of my Louis Wain cards hang here at Deitch Studio (which has, after all, very little wall space with Felix taking up more than his share. I’m starting to think there might be a nice spot at the house in New Jersey for my growing collection of these cards. You have to be able to get pretty close to these to fully enjoy them – they need to be at eye level.

Prepping for the Party is the title of this card. It’s a New Year’s card and at the bottom it declares, A very happy New Year to you and it is signed at the bottom, Your tru friend Ida. It was mailed on December 29, 1904 from Austin, Texas to Miss Dona Hannig, in Lockhart, Texas where it was marked received on December 30. (Without doing a proper survey of my posts, I would say 1904 was a very good year for postcards. It is, of course, well before the appearance of my beloved Felix, but the postcard world was buzzing with the likes of Louis Wain among others.)

*Back of the card – most of mine come from Britain but this one came from and has been in the US.*

In this card we have a very comic two cats doing some party primping. The standing cat, which in my opinion, is somehow inexplicably male, is helping to curl the long hairs of the gray cat. He is using curling papers which would have been heated, as I understand it, with a hot tong device. Understandably, gray cat is wondering what she has gotten herself into. He looks just the tiniest bit maniacal. Would you let this cat come at you with something dangerous? Maybe not…

Because of my chosen career in fundraising, I go to a lot of parties. Most are affairs which go right from the office to the event with barely a brush through the hair or application of lipstick. However, periodically there is a need to dust off the formal wear and put on the dog so to speak.

When I was younger and worked for the Metropolitan Museum there were numerous black tie events scattered through the calendar. There were annual events, the famous Costume Institute Gala in May, an annual dinner to raise money for Acquisitions in December, but with the various exhibition openings and whatnot, I kept a lot of formal wear at the ready, literally wearing out a series of long black dresses and trousers.

Before a major renovation of our offices there sometime in the late ’90’s, we would all gather in a huge women’s bathroom at one end of our hall of offices. It had, oddly for a bathroom, an enormous round window which faced the front entrance of the museum (it is now a gallery devoted to special exhibitions of Greek and Roman Art) and a very tricky and somewhat rickety blind covering it. It was always a question if you’d be able to close it – if you’d bother as well.

*From the dinner at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala in April of 2023.*

Fifteen or twenty women (or more!) squeezing into a such a space to dress always had a college dorm gone wild feel to it. There was a sense of community and corps d’esprit among us of course. Plenty of folks to zip you up, lend you something you forgot or help you with a run in your stockings. You dressed quickly so you could give up your space to someone waiting. The more experienced of us would start early and be done before the majority swept in.

At Jazz at Lincoln Center this was miniaturized with both a smaller staff and a much smaller space which necessitated thoughtful rotation. Sometimes I would just throw something over the window in my office which faced the hall and dress there. By then we had fewer black tie events it was mostly just our annual spring Gala.

My current gig will host its annual Top Dog Gala on Tuesday where we will celebrate the work of NYPD’s police dogs – each dog named for an officer who died in the line of duty. (My evening as a guest to it last year can be found documented in a post here.) Everywhere I have worked in the past has been a destination for events so I have never had to use a venue which we will this week. This greatly alters my sense of control which I am dealing with. I gather that they will devote a greenroom to our dressing needs so another variation to add to the theme – bad lighting (for make-up!) and cramped space.

I used to wonder what it would be like to dress at home and at my leisure for such events. This is of course the difference between working and being a guest! Carefully packing will commence this weekend and I will bring my things on Monday so I have a second chance on Tuesday if I’ve forgotten anything. I wardrobe dry run needs to happen this weekend. It is festive attire and between that and having lost a bunch of weight recently I am in new territory for attire.

Think of us on Tuesday. A couple of million dollars has been raised and we will honor these hard working dogs whose care we endeavor to care for at the hospital, a longstanding partnership with the city. I’d like to work toward a Top Cat year and perhaps today’s card more appropriate for that eventuality!

Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: I haven’t posted a book review in a very long time and I am not entirely sure I have ever written one for a contemporary volume (Kim Deitch books notwithstanding of course), let alone a non-fictions one. (My reading and therefore posting runs heavily to very early 20th century fiction, largely by women. For a few examples you can look here and here.)

However, it seems quite logical that I would break that ground today with this recently published book as it combines Louis Wain (of whom I have posted often – try here and here for items from my collection) and the Victorian cat craze which helped launch the cat as house pet relationship as we know it today. Catland Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes is more or less hot off the presses. Hughes has worked the Victorian history side of the street before and draws heavily on her accumulated knowledge for this sizeable volume.

Hughes uses Wain’s biography as a rough parallel to the rise of cat breeding and ownership – perhaps a fair measure as one could say that Wain’s art, intertwined with the newly found fondness for felines, helped drive the mania but was also driven by it. She loads it up with an equal amount of stories and tidbits from broader Victorian life, but centered mostly on a newly formed cat craze as it were.

While Hughes does take the opportunity to set both Wain’s autobio and previous chroniclers straight on some points, his biographical bits are interspersed throughout by chapters devoted to other aspects of cat related Victorian life. (Somehow I had missed the fact that Wain had a cleft palate which was largely hidden by facial hair as an adult and I had no knowledge of the family history designing and making liturgical fabrics – the latter being of much interest when you consider his sense of pattern and design.) Evidently Wain gilded the facts of his life liberally (lied) during his lifetime making some of it up out of whole cloth more or less.

*circa 1900: Cat artist Louis William Wain (1860 – 1939) draws inspiration from a pet. (Photo by Ernest H. Mills/Getty Images)*

Hughes’s Wain is a socially awkward fellow, albeit it with flashes of attempted showmanship, who was most comfortable wandering off into his own world, In his public persona he judged (the newly created) cat shows, gave demonstrations of two fisted simultaneous cat drawing, and wrote some vaguely (and then increasingly) unhinged editorial pieces for the papers of the time. On the other side of the coin, he and his family declared bankruptcy more than once; he had a tendency to wander off for periods of time, and of course eventually he sadly drifts (almost retreats) into his decorative cat laden world of insanity.

Much the same could be said about Victorian England and its relationship to felines. First, it is clear that there was a pretty hard line between the nascent “purebred” (often pampered) pets of the day, and the run of the mill kitty of the street. The practice of bringing a street kitten or cat into your home was not the norm and, aside from those which were kept for work such as mousing, those cats were at best left to languish in the streets.

*Tabbies in the Park and black and white print by Wain.*

Some of the Victorian practices concerning cats are not for the weak of cat-loving heart to read so fair warning here. There were descriptions and stories I glossed over at best and I suggest same for Pictorama readers. A chapter on Victorian taxidermy (including a woman with a literal cat hat and cat tail cape – Eeeck!) isn’t even the worst of it as the period does seem to have a glib cruelty to it. However, not all the cat tales are bad ones and there were numerous fun bits and pieces that I’ve been reporting to Kim in bed for weeks now.

The book is gloriously well illustrated including, but happily not limited to a color section. Wain’s work lends itself even to black and white reproduction and Hughes uses it to good effect in support of her points as well as being fun to look at.

My favorite chapter in the book was on the Wain futuristic ceramics which I have always had an interest in and it answered at least some of my questions about these. A somewhat luxe line of teapots and the like in true Futurist forms, Wain had the bad luck of launching his line in June of ’14, just as war was overtaking Europe and Great Britain. Not the best time for offbeat ceramic cat-ware.

Produced by a company called Max Emanuel there were 19 patented designs in the first batch with names as diverse as The Mascot Cat and Road Hog Cat. The choice of colors where the larger designs were produced was referred to by a critic as an angry cake decorator on acid. Evidently there was even at inception a riot of designs, colors and finishes for the items, manufactured at two different plants which would make positive identification hard even then and almost impossible now that forgeries have flowed into the market. Still, I would snatch one up if I could and liked it and remain unconcerned about proof of origin.

The most disappointing chapter was on Wain and Felix! Other than the story of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Felix factory on the East End of London being told (Pictorama readers may remember that from a very popular early post that can be found here), Hughes does a rough retelling of a the plot of a silent cartoon that is easily viewed on Youtube. I’m mystified by why she included Felix if she was so disinterested.

*Christmas was a favorite and very lucrative time of the year for Wain from the beginning of his career.*

Wain and his sisters eventually leave London to reside in a suburban seaside town near Margate (one of his boosters in the magazine world was an early investor and set them up there), and this holiday retreat lifestyle inspires some of Wain’s most entertaining cards and images – cats golfing, boating and swimming as well as sly social commentary found even in Catland.

*From the Pams-Pictorama.com collection. Sadly not Wain and Eliot, not yet…*

Meanwhile, of course I have wonderful day dreams about Louis actually wandering over to the Felix photographers in Margate where so many of my Felix photos were made and having a postcard made with an arm tossed around the shoulders of a tall stuffed Felix – this is now united with my day dream of finding one of the giant Felix dolls from those establishments.

Furthermore, as it happens eventually TS Eliot was also nursing a nervous breakdown in the neighborhood – in a town just on the other side of Margate. It is irresistible to imagine that they met at that time, perhaps had a coffee and were strolling the boardwalk together. And perhaps they wandered in and had a picture postcard snapped for posterity – to show up in my collection one day.

More Mainzer

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today’s postcard post is devoted to the heir to the Louis Wain wacky anthropomorphic cat throne, Eugen Hartung. Hartung is sort of the Otto Messmer of cat postcards. Hartung is a Swiss artist (1897-1973) whose career blossomed in the United States after WWII somehow became know by his publisher’s name, Alfred Mainzer. Was it post-war anti-German sentiment? Was it conscious like Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, or did it happen of it’s own accord? For whatever reason, Mainzer’s name is the one prominent on the back of these cards it is the name I knew them by until I started digging a bit for a blog awhile back. I wrote about one of these cards I purchased back in 2019 and recounted some of this history. (That post can be found here.)

Much to my surprise, two handfuls of these cards found their way to me back in December. After retrieving a mysterious package that had been left for you in the parlance of our doorman’s communications, I discovered that a friend who lives on the other end of 86th Street (and who I haven’t seen in person given our pandemic times) had dropped off a packet of these cards for me. Evidently she had found them years ago when cleaning out her parent’s house and put them aside for me. In a recent apartment renovation she discovered them again and brought them over. When I emailed my thanks she said that she remembered thinking when she found them that I was the right home for them and she was glad she had finally united them with me.

Oddly enough though within the month, another handful of these cards showed up in a Christmas card for Kim. I want to say it was either Rick Altergott or Evan Dent who sent them along. I apologize for this slip of mind and not remembering better. I was struck by how odd it was that two bunches of these cards should find their way to me at the same time. If you’re reading please raise your hand so I can correct this and thank you properly!

These cards were still widely available when I was a little kid and I always liked them – purchasing them when I could although those particular ones are long disappeared. They have a texture to the paper, that I remember with tactile memory, and the deckle edge lives in memory too, somehow rooted in the 1960’s in my mind. It turns out that, on the other side of the country, a young adult Kim Deitch was purchasing them in Berkeley. All great minds think alike it seems. Little did either of us know that decades later Deitch Studio and Pam’s Pictorama would unite to be the blissful cat laden bower that it is today.

I have long wondered why, although extremely popular, Hartung’s cat cards have never risen to the level of Louis Wain. (I have written several times about the cat artist genius and some of those posts can be found here, here and here just for starters.) I think in part, although plenty chaotic and wacky, they lack the underlying maniacal frenzy of the Wain universe. They are beautifully choreographed compositions and there is a prettiness that Wain’s drawings don’t have. As Louis Wain himself began to descend into mental illness, the drawings had an increasing edge to them – until of course they become almost entirely abstract. At least this is my theory. Even at their most frenzied they are a bit polite and well bred in a way that Wain isn’t.

I give you a selection of a two of my favorites out of the group, more to come. This Western scene above – a cat cowboy evidently breaking a bucking bronco goat – was a evidently a much beloved one. It has multiple push pin holes in the top edge where someone kept it on view. (None of these cards in either bunch were ever mailed.) A girl cat is using a home movie camera (circa the 1950’s or ’60’s) to film the action and she’s right in the midst of it, tail politely poking out beneath a short skirt. In the top right, one cowboy pushes another off his perch on the rails and a Siamese cat is amongst them for diversity. I once owned an Annie Oakley jacket like the one worn by the fleeing fellow in the lower right – was my favorite jacket for years and I wore it until it fell to pieces.

The next one is this family scene of kitty chaos. I think it is very funny that these cats are dog owners and it is the dogs that are causing today’s troubles. The cats are exceedingly genteel and the cafe scene is decidedly European. The spilled drinks appear to be hot chocolate (the children were drinking it) and the waiter’s spilling tray is full of petit fours. (The one young fellow, strategically under the tray, is preparing to snatch them up as they fall.)

Comically, two birds watch the action from the lower right – none of these well-bred felines pays them any mind. The cats are civilized and all the others are playing their animal roles. This card is heavily faded along the very top edge, but only a persnickety collector would have issue with this. It too has many pin prick holes, top and bottom, from being on view somewhere.

I end today by saying I would expect that at least a few more of these will find their way to the pages of Pictorama so cat card lovers stay tuned.