In spite of his popularity and prolific output, Wain did not become wealthy, possibly because he sold his work cheaply and relinquished copyright, and also because he supported his mother and five sisters.

He was sent first to Orchard Street Foundation School in South Hackney but spent much of his time playing truant and wandering around London, attending lectures at the Royal Polytechnic Institution or going on insect-hunting expeditions into the countryside.

Emily developed breast cancer soon after the marriage; Peter was a comfort to her and also, as Wain would later say, laid the foundation of his career as a cat artist.

[1]: 20 As a young widower, Wain rented rooms in New Cavendish Street in the City of Westminster and moved in somewhat Bohemian circles that included journalists and artists such as Herbert Railton, Caton Woodville, Linley Sambourne, Harry Furniss, Melton Prior, and Phil May.

[1]: 25-26  He worked to build up his reputation by taking on commissions for a variety of subjects, including architectural and landscape drawings as well as animals, for a number of journals.

But in 1890 there was a reconciliation and the family moved to the seaside resort of Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, where they rented a house belonging to Sir William Ingram, managing director of the Illustrated London News.

Wain took up gardening and walking, as well as various sports including running, swimming, ice skating, boxing and fencing.

[1]: 33  Selling his pictures together with the copyright cheaply to publishers meant that he did not receive royalties when his work was reproduced and left him in straitened circumstances in later life.

[2][3]: 6  Wain worked with a variety of media including watercolour, body colour,[a] pen and ink, pencil, silverpoint, chalk and oil.

His cats dressed as humans took part in sports, went to the seaside, tea parties, restaurants and celebrated Christmas, with activities sometimes ending in mishap and mayhem.

[1]: 82 By the end of World War I, demand for Wain's pictures had declined significantly and, in spite of commissions from the publisher Valentine & Sons for a series of children's books, his financial situation deteriorated.

[1]: 82-83 In 1924, Wain's sisters had him certified insane and admitted to a pauper ward at Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting, South London.

[1]: 91  When the bookseller Dan Rider, who was on an asylum visiting committee, came across Wain in the hospital, he set up an appeal to raise money for the artist.

[1]: 99  The prime minister Ramsay MacDonald then set up a fund for Wain's sisters and also arranged civil list pensions for them "in recognition of their brother's services to popular art".

Wain had in the meantime been transferred to more comfortable conditions at Bethlem Hospital, where a fellow patient later recalled him as "a very gentle amiable old man always clean and neat...

He was seen as responsible for raising the social status of cats, of taking them from the parlour to a position where even members of parliament could proudly announce their enthusiasm for them without fear of ridicule.

In spite of his undoubted expertise, some of Wain's theories on the breeding and nature of cats were seen as eccentric, just as were some of his ideas on philosophy and science.

Maclay's theory has been challenged as Wain was still producing paintings in his old style, as well as more abstract "kaleidoscopic" designs, while at Napsbury.

[5] Wain's later work, where his cats dissolve into kaleidoscopic abstract patterns, has been identified as an important precursor to 1960s psychedelic art.