It was August 1801, and Mrs Freudenberger was newly widowed. In his youth, her husband, the artist Sigmund Freudenberger, had worked in Paris, producing drawings and book illustrations in the rococo style fashionable in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Since returning to his hometown of Berne, Switzerland, in 1773, Mr Freudenberger’s primary output had been scenes of Swiss peasant life and national costume. In works such as “The Rustic Toilette” and its pendant, “Village Cleanliness”, red-cheeked peasant girls wash and dress among distinctively Alpine milk churns, baskets, and farm equipment. These prints were often hand-coloured and delivered to booksellers by an enigmatic local peasant who lived in the Freudenbergers’ attic.

Fortunately for Mrs Freudenberger — nervous about a possible loss of income should this talented assistant leave the studio she had now inherited — the man’s artistic skill was matched only by his biddability. Indeed, his unquestioning nature reflected an unworldliness that in other circumstances might have been alarming. His garret bedroom was described by one “gentleman who had . . . the curiosity to visit” as a scene of abject “misery & filth”.¹ An ungainly figure with a “deformed” appearance, the assistant reportedly wandered round the town in rags, to the jeering of local children, and burst into tears on being asked to add up the price of a few penny drawings.² It was only “with difficulty [that he could] be made to write his name”: Gottfried Mind.³

Over the next thirteen years, Mind duly remained with the widow. He may have felt a sense of gratitude toward the family that had provided him with a home, practical artistic education, and meagre employment, but he may also have felt the sharp end of Mrs Freudenberger’s tongue. She was said to “sit beside him herself, with her knitting implements, spurring him on to work”, which he did, until his own death of a “dropsy in the chest” in 1814, aged just forty-six.⁴

However, Mr Freudenberger’s death did make one significant difference to his erstwhile apprentice. Whereas previously Mind had been confined to colouring his master’s prints, he was now free to focus on his own projects, which “gradually began to attract attention, & to be considered objects of profit” (for his new boss).⁵ In addition to Freudenberger-adjacent images of peasant children playing, these included watercolour depictions of animals and wooden figurines, but, above all, pictures of cats. A series later published by the lithographer Joseph Brodtmann plays with variations on a mother cat and three kittens — hunting, tumbling around, and grooming against sparse backgrounds. The English collector George Fairholme, who gathered recollections of Mind while living in Berne between 1828–29, described the artist habitually working with “a favourite cat [sitting] in the hollow formed by his neck & shoulders, while others formed a warm berth on his knee”.⁶ In his own self-portrait, a version of which is now in the British Museum, Mind depicts himself drawing with a cat on the desk before him, next to a dead frog preserved in a jar. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, these drawings, prints, and watercolours had brought Mind a limited pan-European celebrity, his distinct talents later encapsulated in the moniker mentioned in every obituary and retrospective account that appeared in the English-speaking press, from the Gentleman’s Magazine to the children’s periodical Chatterbox: “Der Katzenraphael”, or, “The Raphael of Cats”.

Though Gottfried Mind is seldom discussed today, his story unites several concerns that preoccupied Europe in the early nineteenth century: the swiftly evolving nature of art and of artists; the increasingly examined relationship between humans and animals; and, more distinctively, a popular and intellectual fascination with the Swiss Alps and the supposed Alpine phenomenon of “cretin imbecility”. All of these themes appear more or less explicitly across the core primary material available on Mind: a plethora of obituaries; an article appended to Mindiana, a collection of inlaid drawings which Fairholme assembled from Mind’s designs and published in 1831; various medical lectures; and a collection of later, often anonymous, profiles in the periodical press. A modern reassessment of his life and work therefore offers a fresh perspective on Mind’s turn-of-the-century context, as well as his art.

The facts of Gottfried Mind’s biography appear reasonably straightforward. He was born in Berne to a Hungarian father (most accounts make no mention of his mother), who subsequently settled in nearby Worblaufen (Ittigen) in order to work in the paper manufactory of Samuel Emanuel Gruner. The young Mind’s “weak constitution” meant he received little formal education, although his interest in drawing and woodcarving was clear from a young age.⁷ Between the ages of eight and ten, he attended an industrial “working” school for poor children that had been established by the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. An advocate for the pedagogical importance of physical exercise and activity, Pestalozzi himself would go onto greatness, but the school itself, where basic elementary education vied with manual labour (primarily spinning, weaving, and dyeing), was an early failure. Pestalozzi kept detailed notes on all his students — Gottfried, then known as “Friedl”, is described as “a strange creature, full of artist-caprices, along with a certain roguishness”.⁸ After he left the school, and probably around the age of fourteen, Mind’s father placed him with Freudenberger, then at work on a print series recording Swiss national costumes.⁹ Mind went to live with him in Berne, where he was taught to colour etchings. From this moment “until the time of his death”, in the words of an anonymous journalist writing in The Mirror, “there is nothing to tell of him except that he spent his whole life on the selfsame stool”.¹⁰

Presumably with an eye to a good story, Mind’s obituarists tend to emphasise his isolation from the world. Nonetheless, his comparatively lowly origins and evident disadvantages were, fortuitously, offset by a remarkable number of opportunities to access art, artists, and source material. His father’s employer, Gruner, was a collector and patron of the arts (and incidentally sold a blank sketchbook to the young J. M. W. Turner while the latter was on holiday in Berne in August 1802).¹¹ A German artist named Legel is said to have taken an interest in Mind, and given him the rudiments of sketching, while staying in the paper manufacturer’s house.¹² Both Legel and his young protégé had access to Gruner’s collection of prints and drawings, including work by the celebrated animal painter Johann Elias Ridinger. Mind later supplemented this experience with further study of works by Rubens and Rembrandt in the collection of the Berne-based artist, printmaker, and collector Sigmund Wagner, who recounted to Mind’s self-appointed biographer, Fairholme, that the young man had made “remarks” on what he saw “in his own unintelligible language”, seeming to believe “without any vanity . . . that he could draw animals himself, as well as any of them”.¹³

In turn, Mind himself would become of interest to artists. In 1868, his drawing of a cat cleaning itself was used by Champfleury (pseudonym of the French art critic and novelist Jules Fleury-Husson) as the frontispiece to his anecdotal history of cats in culture. Reprinted in several editions, Les chats, histories, mœurs, observations, anecdotes (1868) was advertised with a poster by the painter Édouard Manet (entitled “The Cats’ Rendezvous”) and included several of Mind’s drawings, reflecting what has been dubbed “a cult of the cat” among nineteenth-century French artists and intellectuals.¹⁴ Notable cat acolytes included Manet himself (who put a black cat in his nude Olympia, which famously horrified the Salon of 1865), but also the poet Charles Baudelaire, for whom the cat was, among other things, a symbolic fusion of the mystical and the erotic.¹⁵ Champfleury’s work helped keep Mind in the public consciousness; he also repeated and popularised the story that the moniker “the Raphael of Cats” had originated with France’s most successful woman painter of the previous generation, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842).¹⁶ Le Brun travelled through Berne in 1807, some years after Turner, and may well have met Mind there. Though there is no primary record of her making the comparison between Raphael and Mind, it does seem like something she might have feasibly said: in her memoirs, she regretted the early death of the French painter Jean Germain Drouais in 1788, “just as he seemed to give promise of becoming a second Raphael”.¹⁷

For Le Brun, Raphael “st[ood] above all other painters” for his attention “even to the smallest flowers in the grass.”¹⁸ Some critics saw a similar quality in Mind’s representation of domestic animals, which are notable for their naturalism and precision. Unlike other “cat artists”, such as the nineteenth-century commercial painter Louis Wain (whose experience of schizophrenia has seen him frequently grouped alongside Mind as an “outsider artist”), Mind does not imagine his feline subjects engaging in human activities. Only rarely does he place them in any kind of narrative context — as with a pen and ink drawing later published under the title La querri aux Rats, which shows a group of cats pursuing rodents throughout a characteristically Swiss wood-panelled room, complete with cuckoo clock. Instead, and almost without exception, Mind’s cats are depicted with close attention to musculature, and to its interaction with bone and fur, as well as to behaviour apparently as characteristic of the cats of the 1800s as of today: loafing, pouncing, arching their backs, and cleaning their hindparts with one leg raised. A similar care can be seen in his drawings of bears, likely modelled after the residents of Berne’s famous bear pit — a pitiful concrete structure extant, in various forms, since the sixteenth century to acknowledge the city’s heraldic association with these animals.¹⁹ The fact that Mind depicted bears as well as cats suggests that he focused on studying those animals that were readily accessible to him, which he seems to have done with remarkable fidelity. “It is true, he had not studied the anatomy of animals”, Fairholme noted, “but we seldom see an error . . . and the occasional pentimenti or corrections, show that his correct eye instantly detected any thing that was wrong in this respect.”²⁰

Mind’s close attention to animal behaviour gave his work a natural appeal for Champfleury and his circle. However, Fairholme’s suggestion that Mind’s drawings sprung almost organically from his communion with the natural world was also in line with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas about Switzerland more generally. A rare European republic, characterised by the sublime Alpine landscapes with which Turner filled his Berne sketchbook, Switzerland was generally felt to combine an enlightened approach to government with the kind of innocent and idyllic rural life on which Freudenberger (for example) had built his later career. This was certainly the view taken by Le Brun, whose delight with the country’s snowcapped mountains and picturesque peasant customs is conveyed in her oil painting titled Festival of the Shepherds at Unspunnen, August 17, 1808 (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Mind’s easy identification with the innocent pleasures of Swiss rural life may in turn have contributed to the mythology that grew up around his mental capacity. Today, he is often casually described as autistic, probably partly because of his inclusion in Darold Treffert’s Extraordinary People (1989), which discusses savant syndrome (sometimes also called autistic savant syndrome).²¹ However, the early nineteenth-century accounts agree only that he had a “weak constitution of body” and was inarticulate and illiterate.²² He does not seem to have been coherently identified with any specific diagnostic term until Fairholme began assembling his Mindiana in the late 1820s, where Mind was usually referred to as a “cretin imbecile”.²³ The certainty may be deceptive. The early to mid-nineteenth century was a period of developing medical interest in intellectual disability, often technically termed “idiocy”. In 1845, England’s Lunacy Act distinguished for the first time between “lunatics, idiots, and persons of unsound mind”; “idiot asylums” soon began to be established in England and elsewhere following precedents in Germany and France. By the end of the century, Mind was regularly appearing in discussions by psychiatrists, including William W. Ireland, Medical Superintendent of the Scottish National Institution for the Education of Imbecile Children, and Alfred Tredgold, a neurologist and incipient eugenicist.²⁴ For these men, Mind’s story primarily provided evidence of the idea that (as Ireland put it) “a constructive or mechanical turn is more frequently preserved amongst idiots than any other gift”.²⁵

“Cretinous imbecility”, the diagnosis applied to Mind, is now regarded as a term of abuse. However, in the nineteenth century, it referred to a specific diagnostic category, with “cretinism” in particular linked to the Alps. On a visit to Switzerland in 1602, the physician and psychiatrist Felix Platter had reported encountering an abundance of children suffering from “innate folly”, accompanied by “goitrous” throats. “Sitting in the streets and looking into the sun . . . twisting their bodies in various ways, with their mouths agape”, he wrote, “they provoke passersby to laughter and astonishment.”²⁶ Platter is thought to be referring to something analogous to what is now termed CIDS (congenital iodine deficiency syndrome), a condition marked by impaired physical and mental development, and often a swelling (or “goitre”) around the thyroid gland.²⁷ The syndrome can be caused in utero by insufficient dietary iodine, a common risk in regions with nutrient-poor Alpine soil. It may have been Mind’s Swiss origins that gave Fairholme the confidence to assert that the artist had been “at an early age affected with the goitre, (so common in Switzerland)”. Certainly, Mind is specifically named as “the Swiss cretin” in the titles to several engravings made from his works after his death.

At the same time, “cretinism” also had traditional connections with the idea of the holy fool — in 1800, while Mind was still alive, the physician François-Emanuel Fodéré had suggested that the term derived from “chrétien, good Christian . . . a title one gives to . . . idiots, because, one says, they are incapable of committing any sin.”²⁸ This constellation of associations around the term “Swiss cretin” gave a particular turn to much interpretation of Mind’s art. His weakness of constitution — and (apparently) of intellect — was regularly contrasted with his mastery of the delicate medium of watercolour, and his ability to capture cats’ distinctive qualities of movement. This achievement could only be the result of a “precocious genius”, Ireland noted, flowering as part of an “innate pre-disposition”, comparable to the child musical prodigies Mozart and Handel. The reverse was also true: “men of special genius”, he continued, “are sometimes much behind other men in very commonplace qualities” (he again cites Mozart — presumably a nod toward the composer’s famously puerile sense of humour).²⁹

While raising questions for psychiatrists about the nature of “imbecility”, Mind’s talents also spoke more generally to new ideas, deriving from Romanticism, about the nature of artistic creativity and inspiration. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), whose lions Mind was said to have admired, had combined several careers as an artist, dealer, and diplomat, and responded adroitly to the demands of his royal and aristocratic patrons. By contrast, the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of the idea that the artist was a lonely, unworldly, and often tragic outsider, working in the teeth of popular misunderstanding and establishment diktats. This was encapsulated in artists like the visionary William Blake (1757–1827) and the embattled and ultimately suicidal history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). Mind, whose work was described as the result of “an instinct, [rather] than a reasoning power”, fitted well into this mould, with which much of the nineteenth-century discussions are in sympathy.³⁰ As a result, the very distinctiveness of Mind’s story allowed it to slot, somewhat paradoxically, into pre-existing notions of artistic exceptionalism. “He would look now and then, as it were, into himself,” noted an obituarist, and “when at these moments, he lifted his head, his eyes had something dreamy in them.”³¹ Perhaps he was dreaming of cats. Perhaps not. Much like the famously elusive character of his favourite subject, Mind’s art and life ultimately defies easy categorisation.