Louis Wain was one of Britain's most popular illustrators in the early 20th century, famous for cats playing golf, drinking tea and going to the opera. In the 1920s he was committed to an asylum and diagnosed as schizophrenic, and later his later abstract, patterned cat pictures were read as evidence of a deteriorating mind. That reading rested on a 1939 psychiatrist's sequence of eight pictures, arranged in an assumed order with no evidence behind it. Curator Bryony Benge-Abbott argues the later work instead reflects creative confidence, new techniques, and a fascination with electricity. The piece invites readers to see Wain's late work as an experiment rather than a symptom.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.