Comparing Peake's and Tenniel's Alices -

 I made the point earlier that Peake’s Alice is very different to Tenniel’s, and so that made me think that I might be nice to actually copy one of Peake’s depictions of Alice herself. This is my copy of a sketch from Through the Looking Glass, after Alice has made it to the end of the board to earn promotion to queen. Looking specifically at the Alice figures, you can see that Tenniel’s archetypal Alice is a little girl, usually quite prim and well kempt. Comparing this with Peake’s Alice, she seems just a tiny bit older, her hair is a little more wild and a little darker than Tenniel’s blond Alice – you can see this better in some of the other illustrations Peake made.

As for the crown, it’s really interesting that in Tenniel’s illustration the queens all wear crowns which seem slightly exaggerated versions of a queen’s crown from a standard Staunton chess piece. Which in Peake’s illustration, Alice is wearing the kind of crown you’d see on an early Victorian chess piece, incredibly tall and elaborate.

With the red and white queens, I’m struck with the symmetry in the composition, despite the fact that the queens themselves are such different characters. I like this sketch even more if you look at it in context of the previous sketch, where the figures are in the same relationship to each other, but the queens are awake. It means that when you turn the page, you get a similar effect of turning the page to see Alice emerging from the looking glass, or to see the queen turning into the kitten, or to see the Cheshire Cat disappearing.

With Tenniel, especially with regards to the red queen, you don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s actually a chess piece, rather than a character with a life of her own, which is something I definitely do feel about the queens in the Peake illustration. I think Peake might well have had a thing about noses, too, for the red queen’s nose reminds me very much of the similar nose he gave to the Mad Hatter.