2025 30x30 Direct Watercolour Challenge 9 - 13

 In my last post I showed my first 8 direct watercolours of this year's challenge. I have tried to produce full pictures, with backgrounds. My broken left shoulder means I can spend time on each picture and this may be why, in my opinion, these are the most consistent set I have produced in any year. Here are the next five. See whether you agree.

9 I find Americana a very fruitful source of inspiration, and likewise, I do enjoy portraying vehicles.

10- this is the beautiful city of Chester. At the moment this is about as good as I can do. Really pleased with this.

11 Way out of my comfort zone here, This was made on the 10th, the second picture of the day, to put me one day ahead.

12 I made this in my Canson mixed media journal. This is maybe why it is a little sketchy. I like the way that the bus wheel came out.

13 My reference photo has the car blue, but I love to see a red Morgan 3 wheeler so that's what I've painted. 

So that's where we ae - still 1 day ahead of schedule. More than a third done and closing in on the halfway mark

2025 30 x 30 Direct Watercolour Challenge

I don’t think I’ve posted since before last Friday, That was the day that I broke my left shoulder. Which is one good reason why I haven’t posted. One handed typing is a pain. One other reason why I haven’t posted since is that it’s now June, and June is the time of the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge. Direct watercolour means that you don’t sketch the design first – you have to go straight in with watercolour.

I first undertook the challenge in 2018 and I did complete it. I repeated in 2019, did not attempt it in 2020 and then made my third completion in 2021. Especially in these earlier years I quite often made quite sketchy paintings that were pretty quick and easy to do. I look at the stuff I did in those years and it’s not brilliant at all. Well, we all have to start somewhere. Then in 2022 I managed to make some pictures that I was quite proud of during the challenge. Not all of them by any means, but certainly some of them. In 2023 this continued, and although some of the first ten were a wee bit ropey, as a set they were clearly the best I’ve done. I loved the whole experience.

2024 it was a different story. Whereas my first ten were inconsistent the year before, now they were very consistent. Consistently bad. I didn’t think that any of them were any good. If I had managed one decent picture then maybe I might have continued. However they were all rubbish and I gave up after 10. I wasn’t annoyed with the fact that I wasn’t doing better than 23. I was angry with myself that I’d gone so far backwards.

So to 2025. I promised myself this –

I would give myself however long was necessary to make each painting and not go chasing the schedule of at least 1 per day.

I would on the same hand be prepared to stop working on each painting when I had done what I could and not overwork it.

I would be more experimental with colours

I would be doing it for fun

So 9 days in how is it going. Well, judge for yourself – here’s the first 8 –

1 – Old Royal Mail Van. One of my 2023 favourites also had an old postman’s van, although the one in this is older. Really pleased – a lot of quite difficult elements in this.

2 – Multicoloured warthog. I set out to be experimental here and I do rather like the results. One friend has already asked for a print.

3 – Donkey. Probably the weakest of the 8 so far. The actual modelling of the animal itself isn’t bad. I like the ghostly trees in the background. But I think I needed to be bolder with the colours. The overall effect is a little insipid.

4 – bull – Nothing insipid about the colours with this one. It was a bit of a reaction to what happened with the donkey and although it’s maybe a little more crude, I think it’s far more successful.

5 – 1940’s London. My plan with this was to use some bigger blocks of colour than I normally do and less detail and more suggestion. I am bowled over by the result. Yeah, it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a painting that turned out very close to the picture that was in my head when I started. If I could have made something like this last year then I might well have completed the challenge.

6 – Oslo tiger statue – a very different painting, much bolder. I think the modelling of the statue itself is really good. Although when I was in Oslo in January it was so dull and gloomy it was hard to believe that the place ever looked like this.

7 – mid century grocer. It was time I made at least 1 picture where the focus is on a human figure. I have overworked the face, sadly. At least it’s not a complete wash out – I like the work on the shirt, for example.

8 – 30s/40’s Americana. While I was looking for reference photos for my grocer I came upon a photo showing this. I knew it would work as a subject if I could do my best to do it justice. Overall it took hours butt I’m stupidly pleased with the result

Well, look, I have to say that I think it’s the best start I’ve ever made to a 30x30 challenge. I think I’ve certainly spent more time on it than I’ve ever done before. Will the quality continue. Watch this space.

Weekend Sketches

Yesterday I just never found the time for another watercolour Treasure Island copy. In the last two or three months I’ve just been working in my Canson A5 mixed media sketching journal. However on Friday I wanted to make a copy of one of William Heath Robinson’s illustrations for the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. The original is such a complex illustration that I decided to use one of the empty pages in my Daler Rowney A4 sketchbook. Here’s my copy.

You know, I enjoyed it so much that I used the book for all of my sketches this weekend. Amongst others was this copy of a Treasure Island illustration by Walter Paget. Paget was a respected and very successful English illustrator in the last years of the 19^th century ad the first couple of decades of the 20^th. His illustrations to “Treasure Island” provide many striking images of the story and are amongst the most popular.

Finally, then, old Victoria London, a favourite subject of mine to sketch. This one took hours.

This week's pirate

Sorry – I’m a little bit late posting this one. This is my copy of Robert Ingpen’s Long John Silver. Robert Ingpen is an Australian artist and his illustrations of “Treasure Island” are among my favourites.

Seven Ages of Public Transport on London's Roads

 Last week I posted recent sketches of various forms of public transport on London's roads through the ages. I realised hat I hadn't made a new sketch of a trolleybus. So, here we go, in chronological order of their use rather than when I made them

1) Horse drawn bus

2) Horse drawn tram

Electric Tram

Motor Bus

Trolley Bus

Double Decker 

Now, yes, I know that's only six. Because I haven't yet done what should be the last of he series, a modern London Double Decker. Watch this space.

This week's Pirate

 Sorry, busy and no real time for chat this morning. Yesterday though was the third consecutive Saturday when I made a watercolour copy of an original Treasure Island illustration. The original of this was by Louis Rhaed and made at the end of the 19th or start of the 20th century. 

Me and London Buses (and Trams

^{You know, if I’ve got an old, or very old black and white photograph of London to use as reference for a sketch, then I’m happy. If it has a method of public transport in it, then doubly so. What can I say? I’m a simple soul. So while I’ve been chancing my arm at copying some Treasure Island illustrations recently, during the last week or two I’ve also been making some sketches of London transport. Here they are:-}

London’s first ever scheduled horse drawn buses were operated by Mr. George Shillibeer in 1829. Shillibeer – shilli name. Regulations over the next 30 years saw more efficient, lighter buses which could carry more passengers. Horse drawn services came under competition from motor buses and electric trams from the end of the Victorian era, and the last horse drawn service was withdrawn in 1911. The bus in the picture was operated by the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC). The company was formed in the eighteen fifties, and was one of the main companies to be amalgamated to form London Transport in the 1930s.

London’s first red motorbuses were operated by the LGOC – General for short. In fact London Transport would use the same colour scheme when they took over. London’s first really successful motor bus was the type B that entered service in 1911. During World War I 900 of these buses were sent out to the Western Front where they were nicknamed ‘Ole Bill’ after a popular newspaper cartoon figure of the time. The last Type B was withdrawn in 1926.

^{A couple of horse drawn tram lines began running in London in the 1860s, but they didn’t really get going until the 1870s.Electric powered trams weren’t used until the first years of the 20th century. By the outbreak of the First World War London had the largest tram network in Europe. However it was hard for tram companies to find investment for further expansion in the 1920s. Trams were expensive to maintain and competition from larger and more reliable motorised buses saw some companies increasingly switching. By the mid 30s it had been decided to replace London’s remaining tramways with motor buses and with trolleybuses powered by overhead wires. The outbreak of World War 2 meant that the last tram services remained until 1951.}

It's probably fair to say that no form of public transport ever contributed so much to London as the Routemaster double decker bus. Its contribution to London’s visual identity alone is immense. The iconic Routemaster first ran in 1954, and even though production ended in 1968 Routemaster services were still running into the new millennium, finally ending in 2005. I haven’t lived in London for 39 years, but I was born there, I grew up there, I went to London University. It will always be my home town. And there are some things which always feel like home to me, and a Routemaster bus is one of them. Thankfully, of the almost 3000 built, over a third of them still exist.

NC Wyeth

I’m sorry to admit that I was not very familiar with the work of American artist and illustrator NC Wyeth before I turned my attention to Treasure Island. This is a shame, because he was a wonderful artist and illustrator who produced what is arguably the most famous and celebrated set of illustrations for the novel.

Wyeth’s career lasted more than forty years, from the earliest years of the 20^th century until his death in the mid-forties. His first commission as an illustrator was for no less a publication than the Saturday Evening Post. He made his illustrations for Treasure Island in 1911 before he was 30. His illustrations are a million miles away from the kind of work being done by Arthur Rackham and his contemporaries in the UK. His use of colour is most appealing. However, this is what means I have ot tried to copy his work before today.

Believe me, I’m fully aware of my shortcomings when I have a paintbrush in my hand, But last week I plucked up the courage to have a go at Ralph Steadman’s Long John Silver and blow me, the results were much better than expected. Not brilliant, not, but not so bad as to make me want to rip the paper to shreds and set fire to the pieces after jumping up and down on them singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Trust me, that's an improvement on some of the rubbish I’ve perpetrated in the past.

So here it is. 

At the moment I’d say that I still prefer Mervyn Peake’s grim monochrome Treasure Island, but Wyeth’s are wonderful too.

Two more Treasure Island Illustrations, me hearties.

Yesterday I moved away from my illustration copies just for a change and produced a couple of responses to daily drawing challenges on Facebook. Before that I’d made another copy of a Peake Treasure Island illustration, which you can see here. 

So this morning I made up my mind to take the plunge and make an ink AND  watercolour copy of Ralph Steadman’s fantastic illustration of Long John Silver. I had to spend a while working out a methodology for doing it. My initial thought was to maybe put some background colour down first. The thing is, though, it can play havoc with an ink pen when you try to use it on top of dried watercolour. So it had to be ink lines first, hen apply the colour. I bought new uniball 0.05mm and 0.1mm pens since the ones I had are pretty much used up. Using the 0.05mm pen, a 0.3mm and a 0.8mm this is what I came up with.

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Incidentally I used Uniball pens because they are reliably waterproof and will take a watercolour on top with no running. No, they haven’t paid me for a testimonial, more’s the pity. Now, at one point I did cosier just laying down some watercolour to begin and finishing with watercolour pencils. But, you know, while I’m pretty confident of achieving what I wan with black ink fineliners, I’m always fearful of overworking with colours, and once I got to a certain point with the paint I felt that I was in danger of overworking it if I added more, and so I stopped. So this is the finished copy. 

As a copy, I’m pretty pleased. As a colour copy I’m absolutely delighted.

The Illustration Family Robinson

Stick with me for a moment. This will all eventually become relevant. I remember when I began studying for my A Levels there was a guy in my class who was actually a year older than the rest of us.  I think that he’d done O Level resits the previous year. I hope that I’m not being unfair when I say that I don’t think that he found A Level English the easiest of subjects. When it come to Art though, the guy was brilliant. To look at his own original work was to die a little inside, with the realisation that you would never be capable of producing original work like that yourself. He was so modest about it as well. I remember him telling me that he was doing a project on artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardlsey. This was my first encounter with the work of the man who would become one of my absolute favourite artist/illustrators. If I could wave my magic wand and have any artist or illustrator from the past produce a set of Alice illustrations it would be Aubrey Beardsley. I think he would have produced something outstanding. Sadly, he died just a few years before the copyright of Wonderland passed into the public domain.

So to the Robinson brothers, then. Once upon a time there were three brothers born in London, Thomas, Charles and William. Only 3 years spanned heir births. I can relate to this myself, since my older brother was born in 1963, I was born in 1964, and our younger brother was born in 1965. Their father and grandfather had both been illustrators and all three brothers had successful careers in illustration, especially during the Golden Age of British illustration. The youngest, William Heath Robinson, is the best remembered today, for his depiction of strange, convoluted and often pointless machines. To this day his name is used as an adjective for this kind of machine, the sort that looks like a mad inventor has knocked it up in their bedroom. William was the only one of the three who did not produce a set of illustrations to the Alice books. Both of the older brothers, Thomas and Charles, did.

The three brothers were active professionally from the 1890s onwards. Beardsley himself passed away in 1898. Did they know each other? Bearing in mind the similarity in their ages – Beardsley was actually slightly younger, and with the similar circles they moved in it seems very likely. Whatever the case the Robinsons’ work seems definitely to have been influenced by Beardsley. A few years ago when the Beardsley Gallery mounted an exhibition ‘The Beardsley Generation’ about Beardsley and his contemporaries who were influenced by him, the Robinsons were represented. Both Thomas Heath (TH) and Charles produced illustrations for Wonderland when the copyright on the book lapsed in 1907. I appreciate both but have a preference for Charles’ work, and I will start with these.

I find Charles Robinson's Alice illustrations a consistently interesting set. Like Mervyn Peake’s they range from the very complex and detailed - the Pool of Tears - to the much simpler - the Mock Turtle. Yet all of Peake's illustrations look like they were made by the same artist. Tenniel’s illustration all look like Tenniel’s work and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations all look like Ralph Steadman’s work. But with Charles Robinson’s, that’s not the case. If you didn't know, I don’t think you would pick out the pool of tears and mock turtle illustrations as having been created by the same hand. 

His illustration of the pool of tears goes beyond the text. His Alice looks almost demonic. The shading is really heavy, and the use of swirls and reflections in the pool make it a real tour de force, and hint at what Beardsley might have done. It’s by far my favourite illustration of Alice in the pool of tears. It’s framed by a relatively ornate Edwardian border. Yet many of his illustrations use very little shading at all. The Mock Turtle illustration for example could easily have been made 60 years later. With the stylisation of the image, the contrast between large areas of negative space and patches of pure black shading and the use of simple geometric shapes, this is another reflection of a different aspect of Beardsley’s work. Speaking of the Mock Turtle I can respect Robinson’s choice to go with something far more closely resembling a real turtle rather than riffing on the Tenniel conception of the character.

If we take these two illustrations as the extremes of a continuum, all of his illustrations of Wonderland fit more closely at one or other ends of the continuum. And you get a lot for your money. There are several colour plates and over 100 black and white illustrations – the majority of which are further towards the Mock Turtle end of the spectrum. This might be why when you view his illustrations today, almost 120 years after he made them, a huge number of them still look fresh and fun. To this extent Helen Oxenbury’s work on the story reminds me of Charles Robinson’s. Their styles are quite different, yet there is the same clean and uncluttered sense of fun and freshness. So while I might not quite put Charles Robinson right at the top of the tree of Alice illustrators with Peake and Tenniel, I’d put him pretty close. He’s a very significant Alice illustrator. I don’t think that he ever illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass. That’s a shame. I’d love to have seen what he would have made of the Jabberwock.

Now, I said that I prefer Charles’ work to that of TH. However, the set of illustrations that TH produced in the same magic year of 1907 are still a fine set and well worthy of your attention. The set that TH produced is a far more homogenous set than Charles’. They were all clearly drawn by the same hand and they clearly all belong to he same work. Which makes it all the more strange that they were combined in the same edition with colour plates by Charles Pears. It looks as if neither artist had seen what the other produced. Their styles are completely different and so is their conception of the characters. But let’s concentrate on the work of TH. With their heavy borders TH’s illustrations almost have something of the quality of medieval woodcut engravings. Each illustration illustrates a whole scene and gives us full backgrounds and foregrounds within a plain, thick rectangular border.

I won’t lie, I have tremendously enjoyed copying TH’s work. Of his more memorable illustrations there’s the turbaned caterpillar and especially the elongated Alice being berated by the pigeon. The use of forced perspective with Alice’s head is something special and is probably my favourite illustration of his scene. But otherwise I don’t include TH in the absolute top branches of the tree because he does often play it safe in his depiction of the scenes. Yes, his Mad Hatter is dark and doesn’t have a 10/6 ticket in his hat. (Charles’ Pears’ does – shame on you Charles.) But it’s still a top hat and he still has a very prominent beaky nose. I like TH’s illustration of Alice with the Gryphon and Mock Turtle, but putting a top hat on the Mock Turtle does nothing to hide the fact that this is still very much Tenniel’s concept of the character. Likewise, while his Alice wears a sailor dress rather than a pinafore dress she is still recognisably a pretty direct descendant of Tenniel’s Alice.

I don’t want to keep harking back to comparisons with his brother Charles’ work but it’s very hard to avoid. If you compare the way that Charles illustrated Alice in the Pool of Tears with TH’s illustration of the scene, they both use swirls of water, but to me TH’s while technically accomplished just doesn’t portray or evoke the same level of emotion. TH’s Alice has an expression just seems to say – oh well, here we are, then, swimming in a pool of my own tears with a mouse. Another day at the office. - While many of Charles’ illustrations look fresh and timeless, all of TH’s illustrations seem to be very much of their time, the Edwardian era.

As I said earlier, I really do enjoy copying TH’s work even though they are not my favourite illustrations of Wonderland and here are two more I’ve just finished.

The Sixties Alice - Ralph Steadman

Of all the sets of illustrations for the Alice books that have been produced during my lifetime, there are two in particular that have really inspired me. The first is Ralph Steadman’s.

If you delve at all into the history of how Alice has been illustrated over the years, certain illustrators’ work tends to be held up as landmarks. Tenniel, Rackham and Peake are all examples of such and so is Ralph Steadman. Ralph Steadman is a world famous British artist, illustrator and cartoonist. In the late sixties Ralph Steadman illustrated both of the Alice books. Of all of the Alice illustrators I've seen I think that Ralph Steadman captures the madness and the twisted logic of the books better than anyone, even Tenniel.

Which is not to say that I like all of his illustrations. I would like to say that I appreciate them, but that’s not the same thing. There are some that I do actually really dislike. But then in a way that’s all part of what you want from an illustration. With the best will in the world the Alice books need something more than the bland and inoffensive. When we get to Helen Oxenbury you’ll see someone whose Alice work is certainly not offensive, but it’s anything but bland. I’ll come to the Steadman illustrations that provoke my dislike later.

I do like what Steadman does with the character of Alice. Her starting point seems to have been Tenniel’s – long flowing hair with Alice band, pinafore dress and all. Tenniel’s Alice has hair that for the most part is just there. Steadman’s Alice has hair that at times almost takes on almost a life of its own. The way he uses it in the Wool and Water illustration is almost genius. I once saw Ralph Steadman contributing to a documentary about the work of Aubrey Beardsley, so it’s likely he was a fan. The Wool and Water illustration I mentioned seems to me to show Beardsley’s influence very much. Steadman’s Alice is as much a bystander as Tenniel’s, but her expressions of surprise, confusion and at times almost horror mirror the reader’s reaction to the strangeness all around.

Steadman uses hatching but very unobtrusively and you’re more likely to be drawn to his characteristic use of what look to be ink blots . There’s a feeling of violent action – either manifest or repressed within many of his illustrations, yet at the same time there is a strong geometrical quality to his work. One of my favourites of his illustrations shows Alice entering and emerging from the looking glass at the same time which demonstrates this. His use of the chessboard pattern in some of his illustrations for Looking Glass gets as far away from Tenniel’s flat tableaux as it is possible to get on a two dimensional surface. They put me in mind of illustrations I’ve seen which try to explain how space is curved. Some of his compositions are so brilliantly and intricately constructed that it almost makes my eyes hurt to try to completely unravel what I’m looking at. I particularly like the two knights fighting in Looking Glass.

So what’s not to like? Well. . . Ralph Steadman illustrated the books at the end of the sixties, a time in which the books were ‘discovered’ by a certain proportion of the readership who wondered what exactly the caterpillar was smoking in his hookah. The kind of misguided person who believes that the books were written under the influence of narcotics. I think we have to be honest here. The caterpillar is introduced in the last couple of sentences of Chapter IV - “. . . her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.” Then at the start of Chapter V the description continues – “The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.” So, the Caterpillar is smoking an unnamed substance. At first he seems oblivious to his surroundings, and even when he does notice Alice he seems sleepy – one might almost say – drugged. So I don’t know if I can reasonably complain because Steadman’s caterpillar looks spaced out. Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice suggests that Steadman gives it the face of self-confessed drug user John Lennon. There’s a general resemblance. But he had the caterpillar smoking some kind of cigarette through a long cigarette holder. The fact that Carroll says he was smoking a hookah leads you to surmise this is a joint. I think that I can justify the cigarette holder and will do so shortly – but this doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Which brings me to what I really dislike. I can’t get over my dislike of Ralph Steadman’s portrayal of the Hatter. Yes, he is completely different from Tenniel’s. But in one illustration he looks like a bloodhound – his open mouth looks like a shiny black nose. He wears what in one illustration appears to be union jack sunglasses. All he has in the way of hats is a plain bowler. Which surprises me a little considering the way that Steadman uses clothes symbolically in other places. For example, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the lobster and others all wear pinstriped trousers. In the case of the White Rabbit this completes an ensemble which makes him look for all the world like a harassed commuter. It gives you an idea that there is some kind of weird Establishment in Wonderland that all of these characters in their own way are part of. It also contrasts well with the playing cards who are painting the roses red, to coin a phrase. These wear plain trousers, and in case we don’t get the point then they are also wearing flat caps. The flat cap is as much as a symbol of the blue collar working man as the bowler hat is a symbol of the white collar middle class managing classes. It’s interesting that Bill the lizard, who is also a hired hand, wears a flat cap, while the idle caterpillar smokes from a cigarette holder, an affectation of the bourgeoisie. Was Lewis Carroll making a dig at the class system? Probably not, if truth be told but it provides an interesting extra dimension to the work.

Ralph Steadman is another illustrator of the books who does not provide much in the way of backgrounds but manages to make a little go a long way. All in all, I kind of think that Mad Hatter notwithstanding, Ralph Steadman deserves a place alongside Tenniel and Peake on the branch at the top of the tree. The branch marked Genius.

All of my copies of Ralph Steadman's illustrations can be found on my page of Alice in Wonderland illustrations. You can find this in the links to the right of the page.

Peakeing again, and Good old Harry Boy

Well, it’s been a gently productive week, peeps. First, let’s look at the copy I made of one of Mervyn Peake’s Treasure Island illustrations. I have to say that this illustration of Long John Silver is one of my favourites. There’s something almost skeletal about the way that he is depicted here, with his skull like lower jaw, and the clear outline of his ribs. This is a malevolent Long John Silver. With Peake’s illustrations you never lose sight of the pirates as men capable of evil. They are cutthroats, every one. 

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Now I’d like to come back to Harry Rountree. I wrote in detail about this wonderful illustrator last week. One of the points I made was that you can find many of his illustrations on the web, but they are mostly those he made for Wonderland. Harry – I’d like to think that we would have got on had we lived at the same time and known each other so I take the liberty of using just his first name – did illustrate Looking Glass too, but it can be much harder to find them on the net.

Or so I thought. I’ll explain that in a moment. Last Sunday I found a reasonably priced edition of the two books that contained Harry’s illustrations. It’s a Collins Pocket Classics edition. The bookplate says that it was presented to the recipient in 1949 and that seems about right. This was a year before Harry passed away.

Now, I don’t believe that the book contains all of the illustrations Harry produced for Looking Glass. I don’t know how many he produced for Looking Glass. 21 are reproduced here including a single colour plate with Harry’s striking depiction of the Jabberwock. What makes me think they may have left some out? Well, this edition only reproduces 21 illustrations from Wonderland too, and I know from my other copy of the Harry illustrated Wonderland that he did many more than this.

Okay, so allowing for all that I’m delighted to see more of Harry’s Alice illustrations that I’ve never seen before. Only. . . well, a couple of the illustrations I have seen before, incorrectly described as illustrations of Wonderland. Then there’s this one I’ve even made a copy of.

I’ll be honest, when I made it last week I mistakenly thought that this was Alice with the Queen of Hearts. I’ve seen it described as such on the net. It is also printed on the inside over of my copy of Harry’s Wonderland – and this edition only contains the earlier book. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t realise hat this was in fact Alice with the Red Queen until I saw it in the Collins combined edition, with a caption from the text printed underneath. And it’s clearly meant to be the Red Queen when you look closely. Peaking out of her robes, her body does resemble the base of a chess piece.

Well anyway, yesterday I made my first straight copy from the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here it is:-

Earlier in the week I made this copy of Alice and the Duchess from Wonderland:-

Finished with Harry for today then? Not quite. In the middle of last week I ordered a copy of an edition with Harry’s 1908 illustrations. I doubt I will end up copying these when it arrives, because I think that they were all or mostly colour plates. You know me and what happens when I try to copy coloured originals. Still, I can’t wait to see it when it’s delivered.

Two More Treasure Island Copies

I did say that I was leaving Treasure Island to one side for a moment. Well, it’s only a moment. My next TI copy was of an 1895 illustration by Louis Rhead. He was born and trained in England, but emigrated in the 1880s when offered a position with a New York publishing firm. He illustrated many classic adventure stories at the turn of the 20^th century.

My second is another Mervyn Peake.

Harry Rountree and the 1928 Alice

So, my fourth Alice illustrator of choice (leaving aside Treasure Island) for a moment, is Harry Rountree. Maybe you’re not as familiar with the name as with Tenniel or Rackham. Yet after leaving his native New Zealand to play his trade in London in the first years of the 20th Century, Harry Rountree enjoyed a wonderful career in illustration. Not that he found it easy at first. Editors whom he approached for commissions were discouraging. He enrolled in the Regent Street Polytechnic’s School of Art, and received a commission to illustrate “Extracts from the Diary of a Duckling.” for a children’s magazine. The story is forgotten now, but it established Rountree as an illustrator of animals. And soon he was establishing a name for himself.

By 1905 he was following a well-trodden path by illustrating for Punch. I haven’t tried to work out how many Alice illustrators plied their trade with Punch over the years, but it would be quite a total, I reckon. In 1908 Rountree made his first set of illustrations for Alice. I say first, for 20 years later Rountree would make new illustrations for another edition, which is the one I will chiefly be writing about. Coming back to the 1908 edition, this was produced at the height of the Golden Age of British illustration. It’s rarer than the 1928 edition, and I believe it has more colour plates than the 1928. Rountree’s colour work is absolutely gorgeous, but I haven’t seen a copy in the flesh, besides which I want to be true to myself. I love monochrome line illustrations.

So to the 1928 edition. He did produce some colour plates for this one as well, but these are relatively few and it’s the black and white line work I want to concentrate on. More than 60 years separate Tenniel and Rountree and you can see it in the styles that they use. Tenniel showed innovation in the way that he integrated text with illustrations but compared with Rountree he was really just scratching the surface. Yes, many of his illustrations are full page – and my treasured edition from probably the forties or fifties is not quite A4 size, but it’s pretty large, and this does the illustrations justice. More than a few are integrated beside, above or below the text on the same page. Especially those where the characters are involved in some energetic action.

For the ’28 Rountree is abounding with life. I’ve written before about the way that he depicts Bill the lizard exploding out of the chimney. His White Rabbit, even in repose, looks as if he is about to explode any moment. His cook, from Pig and Pepper, looks as if she has been caught in freeze frame in the act of hurling the frying pan, which is a huge contrast to Tenniel’s carefully posed tableaux. Some of this energy comes from the poses in which he draws the characters, but a lot also come from the way that he uses shading. He does occasionally use cross hatching, but far less than Tenniel, and his use of hatching is less intricate. He uses blocks of almost pure monochrome in strategic places. Backgrounds are often minimal – patches of grass are shown by a few hastily drawn spikes that look as if they have been applied furiously against the clock. Clouds are a few curved lines joined together depicting the outline of a fluffy, cotton wool ball. Indoors is show with a few vertical pen strokes. I love copying Rountree’s work and one of the things that I love about it is that often Rountree achieves so much with so little. Maybe not genius or rare brilliance, no, but masterful? I think so. I’ve copied more of Harry Rountree’s illustrations of Alice than any other illustrator except for Tenniel of Edgar Thurstan.

I look at Rountree’s work and feel a sense of nostalgia, because this particular style of illustration is something that feels very familiar to me. There were elements of it in the (British) comic books that I used to read as a kid in the early 70s, the Beano and the Dandy and their sort. Even more than that, this was a style that many illustrators of the thirties, forties and fifties used, and I read a lot of books from this time, often in reprints.

More than many illustrators, I think that Hary Rountree got the figure of Alice herself right. In the 1908 edition his Alice has long, flowing golden hair, wears Edwardian clothes, and she is a bit older than Tenniel’s. By 1928 the Rountree Alice is a bit younger, maybe 7 or 8. Her hair is cut shorter in a fashionable 1920s bob and is darker. The clothes she wears are noticeably more modern. While she isn’t maybe quite as much of a free spirit as Peake’s Alice she is far more of a participant than Tenniel’s or Rackham’s. I particularly like one illustration from the front pages of the book where Alice is standing right next to the Queen of Hearts who is shouting – hard to believe, right? – and Alice is holding her hands to her ears. I also love his depiction of the pigeon verbally attacking Alice when her next zooms up into the sky. If you look at Harry’s illustration he has depicted the neck in such a way that you can completely understand why the pigeon calls her a serpent.

Other highlights of the 1928 set include Harry’s illustrations of the Father William poem. Harry’s Father William looks nothing like Tenniel’s, yet Harry ‘gets’ him as much as Tenniel does. I fact I do feel that taken as a whole set, while Harry doesn’t give us archetypal images, he rarely gives us anything that feels ‘wrong’ about the characters. Yes, I do feel that there are a couple of instances where inspiration seems to have failed him and he gives us something derivative. With his Hatter, for instance, yes, he is taller than Tenniel’s and no, his head does not seem ridiculously out of proportion. But he wears a top hat and has a very prominent nose. Likewise, Harry’s mock turtle seems to draw heavily on Tenniel’s – which is a shame because I think that his gryphon is wonderful

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet about Harry is the sheer joie de vivre and humour in his illustrations. His Cheshire Cat has more of the shape of a wildcat, yet he is absolutely laughing his head off. When Alice dreamily muses ‘Do bats eat cats. . . do cats eat bats’ Harry supplies us with a very funny image of a cat launched into the sky with a butterfly net trying to catch the bats around him.

My edition only has Alice in Wonderland. Harry did also illustrate Looking Glass, but images of his illustrations for it are far harder to find online. I’ve only seen a couple of them myself. The combined edition I read about was published in 1940, but when Harry made his illustrations for Looking Glass, I couldn’t say. I fact, as I’m writing this I’ve found a very reasonably priced copy of this combined edition on Ebay and just bought it. So doubtless you can expect some posts about this in the future.

Is Harry Rountree perched on the top of the tree of my favourite Alice illustrators alongside Tenniel and Peake? Ooh, he’s close. But. . . he’s short of genius. But I think that his 1928 edition will be a set that I will always love and appreciate.

Going down the rabbit hole into "Treasure Island"

I’m not a philosopher. I couldn’t tell you the meaning of Life and I wouldn’t tell you how to live your life. But now and again I’m quite happy to pass on the odd lesson I’ve learned along the way. The lesson in question has an Alice connection too, namely some times you can learn things and find a lot of enjoyment if you’re willing to turn off the filters that make you oblivious to things that are not connected with the business of your daily life and follow an idea down a rabbit hole.

A couple of days ago I posted about Mervyn Peake’s work on the Alice books. In that post I mentioned in an aside that in my opinion he is the definitive illustrator of R.L. Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. Now, “Treasure Island” is another of those books that I first read when I was little – maybe 7 or 8, and it’s another children’s classic that I absolutely love. My Nan bought me a Bancroft Classics edition. I don’t know if you remember Bancroft Classics. They were a cheap range of hardback reprints of classic children’s stories you used to be able to buy in Woolworths (remember Woolworths?). At around about the same time I saw a Disney live action film of the story and thought it was really exciting. For all that, I wouldn’t say that the story ever took the kind of hold of me that the Alice books did. You probably only get the reaction that I had to those books once in your life, and then only if you’re lucky.

I’ve recently retired from my career as an English teacher of children aged 11-16 after 38 years in the job. Decades ago, in the 90s, it was decided by the Government (blessed be the name of the Department for Education, or whatever it was called back then), who, in their infinite wisdom, decided that an English teacher’s job was not difficult enough and so decreed that as part of the National Curriculum every child in Key Stage 3 (ages 12 – 14) must study at least one 19^th century novel. So, as a department, we bought in sets of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Treasure Island. Having a memory of enjoying it as a kid, I volunteered to create a scheme of work for Treasure Island. D’you know, I don’t think that I ever enjoyed making a scheme of work more. I loved the book all over again and I’ll be honest, I was really proud of the scheme of work that I made. We didn’t use it for very long, as government policy changed and sadly the sets of the books never really had a chance to wear out.

So, you get the point – I love the book. Not as much as Alice, but then that’s not a criticism. So, coming back to my post on Mervyn Peake, I said that for me he is the definitive illustrator of “Treasure Island”. This led me to asking the question – okay, but who else has illustrated it? I know that Ralph Steadman did, and I love his work on the book. But who else? And this is the rabbit hole that I mentioned at the start of this post. In another life – well, alright, back in the 1990s – I got quite heavily into quizzing. I was a wee bit of a natural at it, because if something interests me, then I want to know more about it, and I’ll dive down that rabbit hole until I’ve found out more. I think that for the majority of people we are so caught up in the business of our daily lives that we have a kind of in-built filter, blocking out the white noise of life around us so that we don’t tend to take notice of things which aren’t part of the business of our lives. These are the rabbit holes I mentioned. When I was younger and more insensitive, people would ask me ‘how do you know these things?’ and I’d reply – how do you not know these things? – which never really endeared me to anyone. Well, after I won the BBC’s Mastermind competition almost 20 years ago, I calmed down a bit and stopped trying so hard to impress people. I still kept going down rabbit holes of knowledge though.

So here’s what I found. I decided to start at the beginning. “Treasure Island” was first published as a serial story in the children’s magazine “Young Folks” between 1881 – 2. A year later it was published in book form by Cassell. According to sources on the internet, this 1883 edition was not illustrated. In February 1884 an American edition of the book was published with four illustrations by a artist called F.T. Merrill. The first illustrated English edition was actually illustrated by a French artist, Georges Roux. Although he complained that Roux depicted the Hispaniola as a brig, Stevenson seems to have been quite pleased with the Roux illustrations.

As he should have been. This is my copy of one of the 20 something illustrations that Roux produced.

1885 was at the start of the period known as the Golden Age of British Illustration. Yet this term really refers to the work of illustrators like Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, and Paul Dulac, sumptuous and colourful illustrations, full of fantasy. Yet the Roux illustrations belong to an older tradition that we can trace back through illustrators like Hablot Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank as far as the great William Hogarth. And to me, this is far more appropriate for Treasure Island. It’s a style of illustration that I like very much.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve even scratched the surface of the history of the illustration of the novel, but I’m sure that I’m going to enjoy the journey. You ever know, I may even feel another challenge coming on.

Arthur Rackham - Did he really 'get' Alice?

So, today’s Alice illustrator of choice is Arthur Rackham. In the history of British illustration, Rackham’s place is as secure as both Tenniel’s and Peake’s. He is renowned as one of the leading lights of what has since been called the Golden Age of British Illustration, a time, between roughly 1880 and 1920, when there was a market for beautifully, sumptuously illustrated children’s books, and when printing technology had advanced to allow reproduction of coloured illustrations. By the middle of the first decade of the 20^th century Arthur Rackham had well established a reputation for himself as an illustrator of fairy stories. His work is characterised by bold ink lines and beautifully subtle use of watercolour. So as soon as “Alice in Wonderland” passed into the public domain it seemed a natural choice to engage Rackham to produce his own illustrations for a new edition.

Don’t misunderstand me either. Some of Rackham’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland are very beautiful, although we will have to consider whether they ae works of rare brilliance (genius). For Wonderland Arthur Rackham made 13 colour plates and 15 line drawings, and I think that you can see a clear difference between hem. I’ll come to the line drawings later, but for me it’s the colour plates that display Rackham’s best work on the book.

For one thing, each colour plate is a lovingly detailed, complete full page illustration. His wonderfully subtle use of watercolour gives each of them an ethereal, almost dreamlike quality. Arthur Rackham’s colour plate illustrating ‘Advice from a Caterpillar” is my favourite depiction of the caterpillar that I’ve yet seen. To get a flavour of just how good Rackham’s colour plates are it’s useful to compare them with the colorised Tenniel illustrations in “The Nursery Alice”. Thse are very nice, but the colour isn’t helping to tell the story at all. If anything (say it quietly) I think that in a few instances the bold colour actually detracts a little from Tenniel’s original sketch. Not so with Rackham. His use of colour is magical, and I wish I had just a fraction of his skill.

Having said that, the top of the tree of Alice illustrators whose work I value is a lonely place. Arthur Rackham doesn’t sit alongside John Tenniel and Mervyn Peake for me, but slightly below. Why should that be? Well, remember, please that this is just my opinion, but I think that there’s a couple of reasons why.

Firstly, there’s the line drawings. Now, again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that they are not good. They are. Rackham was a great and skillful draughtsman. But in many cases they are quite, should you pardon the pun, sketchy. Peake didn’t use detailed backgrounds either, but he contrived to suggest something vague, insubstantial and in its own way dreamlike. Considering how brilliant the backgrounds in his colour plates are, it almost looks as if he couldn’t be bothered – well, unless there was a tree in the background. I look at his line drawings of the Gryphon and the Cheshire Cat and I feel that he must have loved drawing trees, especially gnarled and twisted ones. But even with his drawing of the Gryphon, I can’t respond to it in the way that I respond to Tenniel’s illustration of the sleeping Gryphon. The lightness of touch that makes the colour plates so appealing works against the line drawings in my opinion.

When you look at Rackham’s line drawings you also can’t help feeling that the way that he depicts some of the characters is a little derivative of Tenniel and this is also a criticism you can make of his beautiful watercolour plates. If we start with the Hatter, alright, Rackham’s Hatter has dark hair, while Tenniel’s doesn’t. On the other hand, just like Tenniel’s archetype, Rackham’s Hatter has an overly large head, a remarkably prominent nose and he wears a top hat with a price ticket stuck into the hatband. When you look at it you get the impression that Rackham is not so much giving you his take on Carroll’s Hatter, as his take on Tenniel’s Hatter. However I look at Rackham’s Hatter it looks like a failure of the imagination to me.

That’s a colour plate. If you look at the line drawing of the Mock Turtle you can make the same criticism. Rackham was not the only illustrator to use what is essentially Tenniel’s conception of the character, but he is the illustrator we’re discussing now. I have a feeling about this. I have the feeling that Rackham didn’t really ‘get’ Carroll’s story. He does a thoroughly professional job but to me for the most part he is responding to Tenniel’s presentation of Wonderland. So while he can portray the substance of “Wonderland” he doesn’t get to the soul of it. I think that Mervyn Peake does and I think that he ‘gets’ Wonderland. Knowing of Tenniel’s relationship with Lewis Carroll and his extreme reluctance to illustrate ‘Looking Glass’ it’s tempting to suggest that Tenniel himself didn’t have a great deal of time for the story, but there’s such a connection between Carroll’s words and Tenniel’s illustration that it betrays an underlying understanding and connection.

Ironically Rackham, for me, gets closest to a really original response in the colour plates where he gets furthest away from Tenniel. I’ve already mentioned the caterpillar, but I also think his colour plate showing Alice with the White Rabbit is superb. His rabbit is something of a dandy with his frilly shirt cuffs flopping down from his long sleeves, and his red eyes reveal that he is an albino and at the same time hint at some suppressed rage and madness. The contrast between the darkness of the ground around him with the pale yellow sky is stunningly atmospheric.

Coming back to my comment about Rackham not necessarily ‘getting’ Carroll’s story is demonstrated by his conception of Alice as a character. Superficially Rackham’s Alice is darker haired than Tenniel’s, older than Tenniel’s and dressed in more contemporary clothes than Tenniel’s. For all that, though, Rackham’s Alice, like Tenniel’s, is often depicted as a bystander. She hardly ever seems to emote at all, maintaining a slightly glum expression on her face in many of the illustrations in which she appears. It’s difficult to believe that Rackham’s Alice would ever have had the gumption or the curiosity to follow the rabbit down the hole in the first place.

I'm not denying that Arthur Rackham was a master illustrator, and some of his work on Alice was wonderful. But I just can't quite help thinking that he lacks the inspiration of Tenniel and Peake.