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.
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.
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
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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.
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:-
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.
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 20th 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.
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.
'
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well anyway, yesterday I made my first straight copy from
the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here it is:-
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 20th century.
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.
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 19th 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.
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.
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 20th 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.
Well, having started I might just as well continue. I’ve written about Edgar Thurstan and I’ve written about John Tenniel. So I might just as well go on and write about some of my other favourite Alice illustrators. So let’s discuss Mervyn Peake.
I was going to start off by saying that Mervyn Peake, like
John Tenniel, was one of the illustrators of the book who really showed at
least a touch of genius. But then on reflection I don’t really like the word
genius. Genius has the connotations of an effortless, God-given gift, almost as
if it somehow exists outside of the individual who is merely a vessel through
which it works its wonders. And that’s not what I mean at all. So please, if I
should happen to use the word genius, please accept that I mean rare,
outstanding brilliance.
One of the remarkable things about Mervyn Peake is that he
is at least as well known as a writer as he is as an artist. He was that rarest
or rara aves, a master at both. His lasting fame is assured by his Gormenghast
series of stories – a trilogy of novels and a novella. These are works of
fantasy and the darkest of black humour. To some extent his writing makes me
think of him as a dark and twisted Dickens. The first two Gormenghast novels –
“Titus Groan” and “Gormenghast” were written in the forties, an exceptionally
productive period for Mervyn Peake. During this same period he illustrated both
Alice books and also Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”. It’s well
worth taking a look at Peake’s illustrations of Treasure Island. For me they
are the definitive illustrations of the story, and they are dark, disturbingly
so.
Not so very long ago I watched a BBC documentary about some
of the illustrators of Alice. Mervyn Peake’s son was interviewed and he made
the interesting point that Peake made his Alice illustrations not long after he
was assigned as an artist to the Nazi War Crimes trials in Nuremburg after the Second
World War, and he sees the influence that this had on his father in Peake’s
illustrations of the malevolent figure of the Queen of Hearts. That’s a fair
point. Yet for me, a remarkable thing about Peake’s Alice illustrations is that
they are largely so bereft of darkness, especially compared with what he
produced for Treasure Island. I say largely. Peake’s Cheshire Cat looks almost
demonic. For the most part though his Alice illustrations are lighter than
Tenniel’s, far more dynamic than Tenniel’s and, to be honest, more fun than
Tenniel’s. In the Gormenghast books Peake uses the grotesque, both through
words and his own illustrations. He also uses the grotesque in his
illustrations of Treasure Island. Yet he doesn’t seem to hardly use the
grotesque in Alice. I might have nightmares about his Cheshire Cat but I
certainly wouldn’t have nightmares about his Jabberwock, for example.
What he does do, though, is give us a world full of
interesting and engaging characters. And it’s in this, the depictions of the
personalities – and I use that word deliberately – of Wonderland and
Looking-Glass world that Peake excels. He rarely gives us detailed backgrounds,
sometimes they are little more than a few lines. If anything, it is almost as
if he’s saying that the landscape of Wonderland (and Looking-Glass World) is made
of the characters that populate it, and everything else within it is
insubstantial and dreamlike. And this is a valid vision to put forward.
You should take a look at Peake’s illustration of the
Hatter’s Tea Party. Many illustrators borrow from Tenniel, some of them quite
heavily. Others of them seem to be primarily motivated by trying to be as
different from Tenniel as possible and are therefore defined more by what they
are not than what they are. Not so Peake’s hatter. At first sight he seems very
different from the archetype. However, Peake is confident enough to give him a
nose that, while nothing like Tenniel’s hawk beak, is just as prominent in its
own way. There’s no sign of a Tenniel-esque top hat. Instead he wears a stack
of hats of different styles that all seem to merge with each other. His body and
limbs are in proportion to his head, and he seems younger than Tenniel’s. In the
same scene Tenniel’s Hare is, well, he’s just a hare, with a bandage and a few
straws sticking out of the top of it. Peake’s hare has a personality. He has a
hare’s head, but his has a recognisable personality.
Likewise in “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, Tenniel’s Walrus
wears clothes and boots, but when you get right down to it, he’s a Walrus wearing
clothes. Peake’s Walrus also wears clothes but he has human arms and hands and
legs rather than flippers. The clothes he wears are the waistcoat, jacket and
pinstriped trousers of a successful businessman, but the shabby way he wears them
marks him out as the louche conman that he is. While the Carpenter is one of
the few characters that sees Peake veering towards grotesque, with his ridiculously
elongated slab of a chin and his wild hair.
It’s worthwhile looking closely at Peake’s Alice. In no way
can Peake’s Alice be described as a bystander like Tenniel’s Alice. She’s very
much a participant and a willing one at that. At times she seems to be
positively enjoying herself. You can’t imagine Tenniel’s Alice ever doing
something so carefree and un-self-conscious as dabbling her fingers in the
water as Peake’s Alice does in the Wool and Water illustration. She’s dark-haired
and a little older than Tenniel’s Alice. Graham Greene who was a friend of Peake
said that he thought there was a little too much of the gamine about his Alice.
I think that this is a little unfair. Tomboyish – well, perhaps just a bit, but
attractively tomboyish is maybe seeing something that isn’t necessarily meant to
be there. Peake’s Alice is an unashamed free spirit who enjoys her adventures,
and this rubs off on the viewer.
In a nutshell Peake gives us a different vision of Alice’s
worlds. His work may never be seen as archetypal images in the way that Tenniel’s
are, but for a set of illustrations to make you look again and get a fresh perspective,
they’re pretty hard to beat.
I’ve written a lot about Edgar Thurstan and the relationship between the 21 illustrations of the Alice books he made for the 1930 Odham’s combined edition, and the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. For me, as for many other lovers of the books, Tenniel’s illustrations are the vision that I see in my mind’s eye when I read the books again.
Why should this be? Especially when you consider that they
have a 1951 Disney animated movie to contend with. It can’t be just because
they came first , could it? Well, no, While I think being the first (published)
helped establish Tenniel’s rendition of Wonderland in public consciousness, if
they had been just mediocre they wouldn’t have lasted. And they’ve lasted
alright – boy how they’ve lasted.
I think we can find at least part of the answer by asking the
question – why did Lewis Carroll want Tenniel to make the illustrations in he
first place? Carroll doesn’t often get credit for this, but I think he really understood
how important illustrations would be for his story. He wrote it in manuscript
form as Alice’s Adventures Underground, and accompanied the handwritten text
with 37 of his own hand drawn illustrations, and presented it o Alice Liddell
for Christmas in 1863. When he conceived the idea of having the book published
he borrowed the manuscript and asked some literary friends to try it with their
children. They were very positive about the text, much less so about the
illustrations. Carroll, to his credit saw the recommendation to get a
professional illustrator for what it was. Good advice. He recognised what
Tenniel could bring to the party – the fact that he held off publishing Alice Through
the Looking Glass for several years until Tenniel could be persuaded to
illustrate it shows how essential he thought Tenniel was.
Why, though? Tenniel had already illustrated several books
prior to making the illustrations for Wonderland, but he was best known as a
cartoonist for Punch magazine. From 1850 he shared the duties of cartoonist
with John Leech – the illustrator of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, until becoming
sole cartoonist on the death of Leech in 1864. It seems that Carroll was drawn,
should you pardon the pun, to Tenniel through his great facility rendering
anthropomorphic animals, and his unusual habit of drawing from his prodigious visual
memory without using models or drawing from life. Did he perhaps see in Tenniel
a man capable of creating worlds out of his imagination?
I personally feel that Tenniel’s illustrations demonstrate
tremendous strengths. Namely –
Tenniel showed a fine ability to align his illustrations with
the text, both literally and metaphorically. Tenniel followed the story. His
illustrations show what Carroll wrote. In fact, he showed imagination in the
way that his illustrations linked physically with the text, particularly in the
L shaped illustrations of Alice looking up at Humpty and the Cheshire Cat, for
example. The two side of Alice passing through the looking Glass on opposite
sides of the page, and the two sides of the page showing the transformation of the
Red Queen into the kitten show great innovation.
Tenniel managed to take what were sometimes sparse
descriptions of the characters’ appearance and create archetypes of these same
characters. A great example of this being the Hatter. (The Cheshire Cat tells
us that he’s mad, but Carroll always refers to him as just The Hatter). It’s
not an exaggeration to say that pretty much every depiction of the character since
has been influenced by Tenniel. Illustrators are faced with the stark choice of
borrowing aspects of Tenniel’s Hatter, or producing something that is
deliberately made to be as different from Tenniel’s as possible.
I think that at least part of what makes Tenniel’s work on the
Alice books so effective is that he doesn’t do sugar or saccharine. Even in the
illustrations for the earlier chapters of Wonderland, he never really gives us
anything cute, for want of a better word. Using monochrome with sometimes heavy
shading means that even his brightest illustrations have shadows. Add to this
his willingness to use relatively grotesque caricature. What Dickens achieved
with words with, for example, a character like Sarah Gamp in “Nicholas Nickleby”
Tenniel achieved with his drawing of the Duchess.
More than many of the illustrators of the Alice books who
would come later, many of Tenniel’s illustrations reward the viewer who takes a
second, more detailed look at them. While many who came after would concentrate
on characters while giving merely the hint of a background, there’s a real
richness to many of Tenniel’s backgrounds, especially the outdoors scenes. On
first glance you might not notice the glass houses behind the Queen of Hearts,
or the eel traps behind Father William when he is balancing an eel on his nose.
They’re here. They don’t strictly need to be there but they add texture. The
first time that you looked at the Duchess’ first illustration, did you notice the
smiling cat by her feet? It’s the Cheshire cat before he is even mentioned as
such.
I mentioned that Carroll seems to have appreciated Tenniel’s
facility with anthropomorphic creatures which you can see in his illustrations
of the fish and frog footmen. But he goes even further than just depicting
living animals as people. For Tenniel was s wonderful fantasy artist even
before anyone had conceived of that term. His sleeping Gryphon is a wonderful illustration,
while his jabberwock is nothing less than a tour de force. Personally I think
that this one illustration justifies the price of admission by itself.
--------------------------------------------
So, when you get right down to it I think that while other illustrators
may have illustrated parts of either novel more effectively than Tenniel did, I
think as a whole, as a set of illustrations they are unmatched. Which is ot the
same as saying that they are beyond criticism.
I’m not totally sure exactly how I feel about Tenniel’s
depiction of Alice. With her pinafore dress, and her long blond hair with its
eponymous Alice band, Tenniel gives us another archetype. Even an artist as
distinctive as Ralph Steadman gave us an Alice with the band, the hair and the
pinafore dress. My issue with Tenniel’s Alice is that there is not a lot of
life about her. Alice doesn’t do much more than standing or sitting listening
to and looking at other characters, or reacting to something. In some
illustrations she resembles a porcelain doll, and she’s about as dynamic as one
too.
This is a criticism you can extend to many of Tenniel’s
illustrations. In many of these his characters’ positions are beautifully
observed, but they are poses. We, the viewers are looking straight on at
characters who resemble actors who have been carefully placed in a tableau on
stage, and are holding perfectly still.
Of course, it’s a bit much criticising Tenniel for not
being more cinematic in his compositions when it was decades before cinema was
even invented. But it’s clear how static many of his illustrations seem when you
compare the slow and steady rise out of the chimney his Bill the Lizard makes,
compared with the explosive lizard expectoration in Harry Rountree’s depiction
of the same scene.
-
- -
Well, nobody’s perfect and trust me, it is far easier to
criticise than to do something that other people can criticise. To me, Tenniel’s
work is the standard against which all Alice illustrators must be judged. It’s
that simple.
Yes, dear friends, my self-imposed Thurstan Challenge is complete. Here’s the copies of the remaining Edgar Thurstan illustrations, compared with Thurstan’s originals on the right. I’m tempted to say that it’s been harder this week, since the last five have all been pretty detailed, complicated illustrations, and more complicated than almost all of the Tenniel illustrations. They may not look like it but each one has taken hours to complete.
Carrying them out has convinced me that pretty much all of
Edgar Thurstan’s 21 Alice illustrations do owe something to Tenniel to a
greater or lesser extent. I go into a lot more detail about this in the Edgar
Thurstan – Tenniel Clone or Unfairly Forgotten Alice illustrator page in my
links section.
Here's the last few illustrations :-
