Mervyn Peake - Master of All Trades

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.

John Tenniel - first Alice illustrator. And greatest?

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.

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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.

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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.

Thurstan Challenge Completed

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 :-

Thurstan Challenge Update

 In my defence I should probably explain that I’m having a week off from work because I have to use up all of my holiday time by the 31^st. When I posted on Sunday I had 9 copies to make. Since then I’ve completed four of them:-

Bravely I’ve included the originals alongside them. I think that the big issue has been the shading. I could and should have gone a lot darker in some places.

The cat is the most effective yet took the least amount of time.

There are five left to do and all of them are detailed complicated sketches. Gulp.

 

The Thurstan Challenge

If you’ve been reading my blog at all over the last year or two – look, it’s not impossible that you somehow stumbled across it and quite liked what you read – then you may well have noticed a couple of things. I am rather obsessed with ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and quite a few of its illustrators, and I am particularly interested with one called Edgar B. Thurstan. You would be right to think so. I’ve written a long article all about why and what I know about Thurstan and you can find it in my links section. In fact I’ll make it even easier for you. Just click on the link below.

• Edgar B Thurstan - Tenniel Clone or Unfairly Forgotten Alice Illustrator?

So, I’ve copied 12 out of his 21 Alice illustrations. In celebration of the Alice Challenge I set myself about three years ago, to copy all 92 of Tenniel’s illustrations, I’ve now decided to undertake the Thurstan Challenge. I want to copy the remaining 9 of his illustrations. Granted it’s not that huge a challenge, but the bearing in mind that I’ve already copied my favourites of his Alice illustrations, I think that some credit is due for the undertaking. So here’s the originals of the 9 I have left to do:-

More sketches in the new Canson Sketchbook

I’ve been doing a little more work in my new Carson mixed media sketching journal today. I mentioned that I like the way that it takes fineliner when I tested it and made my first sketch in it on Monday. After making two ink sketches in it today I stand by that. It’s quite similar to sketching in the Seawhite Travel Journal, I find, even though the paper in the Seawhite is much lighter at only 130 gsm.

So this first sketch is a copy of one of the Harry Rountree (1928) illustrations of the Pig and Pepper chapter in Wonderland. Now, I’ve made most of my other Harry Rountree copies in the Royal Talens book. What I find with that is that you have to use a thinner nib whenever you’re doing something a little more detailed. I was perfectly happy with a 0.1mm nib to make this sketch. I found it gave me a lot of control and meant I could sketch pretty accurately. In fact I’m sure I could have used a nib that was a least twice as thick and achieved just as good results.

So this encouraged me to try it out with a copy of an Edgar Thurstan illustration. This is my copy of Edgar Thurstan’s illustration of Alice entering the Looking Glass. I think it has come off a wee bit better than the copies I made in the Royal Talens book using the same nib. Here it is:-

I think I should also point out that this was made on the other side of the page on which I made the watercolour and ink sketch of Disneyland Paris. The paper is so robust that you can do this without ay issues at all.

Here's the same sketch alongside my copy of the Tenniel illustration. Tenniel’s illustration is accompanied with a Mirror image illustration of Alice emerging on the other side on the reverse of the page. Edgar had to do it all in just the one illustration.

I think Edgar gets maybe just a little further away from Tenniel in this one than he does in quite a few of his other illustrations. Alice has a glass dome clock to her right in both illustrations. The interior of the fireplaces are similar. To her left Tenniel’s Alice has a vase under a dome. There’s a similar vase on Thurstan’s Alice’s left, but this doesn’t have a dome. There’s also a more prominent vase on the right too. Tenniel’s mirror is square, while Thurstan’s is a more ornate, bowed shape. I some was I’m put in the mind of the way that Edgar worked on Tenniel’s original with the train carriage illustration. In both, if I can use a photographic analogy, he's not only positioned the ‘camera’ to look down on he scene from a bit of an angle, he has also zoomed out a little which means he gets to show more of the scene than Tenniel does.

I have to say, this was another of Edgar’s illustrations that I have thoroughly enjoyed copying. I don’t think I can put poor old Edgar up on a pedestal with Tenniel, because a lot of his illustrations to seem so derivative. But then, if you’re going to be derivative, the do it well and do it interestingly and I think that Edgar certainly manages to do this.

New Sketching Journal - Canson Gradate Mixed Media A5

I’ve been reading reviews of art materials again. This is a dangerous thing for me to do as I’m sure you’re aware. But hey, sometimes you have to just live a little. Now, you may well be aware that I like travel journals for sketching in. A few years ago when I was spending time with my friends in the Cardiff Urban Sketchers one name of travel journal that kept coming up was Moleskine. So up until last year, that’s what I’ve used. And if you’re read what I’ve written in the past you’ll know that I’ve been pretty happy to use Moleskine. However, I had in the back of my mind the nagging feeling that just maybe Moleskine is a little bit on the expensive side and there may be something equally good if not better for quite a bit less money.

So in the past 12 months I’ve used Italian in Moleskine, British in Seawhite, Dutch in Royal Talens and American in Amazon Basics and now I’ve gone French, with a Canson A5(ish) mixed media Graduate sketchbook.

I’ve pictured it alongside my trusty Royal Talens sketching journal. The size is very similar, with the Canson being only slightly taller. The price is comparable too, the Canson being a few pennies cheaper. You get fewer pages for your money, but the pages are 200 gsm to the Royal Talens 140 gsm. The Seawhite is just over £1 more expensive on Amazon but you get half as many pages again – over 120.

Like Seawhite, Canson go the full Moleskine, by which I mean that you get your matte finish hard cover, your page ribbon, elastic binding strap, and document wallet at the back. Like Seawhite the paper is white, compared with the off white of the Moleskine and the ivory of the Royal Talens.

I will admit that I enjoyed drawing in ink in it. I’ve just returned from Disneyland Paris with my family and this test sketch is based on a photograph I took in the part of the park that is called Fantasyland (I think)

The paper feels as if it has a little more tooth than the Royal Talens. I love just sketching in my Royal Talens, but I do find that for anything detailed I can’t use anything much bigger than a 0.1mm nib, whereas the paper in the Canso felt a better medium for getting the kind of marks that I want to make. Still, I also wanted to see how it works with watercolour. I applied colour to the above sketch using my Windsor and Newton Cotman travel sketchers set. Here’s a photo of the result.

I took a photograph rather than making a scan, because I tend to find that a photograph will show us if there’s any buckling or waffling of the paper. This stood up pretty well to the watercolour. Mind you at 200 gsm I should hope so.

Here’s a comparison between the five brands of A5 travel sketchbook I’ve mentioned in this post.

Clockwise, from top right – Amazon Basics, Royal Talens – Canson – Moleskine – Seawhite of Brighton.

Not surprisingly the colours appear most vibrant in the 200gsm books, the Amazon Basics and the Canson, with the Seawhite coming out on top of the lighter papered books.

I’ve only made this one picture in the book so far, so it’s a little early to daw hard and fast conclusions. But it was nice enough to use, so we’ll just see how we go. If you’re looking for a budget, value for money all purpose sketchbook I still think you can do a lot worse than Seawhite, though.