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.
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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.
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 :-
