Youtube Demo - Steam locomotive sketch

Yes, I didn't need to make any more Christmas Cards now, so instead I made this sketch of a William Stanier Duchess class steam locomotive: -

I did make a video while I was sketching it - but accidentally stopped it rather than paused it, so it's in two parts.

Christmas Card - Youtube Demos

Yes, I was at a bit of a loose end this morning, so I made another Thomas Nast based card. The difference this time round was that I filmed myself doing it. This has been speeded up considerably though, so don't blink or you'll miss it. Here is the finished card below: -

Once I'd got my eye back in, and refreshed my memory about how to actually edit these videos, then I made another one, based on a Father Christmas ( not Santa Claus) from the Illustrated London News of the 1840s. Here's the video:-

Here's the finished card: -

Latest Christmas Cards

Here are some of my latest additions to my Christmas cards for this year: -

Copy of a Thomas Nast original

 I eased up a bit with Thomas Nast, partly because I've already copied most of my favourites.

 I'm very interested in the traditional English Father Christmas, who was a figure quite distinct from Santa Claus. This old dipso was pictured in the Illustrated London News in the 1840s, and as you can see, this one is not for the kiddies.

Three more John Tenniels now. The first two are both very similar. In both originals there is a starving and seemingly homeless child, but I left these out from mine, as I had to make some concessions to the fact that these are meant to be Christmas cards. This is Father Christmas, bringing good cheer even to the meanest of dwellings.

 As for this one, well, this is where we see Father Christmas, with his steaming wassail boil, bringing joy to people of all nations, and the crowned heads of Europe.

Pre 1850 English Father Christmas - Robert Seymour c. 1830

In my last post I commented on the Father Christmas figure portrayed by John Tenniel. This latest card probably illustrates the English and European tradition he was drawing on. The sketch on this card is a copy of an original by Robert Seymour, from the 1830s.

Look at it, and you can’t help noticing the figure’s pagan characteristics. He’s riding a goat, for one thing. For another, he's wearing a crown of holly – which we can also see retained in Nast’s and Tenniel’s versions. But then to my mind there’s also a hint of figures from Roman and Greek Mythology. The traditional figure of Old Father Time is ultimately derived from the Greek Cronus, whose Roman name was Saturn. The Roman festival of Saturnalia, dedicated to Saturn, was an end of year time of jollity and excess. Sound familiar? Maybe there’s also a hint of Dionysus, god of Wine, what with the steaming wassail bowl and the bottle in the basket. The Wassail bowl was a very common feature in portrayals of Father Christmas right up until the middle of the nineteenth century. The word wassail derives ultimately from the Old English phrase – Waes Þu hal  - Waes = be, Þu = you, hal = well, as in HALE and hearty. So essentially, ‘good health’ which is a traditional salutation over a glass of ale, which is appropriate considering that the traditional wassail bowl would contain a drink of mulled beer, curdled cream, apples, eggs, cloves, ginger, nutmeg and sugar. Mmm!

I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure of the significance of the baby cradled in his arm, although it may well be a representation of the coming New Year. Personally, I think that the most well known pictorial representation of this truly ‘traditional’ Father Christmas figure is John Leech’s illustration of the Ghost of Christmas Present in the first edition of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”  - and while it’s never stated that this is actually Father Christmas, the illustration clearly draws on the same traditions as Seymour’s illustration here. 

Poor Robert Seymour. Although a draughtsman of skill, and a certain reputation in his day, if he’s remembered at all it is for the circumstances of his death. Seymour, probably at the height of his fame and success in 1835 came up with a proposition for a series of illustrations of “The Nimrod Club”, a group of hapless sportsmen. His publisher’s, Chapman and Hall agreed, and the decision was taken to accompany the illustrations with short written text sketches, but a young writer nicknamed Boz who had recently had his first success with his “Sketches by Boz”. Boz was the young Charles Dickens. Before the publication of the second instalment, Seymour took a shotgun and killed himself. Many people have speculated what might have led Seymour to take his life, but as in many cases, nobody can really be certain.

Sir John Tenniel

In my last post I wrote about my recent interest in American cartoonist and illustrator Thomas Nast. Nast was a contemporary of the English illustrator and cartoonist John Tenniel, and you can draw comparison between their works, and other illustrators of the same period. Nast was certainly influenced by Tenniel. 

Sir John Tenniel is probably best known for illustrating the original editions of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, and for a political cartoon called “Dropping the Pilot”. Yet actually there was quite a bit more to the man than this. Sir John was the main political cartoonist for Punch for 50 odd years, and it’s interesting to see just how many of the most well known political cartoons of the Victorian era were produced by him. In the early days of Punch William Thackeray, an early contributor, upset the editor, Mark Lemon, by asking who would read the magazine if it wasn’t for Tenniel’s cartoons. 

A measure of the esteem in which he was held at the time is shown by the fact that he was the first ever illustrator or cartoonist to be knighted, in 1893, towards the end of his life.

The Alice books had quite a deep effect on me from early days. It was one of a set of books which my mother owned which had belonged to my grandfather, and even before I could read it I was drawn to Tenniel’s illustrations, their strangeness, the grotesque exaggeration of the features of the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts, the mad grin of the Cheshire cat, and the nightmarish Jabberwocky. 

I think you can see this same ability to hint at darkness and the grotesque which you can see in some of Tenniel’s depictions of Father Christmas, and it’s a thing that distinguishes his work from Nast’s. In Thomas Nast’s brilliant cartoons, we see Santa Claus essentially as the figure depicted in Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” – the one which begins “Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house etc.” Nast’s Santa is not quite the Coca Cola Santa yet; he is a little unkempt, smokes a pipe, and has more of an air of mischievousness about him, but he’s still a happy chap delivering presents and generally doing what Santa should.

Compared with Nast’s Santa, Tenniel’s cartoons often give us Father Christmas, most definitely not Santa Claus. In some of his cartoons Father Christmas is almost like the personification of Winter, and there’s nothing twinkly or mischievous about him. In other Punch cartoons we see him facing pessimistically into a blizzard of whim as war, amongst other things. In the cartoon I copied elements of for the card below, we see him as Old Man Winter, sleeping in a frozen doorway, while the spirit of Charity, accompanied by two urchins, tries to wake him with what appears to be a sprig of mistletoe, to get him to distribute the toys in the box by his side.

Father Christmas being awoken by the spirit of Charity 

Copied from Sir John Tenniel's engraving for Punch

1891 - a noticeably darker Father Christmas than Nast's

The Arrival of Father Christmas - this is a bit

lighter than many of Tenniel's other Father 

Christmas illustrations - his expression is similar

to a Nast Santa's. Even so, this is still very much

in the English tradition of Father Christmas

appearing in the depths of winter, going from

house to house spreading cheer, rather than our

modern idea of Santa dropping through the chimney

leaving presents. 

Pretty, quaint and twee it is not. I find this and other of his Father Christmas images almost compelling as I found his Alice illustrations when I first looked at them fifty years ago.

More on Thomas Nast

In my earlier post about making my own hand sketched Christmas Cards, I mentioned how much I like the work of Thomas Nast – the man often credited with creating our popular image of Father Christmas as the jolly, bearded man in long red robes, beloved of children. I thought I’d write a little more about him. 

Reading about his life, I was struck by the thought that you could probably make a great film or miniseries about it. Nast was possibly the most important and influential cartoonist in American history. He was a man who could legitimately claim to have ‘made’ presidents through his championing of their causes, and to have pretty much singlehandedly brought down the notoriously corrupt New York city administration of William “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall associates. His cartoons helped ensure the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, when his Democrat opponent, George B. McLellan, looked likely to try to negotiate an end to the Civil War with the southern states. Even Ulysses S. Grant attributed his successful bid for the presidency in 1868 to Nast’s support.

My copy of another Thomas Nast Santa.

Apparently when he put Santa in a domestic setting like this one,

he often replicated details of his own home,

and when Santa is shown with children,

they are often based on Nast's own children.

I like the work. Nast’s cartoons and illustrations have all of the intricacy that you’d expect of the period, with liberal use of hatching and cross hatching to create shade and darkness. But I do like his sense of humour as well, from the biting satire of his crusade against Tweed, to the gentle humour of some of his Christmas work, like the cartoon of the little boy crying outside a shop in the window of which there is a notice saying ‘Christmas Comes But Once A Year’.

To me, Nast's Santa often has just a touch of the

twinkly old rogue about him, like this one showing

him having a crafty break for a smoke on a rooftop

I also feel that I like the man, to a certain degree. Nast was a champion of the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was very much an anti-slavery abolitionist, and used his drawing pen to condemn the activities of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In his time he championed the plight of Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. Nast was once approached by associates of Tweed and offered an astronomical bribe to stop his campaign, which, to his credit, he refused to accept. All this is positive. Having said this, on the other side of the ledger it appears that he was anti-Catholic, and certainly his portrayal of Irish people as violent drunken thugs was cruel, unfair, and inexcusable. The fact is that at times in his career, for all of his opposition to slavery and his support of the plight of Chinese immigrants he still at times resorted to lazy and unflatteringly stereotyped images of black people and Chinese people.

I don't think Santa ever appeared quite as sinister to me as

he does in this copy of a Nast original. There's a touch of the 

seedy old goblin about him here. 

Sadly the later part of Nast’s life was not so successful as the earlier. In 1886 he left Harper’s Weekly. After Fletcher Harper died, the new editor did not see eye to eye with Nast, and tension had simmered between them for some time. Two years earlier he had lost much of his wealth through being swindled by a fraudulent banking and brokerage firm. New publishing ventures failed. As Teddy Roosevelt became president in the early years of the new century, Nast applied for work with the US State Department, hoping for a diplomatic position in Europe. Roosevelt offered him to become Consul General in Ecuador, where he succumbed to yellow fever and died towards the end of 1902. 

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I don't think that this next one was original made by Nast - well, I'm sure it wasn't, but it's another 19th century depiction of Santa which I found on google, and I really like

Christmas Cards

Here we are, first of December, and I’m already introducing the subject of Christmas. I make no apologies. The fact is that I do like making my own Christmas cards, and if you’re going to do more than a few it does require a certain amount of time and a certain amount of preparation. Put it this way – by starting during this last week I’ve bought myself plenty enough time to complete enough of a stock. 

Last year I painted watercolour Christmas Cards mostly for work colleagues. There was precious little planning involved – basically the idea just occurred to me one Sunday morning.  I did it by folding pages from my watercolour pad in half and using them as cards, painting the design onto the ‘front’ cover. That was all well and good, but they did look like what they were – sheets of paper folded in half. 

This year I bought a set of 25 blank cards with envelopes from a craft supplier, and then I started doing the same thing as last year– looking out designs on google, picking what I liked, editing out what I didn’t, so on and so forth. Thing is, this time out I wasn’t at all so happy with the first four or five results. So I thought that perhaps I could play to my strengths, and make pen and ink sketch designs rather than painting. Once again, I looked on the internet to see what was what, and got cracking. 

I’m particularly fond of the work of Thomas Nast. Originally born in Germany, when Thomas was a child his father decided to move the family to the USA, and Thomas became the leading and most influential American political cartoonist of the 19^th century – and possibly of all time. In addition to his satirical cartoons, though, Thomas Nast probably did more to fix the traditional portrayal of Father Christmas/Santa Claus in the public imagination than anyone else. For over 20 years he would create new cartoon images for Harper’s Weekly every Christmas, and I’m enchanted by many of them. I’ve already copied a couple of his Santa designs – and doubtless will do more before the 25^th.

All three cards on this page have copies of details
from drawings by Thomas Nast. It's drawings
like the originals which really popularised
the public conception of the jolly Santa.

Originally I bought just one box of 25 cards, which I thought would be just about enough for work colleagues and friends in the Art group. And indeed this might have been true, had it not been for my nearest and dearest. Mrs. C. fell in love with one design and appropriated it to send to her mother and step dad in Spain. Well, fair enough, I can’t really quibble with that. Still, I must confess that it’s got me quite interested in the work of 19^th century cartoonists and illustrators like Nast, Sir John Tenniel, George Cruickshank, John Leech and others.

By way of an aside, I am actually descended from two professional artists on my mother’s side, one of whom did dabble in political cartoons, in the generation between Hogarth and James Gillray. Philip Dawe was my 5x great grandfather. In all honesty we don’t know a great deal about his personal life, but he certainly grew up and worked in London, where he was an assistant to William Hogarth in the later part of that great man’s career. Philip was an engraver as well, but he did produce some political cartoons about the political situation in the lead up to the American Revolution, showing sympathy towards the Americans. He had several children, one of whom, Henry Edward Dawe, was my 4x great grandfather. Henry is best known as an engraver, and was actually JMW Turner’s favoured engraver of prints of his work. For a time though Henry worked as assistant for his elder brother George Dawe, the real star artist of the family. George Dawe is pretty much unknown in his own country now, but over 300 of his paintings hand in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. An extremely successful portrait painter in  his day, George was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to paint portraits of over 300 victorious Russian Generals from the Napoleonic Wars. He was in Russia through most of the 1820s, but returned home to die in 1829.

It’s amazing to me that these two ancestors of mine would have known and worked with two of the English artists I most admire, Hogarth and Turner. Coming back to where we started, Hogarth was pretty much the figure from which all of the great 18^th and 19^th century cartoonists took their inspiration. 

Not based on a Nast cartoon this time,
but another nice image, which I hope
that the recipient will like