Nothing to do with Alice

 Yes, I've managed to make a picture that has nothing to do with Alice. I belong to a Facebook group that gives you a different prompt every day - you can respond to it or not, there's no pressure. To be fair, it was a prompt on this group that eventually led to the Alice fixation - Sir John Tenniel was a daily prompt a long time ago, and that got me started. Today's prompt led me to make this: - 

I mean, we're not exactly talking old master, here, but we are talking progress to at least some extent. It looks close to what I was aiming for. Which is nice, because the 30x30 challenge for 2022 starts tomorrow. 

The purpose of the 30x30 Challenge is to produce 30 Direct Watercolours by the end of the month of June. Direct watercolours are those that you produce just using watercolour, with no pre-sketching and no other media involved. I've completed the challenge for the last couple of years - and last year I even sold 8 or 9 of my 30 paintings. Well, if that should happen this year, well and good, but just completing the challenge will be enough for now. 

Hmm - not quite what I was aiming for.

 

Yes, this is my second attempt at an Alice in Wonderland illustration. My first was the gryphon, but to be fair, that was a little bit of a soft option. Not because it's easy drawing a griffin, it isn't, but if you see what I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to come from Alice in Wonderland. But a caterpillar smoking a houkah - no, that can only be Wonderland.

Good points - the mushrooms and grass are pretty well realised. I wanted to give the caterpillar the sort of opium - raddled old Victorian colonial face, which is why he is wearing a smoking jacket and a smoking hat. His face is not at all badly realised. But if we're being critical, I wish I'd either gone for massively oversized glasses, or half moon specs. 

Other 'I wish that I'ds' . . . I wish I'd made the houkah bigger and placed it a little further up on the mushroom. I wish I'd either made the head smaller so as to be in proportion with the body, or even bigger to make it obvious that I was trying a Tenniel-esque out of proportion head. 

By way of comparison, here's a copy of another of T.H. Robinson's illustrations, also of the caterpillar.

Here we are, then.

To coin a phrase, the time has come. In this case, the time for me to make my own Alice illustration. In the end I decided to have a go at the gryphon- hopefully you can tell this from looking at the picture.

I am stupidly pleased with this – because, and this is not meant to be false modesty – when I make my own pictures when I’m not copying someone else’s, and not drawing something that I can actually see – most of my own drawings are utter pigswill. Yes, there are things about this that could be better, but pigswill it is not.

Ironically, after pointing out the static quality of the majority of Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, this is far more static than his gryphon. Also, being critical, there’s a slight disconnect between the lion and eagle parts – the latter being slightly too big for the former. I do like the rocky beach I’ve put him on, though.

I went back to Carroll’s text before starting. What he actually says is “They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) Getting a little meta-textual there, our Lewis. Mind you, if you knew that you had someone as good as Tenniel illustrating your novel, then you’d surely be tempted to say something similar yourself, I’m sure.

It's maybe not perfect, well, there’s no two ways about it, it’s not perfect. However it is decent enough to encourage me to seriously think about doing more.

How do you get away from Tenniel?

I am thinking about trying to produce my own illustration based on Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass. Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve made copies of almost forty illustrations of the  books by various artists. It’s time I had a go at putting my own stamp on it.

However.

There are a couple of problems. The first sounds like false modesty, but it really isn’t. I don’t have the skill of being able to conjure up good illustrations off the top of my own head, purely through my own imagination. John Tenniel had the most incredible visual memory. I don’t.

The second problem is one which has faced every other illustrator of the books since John Tenniel, namely, how do you get away from Tenniel’s illustrations? It’s a fair question. One way of doing it that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is to do something completely different. For example, Mervyn Peake’s frankly evil looking Cheshire Cat. Which is doable because nobody actually knows exactly what a Cheshire Cat should look like.

But how do you get away from Tenniel when all logic dictates that what you draw must inevitably end up looking similar? Well, here’s my copy of Tenniel’s Fish and frog footmen.

Let's compare it with my copy of a Mervyn Peake illustration of the fish footman. 

Superficially, they're pretty similar - similar costume with the breeches, the wig and the long tail coat - similar letters. However Peake manages to put his own stamp on this partly through having very minimal - almost non-existent background - and partly through depicting the fish running. One of the things I've noticed about Tenniel's illustrations is that the vast majority are static. Even some of the ones where characters are moving are strangely still. Off the top of my head, there's one from Wonderland with Bill the Lizard shooting out of the chimney, another with the Hatter storming off with his hat over his eyes, and in Looking Glass there's the Red Queen flying along with Alice in her wake. Other than that though the characters are often standing, or sitting, or striking poses. So depicting characters in movement is an option for getting away from Tenniel

This is one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations. Again, superficially the frog footman looks to be at the very least a close cousin of Tenniel's. As with Peake, there's a contrast with the way that Tenniel uses background in his illustration. Rackham could do very detailed background and I always felt that his depiction of forests and trees is masterly. Here, though, the background is extremely sketchy, especially when compared with Tenniel's. I don't think it's coincidence that Rackham chooses to depict the frog sitting, while it is standing stiffly, almost to attention, in Tenniel's. 

So, drawing a few lessons together from this, I can get away from Tenniel by firstly, thinking about the conception of the characters themselves, but also by thinking carefully about the way I use background detail, and also the positions of the characters, and the amount of movement in the picture.

None of which answers the question, though - if I am going to have a go at an Alice books illustration, which character or scene from the book am I going to have a go at? 

The Remarkable Robinsons

In my last post I said that one of the artist illustrators I most wish had made his own illustrations of Alice in Wonderland was Aubrey Beardsley. I copied the Ralph Steadman illustration that accompanies the Wool and Water chapter in Looking Glass which I believe owes a little to Aubrey Beardsley. I also mentioned that there’s a wonderful illustration by Charles Robinson which I believe also owes a debt to Aubrey Beardsley. I’ve spent several hours today doing my best to copy it. This is the best that I can do.

Charles Robinson was one of three artist brothers born in London. He was the middle brother, although there was less than four years between all three. His older brother was Thomas Heath Robinson – and we’ll come to him in a minutes – and his younger brother, William Heath Robinson was probably the most well known of the three. Wiliam Heath Robinson is remembered for his remarkable drawings of fantastical inventions, and any contraption which seems to be cobbled together from an assortment of ill matched items is still often labelled a ‘Heath Robinson’ contraption.

In the last day or so I’ve looked at quite a few illustrations by Charles Robinson, and I’m pretty sure he was influenced by Beardsley. As for this illustration, made for a 1907 edition published by Cassell, I think it’s remarkable. Alice looks positively demonic! I also think that the ripples in the water – which I presume is the pool of Alice’s tears – and the reflection of Alice herself – are a real tour de force. Look at illustrations like this, and you can understand why this period is known as the Golden Age of British illustration.

Thomas, professionally known as T.H. Robinson, also illustrated Alice in Wonderland, just a year later than Charles did, in 1908. The illustrations that I’ve seen aren’t quite a startlingly magnificent as the Charles Robinson illustration that I copied, but they’re not without their appeal. I like T H Robinson’s caterpillar, and I really like the original of this sketch I copied of Alice opening up like a telescope, and being called a serpent by a pigeon. I think that the viewpoint is brilliantly chosen.

Who do you wish had illustrated the Alice books?

I’ve given a bit of thought to the question – of all the artists who have never to my knowledge illustrated the Alice books, which ones do I most wish had done it? I love this sort of question, and always when I come up with one, I start firming it up with rules and conditions. In this case I decided that the choice must be limited to only artists and illustrators who have been working at any time since 1865, the year of the publication of Wonderland. Strictly speaking I should possibly say only those working since the copyright ran out and anyone could have a go. Since this precludes one of my choices, though, I’m going to make 1865 the cut off point. My first choice, then, is a rather obvious one.

Sir Quentin Blake

I mean, it’s such an obvious choice, isn’t it, that I couldn’t help thinking that surely Sir Quentin must have illustrated the Alice books at one time or another. But if he did, I haven’t found any evidence of it whatsoever. Although he has illustrated the Walrus and the Carpenter for a book of poetry, anthologised in aid of the Children’s Trust.

It's interesting if you compare this to the equivalent Tenniel illustration.

 

At first sight they look very different, but look closer, and maybe you’ll agree with me that Sir Q., as I’d like to feel he’d let me call him, is actually drawing quite strongly on Tenniel, or at least paying an affectionate homage. Walrus on the left, carpenter on the right. Both sitting on the rocks. Big cliff on the far right. The oysters in both pictures seem to be very close cousins as well.

Sir Quentin is in his 80s now, and still going strong. He’s indelibly associated with the works of Roald Dahl – a couple of years ago when working my way through 50 great British illustrators I copied an illustration from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, the first Dahl novel I ever read. For me it’s difficult to think of Roald Dahl’s books without thinking of Quentin Blake’s illustrations – as writer and illustrator they were an absolutely perfect match. Then, in the last decade, his illustrations have become the 'face' of David Walliams' extremely popular books. However, Sir Quentin’s portfolio is much wider and more varied than that, and I can’t help thinking that his quirky, expressive and individual style would make for a very interesting interpretation of the Alice books. His style looks deceptively simple. Yet when you try to make a copy of one of his illustrations you start to realise just how clever and precise it actually is. No single pen stroke is wasted, and as a result all of his pictures crackle and sparkle with life and personality.

Aubrey Beardsley

Hear me out. I know that his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, as an example, ooze sexuality. That is not something I am advocating should be brought into the Alice books. But I think he’s fair game since, although Aubrey Beardsley was very much not a children’s illustrator, he did at one point illustrate an edition of the 1001 Arabian Nights. And furthermore. . . he was a genius in my book. Effectively his career lasted about 6 years, before his tragic early death from tuberculosis at the age of 26 in 1898. For the later part of that career he was often vilified. However his work is now more popular than ever, and his influence on artists, and graphic designers ever since, and especially since the 60s has been frankly immense.

Looking at this famous image from Salome that I copied you can see some of the hallmarks of the Art Nouveau style of which Beardsley was an innovator – the elongated liquid forms, for example. But look at the way he uses monochrome – this was not years ahead of his time, but decades. I first came to know of Beardsley and his work when I was 17, and studying my English A levels. (A levels are/were the qualifications you needed to pass in England and Wales in order to gain a place to study at University). One of my fellow students was not, frankly, great at English, but he was a superb artist, and he told me about basing his final project on Beardsley. When I researched this name which I knew nothing about, I too fell instantly under his spell.

Maybe I’m being fanciful here, but I do think it’s possible to see the influence of Aubrey Beardsley in some of the representations that have been made of the Alice books since. I haven’t yet made a copy of a brilliant – if rather disturbing – Charles Heath Robinson illustration from 1907 which I think owes something to Beardsley. Still this is a copy of Ralph Steadman’s illustration for the ‘Wool and Water’ chapter of Looking Glass. The water at the bottom of the picture is one obvious comparison, but it also seems to me that Alice's arms in particular are elongated and the liquid way that Alice's hair spreads into the water seems pretty suggestive of Beardsley to me. I do know that Ralph Steadman contributed to a BBC documentary about Beardsley as well in the past, so I think it's reasonable to suggest he may well be a fan. 

White Rabbits

 

I did make a copy of this Tenniel illustration of the white rabbit looking at his pocket watch a few years ago. If I ever posted it online, though, I can’t find it, and so I was out with the ink pen again.

In the process, I found the original of this slightly later version of the white rabbit. This was drawn by Harry Furniss. Harry Furniss was an Irish born illustrator, whose career overlapped with Tenniel’s. Furness, like Tenniel, made his living through political and humourous cartoons, and began working for Punch in 1880. He actually left Punch before Tenniel did. In 1894 the owners of the magazine found that he had sold one of his Punch drawings to Pears soap, and that was the end of that.

As well as working for the same magazine as Tenniel, Furniss was also the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s later “Sylvie and Bruno” novels. He worked closely with Carroll – probably too closely for his liking, and the story goes that it got to the point that he would pretend to be out when Carroll called round. After this Furniss vowed he would never work with Carroll again. It’s not surprising. After working with Carroll on “Looking Glass”, Tenniel told him that he had completely lost the facility of illustrating novels. Maybe that was true, but then it may just well be that he didn’t fancy ever working with Carroll again.

Harry Furniss began his own humourous magazine after leaving Punch. This failed, and he left to go and work in America, at one time working in the fledgling film industry.

Harry Furniss was 11 years old when the book was first published, and so the story goes he was bitterly disappointed that he was too young to illustrate it. One of the reasons why he would never work with Carroll again after Sylvie and Bruno might well have been because the books were nothing like the Alice books. The copyright for Alice in Wonderland ran out in 19o7, and Harry Furniss produced 20 illustrations for an edition.

If you look at Furniss’ white rabbit on the left, and compare it with Tenniel’s on the right, maybe you’ll have the same thought that I did occur to you – the same but different. Some of Furniss’ illustrations – for example Alice staring at the Cheshire Cat do have a similarity to Tenniel’s – although not all of them. His Queen of Hearts, for example, is a little more animated, but less disproportionately grotesque than Tenniel’s. The illustration of Alice falling down the rabbit hole is remarkably different as well.

I just find it interesting to see what a contemporary of Tenniel made of the story. I don’t know if Tenniel ever expressed an opinion about what Furniss did with the story – I’d be interested to read it if he did.

The Itch Test

2 years ago, during the first lockdown, I embarked upon a project of copying an illustration a day from 50 great British (or British based) illustrators. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although the results were often far from perfect. I learned about artists whom I was ignorant of previously, and came to appreciate some very fine work. My current obsession with illustrators of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books has had the same effect with me.

Of course, it all starts with John Tenniel. Following a prompt in a sketching group on Facebook, I copied a John Tenniel cartoon, “Dropping the Pilot” which led to me copying others. I’d copied at least part of several Alice illustrations over the last  years or so, but this reawakening of interest in Tenniel’s work then led to me taking on some more of the Alice illustrations, and so forth.

Of course, Tenniel has been one of my great illustrator heroes for a long time. For me, Tenniel’s work almost always passes what I’d like to think of as The Itch Test™. When I look at an illustration, if I really like it, then I get an itch to copy it. I almost always feel like this about Tenniel’s work. Admittedly, me copying a Tenniel sketch to try to understand how it was created is, I guess, a little like taking apart a working Rolex to find out how it works. The best you can hope for is not to do any damage. But I can’t help it. If you have an itch, then sooner or later you have to scratch it.

No other illustrator of the Alice books has made me itch quite so much as Tenniel. If we take Mervyn Peake, for example, I’ve already copied several of his illustrations for the Alice books, and some I think that some of his illustrations for the books rival, or (say it quietly) outdo Tenniel’s. But then some of them don’t make me itch at all. I think of, for example, his illustration of the Caterpillar. Peake was a great illustrator, and a superb draughtsman, and there’s nothing intrinsically bad about his caterpillar, but somehow it just doesn’t do it for me and I have no urge to copy it.

So, yesterday I decided to tackle Tenniel’s Humpty Dumpty. I like the way that the illustration is composed and constructed to give room on the page for the text. Afterwards I searched the internet for images of Humpty from Looking Glass produced by other artists, and I came upon one by an illustrator called E.B.Thurstan.

I wish that I knew more about Thurstan (not clear if this was a male or female illustrator) but I haven’t been able to find out anything. Still, the moment I saw it, my drawing hand began to itch – metaphorically at least. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that this is clearly in the tradition of Tenniel, but I think that the viewpoint looking down on Alice is particularly effective, and the background (at least in the original) is superb.

Speaking of itches, last week I thoroughly enjoyed copying Ralph Steadman’s Cheshire Cat. It started me looking more closely at Steadman’s illustrations for the 1973 editions of the Alice books. Ralph Steadman’s work has, I think, something of a marmite quality. I can understand you loving his work, and I can understand you having a strong reaction against his work – but I find it difficult to accept not having an opinion. I find that the Alice illustrations polarise me. I love certain illustrations, like this one of Alice and the White Knight which made my had start itching the moment I found it. 

On the other hand I really don’t like his illustrations of the Mad Hatter and March Hare, and also the caterpillar. Which is not to criticise the quality of the draughtsmanship. It’s that specific conception of the character depicted that I don’t like. Just a personal thing, and not something I think Ralph Steadman need lose any sleep over!

Peakeing too early?

I’ve been having another go at Mervyn Peake. As a copy this is far from perfect, but not for want of effort in my part. This is his realisation of the Walrus and the Carpenter. For me there’s echoes of the Tenniel original in that slabby chin of the Carpenter, although the elongated body is quite different. As is the walrus. What I like about Peake’s Walrus is, with his pinstriped trousers, there is a little more of the sly conman about him than there is in Tenniel’s, where he is, to all intents and purposes, just a walrus.

More Cheshire Cats

 Yes, I decided to take the Cheshire Cat theme and run with it some more. So let's recap. We have my copy of Tenniel's Cheshire Cat: - 

Then I added my copy of Helen Oxenbury's illustration of Alice and the Cheshire Cat :-

- and then my copy Mervyn Peake's 

SO, who have we got to add today? Well, here's my copy of Arthur Rackham's

Rackham's cat itself isn't that striking in comparison with some of the others. He's a little thinner and a little more manic than Tenniel's, but nowhere near as striking or alarming as Peake's. That tree though! Say what you like, Arthur Rackham couldn't half draw interesting trees.

Finally, now for something completely different. This is my copy of Ralph Steadman's illustration of the Cheshire Cat

Copying it helps you realise just how good Ralph Steadman is. His style looks chaotic, anarchic to first sight. It really isn't, though. There's some absolutely beautiful use of quite precise geometric shading here. In terms of my personal preference, this rivals Peake's at the top of my list.

Comparison - 3 Cheshire Cats

Right, if you were with me yesterday you’ll know I posted a copy of one of John Tenniel’s illustrations of the Cheshire Cat. I made the point that the Cheshire Cat illustrations really aren’t my favourite examples of Tenniel’s work. After that I made copies of a couple of other illustrations of said cat, for comparison.

This is my copy of Helen Oxenbury’s illustration of the Cheshire Cat. Helen Oxenbury won the 1999 Kate Greenaway medal for her illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. At first look you might be struck by the differences between her style and Tenniel’s. Helen Oxenbury’s Alice is a modern girl, and her illustrations are clean and unfussy. But if you look again, Alice and he cat are actualy in very similar positions to those they adopt in the Tenniel sketch. The cat is in the tree, on the rtop right of the illustration, Alice is to the bottom left, looking up, just like in Tenniel’s. Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations interpret Alice as a funny, slightly ridiculous, children’s tale, with none of the darkness of some other illustrations, and that’s a perfectly valid interpretation.

This is my copy of Mervyn Peake’s Cheshire Cat. Now, I have to say that this is my favourite. Peake’s Cheshire Cat is grinning, but those fangs and those demonic eyes convey he’s up to no good at all.

This is the Tenniel copy I posted yesterday.

The Cheshire Cat

So, I was thinking when I got up this morning about the important characters from the Alice books that I haven’t yet sketched, and one of the most obvious is the Cheshire Cat. There’s a reason for this- I’m  not that fussed about the way that the Cheshire Cat is depicted. Still, needs must, and so I made this copy of my favourite Cheshire Cat illustration from the book.

I rather like this one because it really conveys the supernatural nature of the cat, but also because it also has the Queen of Hearts. I did sketch her several years ago when I combined details of an illustration of her, together with a different illustration showing one of the cards painting the roses red.

I’ll have a look at some of the other depictions of the Cheshire Cat, and see if I fancy making a copy of any of them for comparison.

Comparison - Tenniel's and Rackham's Caterpillars

 I don't necessarily think that it was very fair of me comparing Tenniel and Arthur Rackham’s Alice illustrations just by looking at their respective Gryphons, because that was a contest where Tenniel was always going to come out on top.

So I decided to offer by way of contrast what I feel is one of Tenniel’s less effective illustrations against one of Rackham’s most effective. So, here is Tenniel’s caterpillar :

And here is Arthur Rackham’s –

Now, Rackham did like to gently watercolour his illustrations, and when you’re as good as Rackham was, who would blame you? I’m nowhere near as good using colour as I am just using ink, and I make no bones about it. Add to that the fact that my scanner hates light blues, and when it picks them up at all it tends to make them grey. Here's a photograph of my copy :-

Still, hopefully my copy might give you just a little flavour of the Rackham original. I think that this realisation of the caterpillar is probably my favourite of any. Tenniel never showed the caterpillar’s face, which admittedly enabled him to pull off the optical illusion whereby what you think is it’s profile could just as easily be two top legs. For me, Rackham gets it right. He kind of looks like a dried out, superannuated academic.

Then, when you add to that Rackham’s great facility at depicting a fantasy woodland, you’ve got something of quality.

Comparison - Arthur Rackham's and John Tenniel's Gryphon

 Okay - so to recap - this is my copy of Arthur Rackham's Gryphon:-

It's nice. I particularly like the tree - and to be fair he was very good at gnarly trees like this. The gryphon is well drawn, no argument. But I'm sorry, I don't think it approaches Tenniel's original- my copy of which is below:-

What a piece of illustration this is (I'm referring of course to Tenniel's original and not my copy of it). For all that this was produced for a children's book, this is simply a fantastic piece of fantasy illustration. 

Comparing Peake's and Tenniel's Alices -

 I made the point earlier that Peake’s Alice is very different to Tenniel’s, and so that made me think that I might be nice to actually copy one of Peake’s depictions of Alice herself. This is my copy of a sketch from Through the Looking Glass, after Alice has made it to the end of the board to earn promotion to queen. Looking specifically at the Alice figures, you can see that Tenniel’s archetypal Alice is a little girl, usually quite prim and well kempt. Comparing this with Peake’s Alice, she seems just a tiny bit older, her hair is a little more wild and a little darker than Tenniel’s blond Alice – you can see this better in some of the other illustrations Peake made.

As for the crown, it’s really interesting that in Tenniel’s illustration the queens all wear crowns which seem slightly exaggerated versions of a queen’s crown from a standard Staunton chess piece. Which in Peake’s illustration, Alice is wearing the kind of crown you’d see on an early Victorian chess piece, incredibly tall and elaborate.

With the red and white queens, I’m struck with the symmetry in the composition, despite the fact that the queens themselves are such different characters. I like this sketch even more if you look at it in context of the previous sketch, where the figures are in the same relationship to each other, but the queens are awake. It means that when you turn the page, you get a similar effect of turning the page to see Alice emerging from the looking glass, or to see the queen turning into the kitten, or to see the Cheshire Cat disappearing.

With Tenniel, especially with regards to the red queen, you don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s actually a chess piece, rather than a character with a life of her own, which is something I definitely do feel about the queens in the Peake illustration. I think Peake might well have had a thing about noses, too, for the red queen’s nose reminds me very much of the similar nose he gave to the Mad Hatter.

Comparison with Peake

Yesterday I copied Tenniel's illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

By way of comparison I sketched a copy of Mervyn Peake’s rendition of Tweedledum and Tweedledee this morning. Looking at it, I think it’s an interesting illustration (see what I did there?) of the similarities and differences between Tenniel’s renditions of the characters in the book, and Peake’s.

Like Tenniel, Peake shows the two as twins, with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Like Tenniel, Peake distinguishes between them through the names embroided on the collar – although this is actually specified in the description in Chapter IV of Through the Looking Glass”. So much for the similarities. I think it’s worth comparing the faces. In Tenniel’s illustration, although the pair are wearing schoolboy’s caps, they look like grownups. Back in the 70s and 80s the comic actor Terry Scott would often dress up as a schoolboy for comic effect – he had a novelty record called “My brother” a well. Well, the faces of Tenniel’s twins remind me of Terry Scott as a schoolboy. They don’t look like kids. While Peake’s twins really are a pair of cheeky urchins.

I do think that Tenniel’s static pair do fit Carroll’s description, “they stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was looking round to see if the word “TWEEDLE” was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked ‘DUM’.

‘If you think we’re wax-works,” he said,”you ought to pay, you know” One other notable difference as well is the fact that Peake doesn't include Alice in this illustration, which is also true of the Mad Hatter and March Hare illustration that I copied last week. Peake's Alice is very different from Teniel's, her dark hair being one obvious difference. 

Back to Tenniel Again

No, sorry, I still haven’ worked Sir John Tenniel or Alice out of my system yet. I was tempted to have a go at another of Mervyn Peake’s illustrations today, but hey, it’s been a hard week, and I deserved a dose of Tenniel. And for once. . . for once I’ve had a decent go at Alice herself here. It’s not perfect, but it’ possibly the best Alice I’ve done. Tweedledee is a wee bit smaller than Tweedledum here, which isn’t perfect, but hey, let’s work with what we have.

The names were not invented by Lewis Carroll, either. John Byron, in a satire of 1725, used the names to refer to composers Handel and Bononcini (Bonon who?). With reference to the nursery rhyme, the two of them never quite have a battle in “Through the Looking Glass” because they’re frightened off by a raven. There you go.

Other Alice Illustrators

Last night there was nothing I wanted to watch on after about 10pm so I was idly searching the documentaries on the iplayer. I chanced upon a series with the title “The Beauty of Books”. – Hullo – thought I – I’m in. Now, the fourth episode happened to focus on illustrated books, with a particular focus on . . . yes, Alice in Wonderland. So even if I hadn’t been in before, I was in then.

A good show. It did do a bit with Tenniel but wasn’t exclusively about him. It did focus on some of the other illustrators to have a go at the books. Research I did this morning showed that there have been more than 300 of them. In fact, I’ve even copied some of them before. Back in the 2020 lockdown I set myself the challenge of copying the work of forty different British illustrators – stretching a point to illustrators who might not have been born in the UK but worked primarily in the UK. 3 of the illustrations I copied were from Alice in Wonderland. These were : -

This is my copy of one of Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations for “Alice through the Looking Glass”, showing Alice with the White Queen. Her illustrations for “Alice in Wonderland” won the 1999 Kate Greenaway Medal.

This is Arthur Rackham’s Griffin from “Alice in Wonderland”. Rackham is synonymous with a fairytale style of illustration combining strong ink work with subtle watercolour. Rackham was the illustrator of J.M.Barrie’s first ever Peter Pan story “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”. Rackham’s illustrations do suit the magical, dreamlike quality of the books, although they don’t have the unsettling quality of Tenniel’s work.

That’s not something I would say about Ralph Steadman’s work. There’s little dreamlike about it, although at times nightmarish would be more appropriate. That’s not a criticism, more of an appreciation.

Before I watched the programme last night, I didn’t know that Mervyn Peake had also illustrated “Alice in Wonderland”. I did copy a Peake illustration in 2020, but it ws one of his magnificent illustrations for Treasure Island. Ralph Steadman also illustrated Treasure Island, which is a coincidence.

The programme featured Mervyn Peake’s son who explained that his father had been sent to Germany as a war artist at the end of world war II, just a year before producing his illustrations to “Alice in Wonderland”. Looking through Peake’s original sketch books, he pointed to the original sketch for the Queen of Hearts and suggested that this may well have been influenced by the fact that Peake was present at one of the first war crimes trials, of the Nazi Peter Back. There is certainly a darkness in some of Peake’s illustrations for the books, which matches and at times exceeds Tenniel’s. Michael Foreman, a Greenaway Medal winner who has illustrated Alice himself made the point on the show that he’s particularly fond of Peake’s illustrations for Alice.

He pointed to Peake’s superb draughtsmanship and his great technical ability, and in this he certainly is a true successor to Tenniel. I copied Peake’s rendition of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, possibly his most acclaimed Alice illustration. I found it a fascinating and at the same time frustrating experience. His use of hatching and cross hatching seems far more intricate to me than Tenniel’s, but it does mean that he achieves the depth and intensity of the finest of the Victorian illustrators. It takes hours to try to reproduce, though.

All of which set me to musing about why – in my opinion (feel free to disagree) – Tenniel and Peake produced illustrations more suited to the Alice books than other illustrators. I can’t hlpe feeling that, in Tenniel’s case his career as a political cartoonist stood him in great stead here. Essentially, his work as a political cartoonist involved taking the very familiar – politicians of the day like Disraeli, Gladstone and Palmerston for example – and twisting the way that they are presented away from the norm – presenting Disraeli as the lamp seller from Aladdin in “New Crowns for Old” for instance. His work inhabits a world in which the great powers of Europe are presented as anthropomorphic animals as well, and both of these traits made him an absolutely inspired choice to illustrate Alice in Wonderland. It’s no surprise to me that he even ended up satirising his own illustrations for the book in two cartoons for Punch – Alice in Blunderland – and – Alice in Bumbleland.

As for Mervyn Peake, well I’ve already mentioned his son’s theory about the influence that his experiences in Germany at the end of the war had on his work. Also, Mervyn Peake was a writer himself. In the mid-late 190’s – the period during which his illustrations for Alice were produced, he also wrote the first two parts of his “Gormenghast” trilogy. This is a remarkable work, of dark fantasy – despite a conspicuous lack of ‘fantastic’ elements such as magic. The same inner forces that drove him to create the books, also made him such a great illustrator for Alice, in my opinion.