To be original or faithful?

Yesterday was a bit of a bumper day for making copies of illustrations in my new Royal Talens sketchbook. I wrote yesterday about the watercolour test based on a 1908 Harry Rountree illustration of Advice from a Caterpillar, and also showed my copy of his White Rabbit in the page’s tabard.

Later on in the day I took on a TH Robinson illustration of The Pool of Tears. I’m sure that I’ve written about him before, but briefly, T.H. Robinson – Thomas Heath Robinson – was one of a very talented trio of brothers. His brothers were Charles Robinson and William Heath Robinson. William, the most famous of the three, never illustrated Alice to the best of my knowledge, but Charles did, and he produced one of my all-time favourite Alice illustrations, which was also of the Pool of Tears. I wanted to draw Thomas’ illustration of the same scene by way of comparison.

After that I copied two more Harry Rountree illustrations – of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, and of the Mock Turtle. The Mad Hatter surely must be one of the biggest problems for illustrators since 1907. The Tenniel illustrations of him are so distinctive and have become so ingrained within the public consciousness that an illustrator can be forgiven for thinking long and hard before going too far away from Tenniel’s Hatter. Amongst my favourite other Alice illustrators, Mervyn Peake displays more originality than most. If you look at Rountree’s, he moves away from the oversized head and shortened limbs of Tenniel, but his Hatter still has an exaggerated nose, a tail coat and a top hat. At least he didn’t go the whole hog of having the 10/6 ticket in it.

Incidentally, even Walt Disney didn’t go very far away from the Tenniel original of the Hatter. Disney loved Carroll’s book. One of his earliest cartoons was “Alice’s Wonderland” which combined live action and animation, and led to a series of fifty seven short films. He wanted to make “Alice in Wonderland” as his first feature film, but may have been put off by the fact that MGM produced a live action version in 1933 that bombed at the box office. When he made his 1951 “Alice in Wonderland”, the script did play a little bit fast and loose with the story, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee from “Alice Through the Looking Glass” and leaving out some of the characters from the first book. One character you just couldn’t leave out is the Mad Hatter. If you looked at one of the Tenniel illustrations of the character alongside a still from the film you’d perhaps be struck by the facial differences between them. Disney’s is fleshier and has a bulbous hooter rather than the hawklike beak that Tenniel’s Hatter sports. But look closer and you can see that facial differences aside, he is otherwise pretty faithful, down to the 10/6 label in the hat.

Of course, the Mock Turtle is one of the Wonderland characters excised from the Disney animation. Many illustrators of Wonderland since Tenniel have faced the challenge of the Mock Turtle in three ways – 1) – ot to illustrate the character at all – 2) – To use a similar visual concept of the character to Tenniel’s – 3) To ignore that it’s a ‘mock’ turtle and draw it as a tortoise or turtle. It’s pretty easy to see that Harry Rountree took the second approach. I think it’s technically a fine illustration, but it doesn’t show us anything about the character that Tenniel didn’t do before.