A difference between the 1860s and the 1930s

When you’re making a copy of someone else’s picture, one of the benefits to be derived from it is that you learn a lot about the original while you’re doing it. This makes sense when you think about it. You can’t, well, I can’t copy a picture, or a photograph or even draw from life without looking, looking, looking. I’ve written about my ‘method’ before – which is maybe making it sound more systematic than it really is – of mentally dividing parts of the original into a series of small drawings and reproducing these which eventually combine to form the big picture. Working this way I find does help me to focus on the detail of the separate parts of the picture.

I’m getting a little away from the point I’m going to make. This morning I made a copy of Edgar’s illustration of the fish and frog footmen from Wonderland. Here it is compared with my copy of Tenniel’s illustration of the same scene. The hallmarks of Edgar’s use of the Tenniel original to inspire his work are evident. This is a bit like a mirror image – what’s on the right in Tenniel’s is on the left in Edgar’s and vice versa. The figures are very similar in both, right down to the position of the frog’s legs, and the frock coat worn by the fish. And . . . the fact that the position of the viewer is shifted, so that we are looking slightly down and slightly on he diagonal, compared with Tenniel’s figures. With Tenniel, we the viewers are largely on a level with the figures who are directly in front of us.

Maybe I have an explanation for this. Work with me. For me, it’s the difference between watching a story play out in a theatre on a stage, and watching a story play out on film. Tenniel puts the viewer in the position of the audience in a theatre. Cinema had not been invented when Tenniel made his Alice illustrations. Edgar puts the viewer in much more interesting positions, just as a film director could do using cameras in different positions. Now, I’m not saying that Edgar was consciously trying to be cinematic in his approach. But in the 1930s, when I believe Edgar made his illustrations he was living in a world where cinema had already shown us all different ways of looking at the world.

Well, it’s a theory anyway. What’s not a theory, but a fact is that my admiration for Edgar’s technical skill increases with every one of his illustrations that I copy. You know, I think that I’m pretty decent at copying Tenniel’s work. But if you said to me, well this is what you have to do – you make a mirror image copy, but then you have to also shift the viewpoint upwards, and on the diagonal – well I don’t think I would produce anything decent if I tried to.

For the record his is my tenth copy of an Edgar Thurstan Alice illustration, out of just 21 illustrations he made in total. My eleventh copy is this one below. I think that these latest two copies are probably the best ones I’ve made of Thurstan and it’s probably because I used a nib only half as thick as the 0.1mm nib I used on the others.