Harry Rountree and the 1928 Alice

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.