NC Wyeth

I’m sorry to admit that I was not very familiar with the work of American artist and illustrator NC Wyeth before I turned my attention to Treasure Island. This is a shame, because he was a wonderful artist and illustrator who produced what is arguably the most famous and celebrated set of illustrations for the novel.

Wyeth’s career lasted more than forty years, from the earliest years of the 20^th century until his death in the mid-forties. His first commission as an illustrator was for no less a publication than the Saturday Evening Post. He made his illustrations for Treasure Island in 1911 before he was 30. His illustrations are a million miles away from the kind of work being done by Arthur Rackham and his contemporaries in the UK. His use of colour is most appealing. However, this is what means I have ot tried to copy his work before today.

Believe me, I’m fully aware of my shortcomings when I have a paintbrush in my hand, But last week I plucked up the courage to have a go at Ralph Steadman’s Long John Silver and blow me, the results were much better than expected. Not brilliant, not, but not so bad as to make me want to rip the paper to shreds and set fire to the pieces after jumping up and down on them singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Trust me, that's an improvement on some of the rubbish I’ve perpetrated in the past.

So here it is. 

At the moment I’d say that I still prefer Mervyn Peake’s grim monochrome Treasure Island, but Wyeth’s are wonderful too.

Two more Treasure Island Illustrations, me hearties.

Yesterday I moved away from my illustration copies just for a change and produced a couple of responses to daily drawing challenges on Facebook. Before that I’d made another copy of a Peake Treasure Island illustration, which you can see here. 

So this morning I made up my mind to take the plunge and make an ink AND  watercolour copy of Ralph Steadman’s fantastic illustration of Long John Silver. I had to spend a while working out a methodology for doing it. My initial thought was to maybe put some background colour down first. The thing is, though, it can play havoc with an ink pen when you try to use it on top of dried watercolour. So it had to be ink lines first, hen apply the colour. I bought new uniball 0.05mm and 0.1mm pens since the ones I had are pretty much used up. Using the 0.05mm pen, a 0.3mm and a 0.8mm this is what I came up with.

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Incidentally I used Uniball pens because they are reliably waterproof and will take a watercolour on top with no running. No, they haven’t paid me for a testimonial, more’s the pity. Now, at one point I did cosier just laying down some watercolour to begin and finishing with watercolour pencils. But, you know, while I’m pretty confident of achieving what I wan with black ink fineliners, I’m always fearful of overworking with colours, and once I got to a certain point with the paint I felt that I was in danger of overworking it if I added more, and so I stopped. So this is the finished copy. 

As a copy, I’m pretty pleased. As a colour copy I’m absolutely delighted.

The Illustration Family Robinson

Stick with me for a moment. This will all eventually become relevant. I remember when I began studying for my A Levels there was a guy in my class who was actually a year older than the rest of us.  I think that he’d done O Level resits the previous year. I hope that I’m not being unfair when I say that I don’t think that he found A Level English the easiest of subjects. When it come to Art though, the guy was brilliant. To look at his own original work was to die a little inside, with the realisation that you would never be capable of producing original work like that yourself. He was so modest about it as well. I remember him telling me that he was doing a project on artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardlsey. This was my first encounter with the work of the man who would become one of my absolute favourite artist/illustrators. If I could wave my magic wand and have any artist or illustrator from the past produce a set of Alice illustrations it would be Aubrey Beardsley. I think he would have produced something outstanding. Sadly, he died just a few years before the copyright of Wonderland passed into the public domain.

So to the Robinson brothers, then. Once upon a time there were three brothers born in London, Thomas, Charles and William. Only 3 years spanned heir births. I can relate to this myself, since my older brother was born in 1963, I was born in 1964, and our younger brother was born in 1965. Their father and grandfather had both been illustrators and all three brothers had successful careers in illustration, especially during the Golden Age of British illustration. The youngest, William Heath Robinson, is the best remembered today, for his depiction of strange, convoluted and often pointless machines. To this day his name is used as an adjective for this kind of machine, the sort that looks like a mad inventor has knocked it up in their bedroom. William was the only one of the three who did not produce a set of illustrations to the Alice books. Both of the older brothers, Thomas and Charles, did.

The three brothers were active professionally from the 1890s onwards. Beardsley himself passed away in 1898. Did they know each other? Bearing in mind the similarity in their ages – Beardsley was actually slightly younger, and with the similar circles they moved in it seems very likely. Whatever the case the Robinsons’ work seems definitely to have been influenced by Beardsley. A few years ago when the Beardsley Gallery mounted an exhibition ‘The Beardsley Generation’ about Beardsley and his contemporaries who were influenced by him, the Robinsons were represented. Both Thomas Heath (TH) and Charles produced illustrations for Wonderland when the copyright on the book lapsed in 1907. I appreciate both but have a preference for Charles’ work, and I will start with these.

I find Charles Robinson's Alice illustrations a consistently interesting set. Like Mervyn Peake’s they range from the very complex and detailed - the Pool of Tears - to the much simpler - the Mock Turtle. Yet all of Peake's illustrations look like they were made by the same artist. Tenniel’s illustration all look like Tenniel’s work and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations all look like Ralph Steadman’s work. But with Charles Robinson’s, that’s not the case. If you didn't know, I don’t think you would pick out the pool of tears and mock turtle illustrations as having been created by the same hand. 

His illustration of the pool of tears goes beyond the text. His Alice looks almost demonic. The shading is really heavy, and the use of swirls and reflections in the pool make it a real tour de force, and hint at what Beardsley might have done. It’s by far my favourite illustration of Alice in the pool of tears. It’s framed by a relatively ornate Edwardian border. Yet many of his illustrations use very little shading at all. The Mock Turtle illustration for example could easily have been made 60 years later. With the stylisation of the image, the contrast between large areas of negative space and patches of pure black shading and the use of simple geometric shapes, this is another reflection of a different aspect of Beardsley’s work. Speaking of the Mock Turtle I can respect Robinson’s choice to go with something far more closely resembling a real turtle rather than riffing on the Tenniel conception of the character.

If we take these two illustrations as the extremes of a continuum, all of his illustrations of Wonderland fit more closely at one or other ends of the continuum. And you get a lot for your money. There are several colour plates and over 100 black and white illustrations – the majority of which are further towards the Mock Turtle end of the spectrum. This might be why when you view his illustrations today, almost 120 years after he made them, a huge number of them still look fresh and fun. To this extent Helen Oxenbury’s work on the story reminds me of Charles Robinson’s. Their styles are quite different, yet there is the same clean and uncluttered sense of fun and freshness. So while I might not quite put Charles Robinson right at the top of the tree of Alice illustrators with Peake and Tenniel, I’d put him pretty close. He’s a very significant Alice illustrator. I don’t think that he ever illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass. That’s a shame. I’d love to have seen what he would have made of the Jabberwock.

Now, I said that I prefer Charles’ work to that of TH. However, the set of illustrations that TH produced in the same magic year of 1907 are still a fine set and well worthy of your attention. The set that TH produced is a far more homogenous set than Charles’. They were all clearly drawn by the same hand and they clearly all belong to he same work. Which makes it all the more strange that they were combined in the same edition with colour plates by Charles Pears. It looks as if neither artist had seen what the other produced. Their styles are completely different and so is their conception of the characters. But let’s concentrate on the work of TH. With their heavy borders TH’s illustrations almost have something of the quality of medieval woodcut engravings. Each illustration illustrates a whole scene and gives us full backgrounds and foregrounds within a plain, thick rectangular border.

I won’t lie, I have tremendously enjoyed copying TH’s work. Of his more memorable illustrations there’s the turbaned caterpillar and especially the elongated Alice being berated by the pigeon. The use of forced perspective with Alice’s head is something special and is probably my favourite illustration of his scene. But otherwise I don’t include TH in the absolute top branches of the tree because he does often play it safe in his depiction of the scenes. Yes, his Mad Hatter is dark and doesn’t have a 10/6 ticket in his hat. (Charles’ Pears’ does – shame on you Charles.) But it’s still a top hat and he still has a very prominent beaky nose. I like TH’s illustration of Alice with the Gryphon and Mock Turtle, but putting a top hat on the Mock Turtle does nothing to hide the fact that this is still very much Tenniel’s concept of the character. Likewise, while his Alice wears a sailor dress rather than a pinafore dress she is still recognisably a pretty direct descendant of Tenniel’s Alice.

I don’t want to keep harking back to comparisons with his brother Charles’ work but it’s very hard to avoid. If you compare the way that Charles illustrated Alice in the Pool of Tears with TH’s illustration of the scene, they both use swirls of water, but to me TH’s while technically accomplished just doesn’t portray or evoke the same level of emotion. TH’s Alice has an expression just seems to say – oh well, here we are, then, swimming in a pool of my own tears with a mouse. Another day at the office. - While many of Charles’ illustrations look fresh and timeless, all of TH’s illustrations seem to be very much of their time, the Edwardian era.

As I said earlier, I really do enjoy copying TH’s work even though they are not my favourite illustrations of Wonderland and here are two more I’ve just finished.

The Sixties Alice - Ralph Steadman

Of all the sets of illustrations for the Alice books that have been produced during my lifetime, there are two in particular that have really inspired me. The first is Ralph Steadman’s.

If you delve at all into the history of how Alice has been illustrated over the years, certain illustrators’ work tends to be held up as landmarks. Tenniel, Rackham and Peake are all examples of such and so is Ralph Steadman. Ralph Steadman is a world famous British artist, illustrator and cartoonist. In the late sixties Ralph Steadman illustrated both of the Alice books. Of all of the Alice illustrators I've seen I think that Ralph Steadman captures the madness and the twisted logic of the books better than anyone, even Tenniel.

Which is not to say that I like all of his illustrations. I would like to say that I appreciate them, but that’s not the same thing. There are some that I do actually really dislike. But then in a way that’s all part of what you want from an illustration. With the best will in the world the Alice books need something more than the bland and inoffensive. When we get to Helen Oxenbury you’ll see someone whose Alice work is certainly not offensive, but it’s anything but bland. I’ll come to the Steadman illustrations that provoke my dislike later.

I do like what Steadman does with the character of Alice. Her starting point seems to have been Tenniel’s – long flowing hair with Alice band, pinafore dress and all. Tenniel’s Alice has hair that for the most part is just there. Steadman’s Alice has hair that at times almost takes on almost a life of its own. The way he uses it in the Wool and Water illustration is almost genius. I once saw Ralph Steadman contributing to a documentary about the work of Aubrey Beardsley, so it’s likely he was a fan. The Wool and Water illustration I mentioned seems to me to show Beardsley’s influence very much. Steadman’s Alice is as much a bystander as Tenniel’s, but her expressions of surprise, confusion and at times almost horror mirror the reader’s reaction to the strangeness all around.

Steadman uses hatching but very unobtrusively and you’re more likely to be drawn to his characteristic use of what look to be ink blots . There’s a feeling of violent action – either manifest or repressed within many of his illustrations, yet at the same time there is a strong geometrical quality to his work. One of my favourites of his illustrations shows Alice entering and emerging from the looking glass at the same time which demonstrates this. His use of the chessboard pattern in some of his illustrations for Looking Glass gets as far away from Tenniel’s flat tableaux as it is possible to get on a two dimensional surface. They put me in mind of illustrations I’ve seen which try to explain how space is curved. Some of his compositions are so brilliantly and intricately constructed that it almost makes my eyes hurt to try to completely unravel what I’m looking at. I particularly like the two knights fighting in Looking Glass.

So what’s not to like? Well. . . Ralph Steadman illustrated the books at the end of the sixties, a time in which the books were ‘discovered’ by a certain proportion of the readership who wondered what exactly the caterpillar was smoking in his hookah. The kind of misguided person who believes that the books were written under the influence of narcotics. I think we have to be honest here. The caterpillar is introduced in the last couple of sentences of Chapter IV - “. . . her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.” Then at the start of Chapter V the description continues – “The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.” So, the Caterpillar is smoking an unnamed substance. At first he seems oblivious to his surroundings, and even when he does notice Alice he seems sleepy – one might almost say – drugged. So I don’t know if I can reasonably complain because Steadman’s caterpillar looks spaced out. Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice suggests that Steadman gives it the face of self-confessed drug user John Lennon. There’s a general resemblance. But he had the caterpillar smoking some kind of cigarette through a long cigarette holder. The fact that Carroll says he was smoking a hookah leads you to surmise this is a joint. I think that I can justify the cigarette holder and will do so shortly – but this doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Which brings me to what I really dislike. I can’t get over my dislike of Ralph Steadman’s portrayal of the Hatter. Yes, he is completely different from Tenniel’s. But in one illustration he looks like a bloodhound – his open mouth looks like a shiny black nose. He wears what in one illustration appears to be union jack sunglasses. All he has in the way of hats is a plain bowler. Which surprises me a little considering the way that Steadman uses clothes symbolically in other places. For example, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the lobster and others all wear pinstriped trousers. In the case of the White Rabbit this completes an ensemble which makes him look for all the world like a harassed commuter. It gives you an idea that there is some kind of weird Establishment in Wonderland that all of these characters in their own way are part of. It also contrasts well with the playing cards who are painting the roses red, to coin a phrase. These wear plain trousers, and in case we don’t get the point then they are also wearing flat caps. The flat cap is as much as a symbol of the blue collar working man as the bowler hat is a symbol of the white collar middle class managing classes. It’s interesting that Bill the lizard, who is also a hired hand, wears a flat cap, while the idle caterpillar smokes from a cigarette holder, an affectation of the bourgeoisie. Was Lewis Carroll making a dig at the class system? Probably not, if truth be told but it provides an interesting extra dimension to the work.

Ralph Steadman is another illustrator of the books who does not provide much in the way of backgrounds but manages to make a little go a long way. All in all, I kind of think that Mad Hatter notwithstanding, Ralph Steadman deserves a place alongside Tenniel and Peake on the branch at the top of the tree. The branch marked Genius.

All of my copies of Ralph Steadman's illustrations can be found on my page of Alice in Wonderland illustrations. You can find this in the links to the right of the page.

Peakeing again, and Good old Harry Boy

Well, it’s been a gently productive week, peeps. First, let’s look at the copy I made of one of Mervyn Peake’s Treasure Island illustrations. I have to say that this illustration of Long John Silver is one of my favourites. There’s something almost skeletal about the way that he is depicted here, with his skull like lower jaw, and the clear outline of his ribs. This is a malevolent Long John Silver. With Peake’s illustrations you never lose sight of the pirates as men capable of evil. They are cutthroats, every one. 

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Now I’d like to come back to Harry Rountree. I wrote in detail about this wonderful illustrator last week. One of the points I made was that you can find many of his illustrations on the web, but they are mostly those he made for Wonderland. Harry – I’d like to think that we would have got on had we lived at the same time and known each other so I take the liberty of using just his first name – did illustrate Looking Glass too, but it can be much harder to find them on the net.

Or so I thought. I’ll explain that in a moment. Last Sunday I found a reasonably priced edition of the two books that contained Harry’s illustrations. It’s a Collins Pocket Classics edition. The bookplate says that it was presented to the recipient in 1949 and that seems about right. This was a year before Harry passed away.

Now, I don’t believe that the book contains all of the illustrations Harry produced for Looking Glass. I don’t know how many he produced for Looking Glass. 21 are reproduced here including a single colour plate with Harry’s striking depiction of the Jabberwock. What makes me think they may have left some out? Well, this edition only reproduces 21 illustrations from Wonderland too, and I know from my other copy of the Harry illustrated Wonderland that he did many more than this.

Okay, so allowing for all that I’m delighted to see more of Harry’s Alice illustrations that I’ve never seen before. Only. . . well, a couple of the illustrations I have seen before, incorrectly described as illustrations of Wonderland. Then there’s this one I’ve even made a copy of.

I’ll be honest, when I made it last week I mistakenly thought that this was Alice with the Queen of Hearts. I’ve seen it described as such on the net. It is also printed on the inside over of my copy of Harry’s Wonderland – and this edition only contains the earlier book. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t realise hat this was in fact Alice with the Red Queen until I saw it in the Collins combined edition, with a caption from the text printed underneath. And it’s clearly meant to be the Red Queen when you look closely. Peaking out of her robes, her body does resemble the base of a chess piece.

Well anyway, yesterday I made my first straight copy from the book, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Here it is:-

Earlier in the week I made this copy of Alice and the Duchess from Wonderland:-

Finished with Harry for today then? Not quite. In the middle of last week I ordered a copy of an edition with Harry’s 1908 illustrations. I doubt I will end up copying these when it arrives, because I think that they were all or mostly colour plates. You know me and what happens when I try to copy coloured originals. Still, I can’t wait to see it when it’s delivered.

Two More Treasure Island Copies

I did say that I was leaving Treasure Island to one side for a moment. Well, it’s only a moment. My next TI copy was of an 1895 illustration by Louis Rhead. He was born and trained in England, but emigrated in the 1880s when offered a position with a New York publishing firm. He illustrated many classic adventure stories at the turn of the 20^th century.

My second is another Mervyn Peake.

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.