John Tenniel 1820 - 1914
Born in London in 1820, Sir John Tenniel was the principal political cartoonist for England’s Punch magazine for over 50 years and illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which are considered to be his finest and most enduring achievement. They must also rank among the world’s best-known children’s images.
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An ultimate tribute came to an elderly Tenniel as he was honoured as a living national treasure and for his public service was knighted in 1893 by Queen Victoria. The first such honour ever bequeathed on an illustrator or cartoonist, his fellows saw his knighting as an important step in raising what had been considered a fairly lowly profession to an unprecedented level of respectability.
Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are considered to be his finest and most enduring achievement. They must also rank among the world's best-known children's images.
The Dalziel brothers were commissioned to engrave the boxwood blocks on which Tenniel had made his drawings. The engravers advised Lewis Carroll that the engraved blocks should not be used for printing the illustrations in the books but instead they would act as the masters from which electrotype copies would be made. It was from these electrotypes that all the illustrations in the Alice books were printed with a resultant loss of definition.
In 1985 the original wood engraved blocks were discovered in deed boxes belonging to Macmillan, the original publishers. Jonathan Stephenson at the Rocket Press was awarded the prestigious job of printing 250 sets from the blocks (the first time that they had been used) for worldwide distribution. No further sets will be printed.
Wood engraving
Published 1988
Suite: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Unsigned
Edition of 250
Paper size: 5.5 × 7.5cm
£550 Framed