John Tenniel

It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me.

Sir John Tenniel (28 February 1820 – 25 February 1914) was a British illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist, most famous for his association with Lewis Carroll and his works.

Quotes

• A wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.
  • Refusing to illustrate a proposed chapter in Through the Looking-Glass, as quoted in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 146

• It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me. … I have done nothing in that direction since.
  • Declining to illustrate a later book by Lewis Carroll, as quoted in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 146

M. N. Cohen & E. Wakeling, Lewis Carroll and his Illustrators (2003)

• Please let me know to what extent you have used, or intend using, the pruning knife.
  • Urging Carroll to shorten Through the Looking-Glass; p. 14

• The nine Wise Words are full of wisdom, besides being decidedly funny.
  • Of Carroll's essay Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing; p. 18

• How true it is that some have greatness thrust upon them! - and you may be quite sure that it was none of my seeking.
  • Of his knighthood; p. 18

Quotes about Tenniel

• Tenniel is the man.
  • Sir Noel Paton, refusing to illustrate Through the Looking-Glass; quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898) p. 130

• Mr. Tenniel is the only artist, who has drawn for me, who resolutely refused to use a model, and declared he has no more needed one than I should need a multiplication-table to work on a mathematical problem!
  • Lewis Carroll to Gertrude Thomson, letter of 31 March 1892
  • Quoted in M. N. Cohen & E. Wakeling, Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators (2003), p. 247

• Tenniel raised the political cartoon to a new level of dignity and importance.
  • Edward Hodnett, Image and Text (1982), p. 167

• Tenniel, who had started as a child prodigy, nearly ended as one. When a boy, fencing with his father, he lost the sight of of one eye. But the remaining one saw more than most.
  • Harold Bloom, in an Introduction to a 2006 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 23

External links

• "John Tenniel (1820-1914)" by Edward Wakeling (March 2008)
• Works by John Tenniel at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of Tenniel Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel at Project Gutenberg
• John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
• More about John Tenniel and the making of the illustrations for the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland books
• A collection of Tenniel's American Civil War-era illustrations