27 Facts About John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel was an English illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist prominent in the second half of the 19th century.

John Tenniel was a quiet and introverted person, both as a boy and as an adult.

John Tenniel was content to remain firmly out of the limelight and seemed unaffected by competition or change.

In 1840, John Tenniel, while practising fencing, received a serious eye wound from his father's foil, which had accidentally lost its protective tip.

In spite of a tendency towards high art, John Tenniel was already known and appreciated as a humourist.

John Tenniel became a student of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1842 by probation; he was admitted because he had made enough copies of classical sculptures to fill the necessary admission portfolio.

John Tenniel would draw the classical statues at London's Townley Gallery, copy illustrations from books of costumes and armour in the British Museum, and draw animals from the zoo in Regent's Park, as well as actors from London theatres, which he drew from the pits.

John Tenniel planned to enter the 1845 House of Lords competition amongst artists to win the opportunity to design the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster.

John Tenniel furthered political and social reform through satirical, often radical, and at times vitriolic images of the world.

In 1861, John Tenniel was offered Leech's position at Punch, as political cartoonist, but John Tenniel still maintained a sense of decorum and restraint in the heated social and political issues of the day.

When Leech died in 1864, John Tenniel continued their work alone, rarely missing a single week.

John Tenniel's task was to follow the wilful choices of his Punch editors, who probably took their cue from The Times and would have felt the suggestions of political tensions from Parliament as well.

John Tenniel drew 2,165 cartoons for Punch, a liberal and politically active publication that mirrored the Victorian public's mood for liberal social changes; thus John Tenniel, in his cartoons, represented for years the conscience of the British majority.

John Tenniel contributed around 2,300 cartoons, innumerable minor drawings, many double-page cartoons for Punch's Almanac and other specials, and 250 designs for Punch's Pocket-books.

John Tenniel drew 92 drawings for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

The first print run of 2,000 was sold in the United States, rather than England, because John Tenniel objected to the print quality.

Carroll did later approach John Tenniel to undertake another project for him.

John Tenniel's more precisely-designed illustrations depicted specific moments of time, locale and individual character instead of just generalised scenes.

John Tenniel's style was characteristically grotesque through his dark, atmospheric compositions of exaggerated fantasy creatures carefully drawn in outline.

Additionally, John Tenniel closely follows Carroll's text, so that the reader sees the similitude between the written text and the illustrations.

One was bracketing: two relevant sentences would bracket an image as a way of imparting the moment that John Tenniel was trying to illustrate.

When he retired in January 1901, John Tenniel was honoured with a farewell banquet, at which Arthur Balfour, then Leader of the House of Commons, presided, and described John Tenniel as "a great artist and a great gentleman".

John Tenniel died of natural causes on 25 February 1914, three days shy of his 94th birthday.

John Tenniel was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

John Tenniel became not only one of Victorian Britain's most published illustrators, but as a Punch cartoonist one of the "supreme social observers" of British society and an integral component of a powerful journalistic force.

Public exhibitions of Sir John Tenniel's work were held in 1895 and 1900.

John Tenniel was the author of one of the mosaics, Leonardo da Vinci, in the South Court in the Victoria and Albert Museum.