Research Catalog

Title

Sir John Tenniel : aspects of his work / Roger Simpson.

Author

Simpson, Roger, 1951-

Publication

Rutherford [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London : Associated University Presses, c1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Tenniel, John, 1820-1914
• Tenniel, John, 1820-1914.

Description

187 p. : ill.; 29 cm.

Summary

• But Tenniel's long career was also a struggle between his responsiveness to popular taste and his sympathy with views on art that condemned that taste and sought to reform it. He was drawn to the Bohemian cliques of the 1840s, which were instrumental in the attempt to resurrect a school of English history painting. He played a relatively successful and prominent role in the focus of that movement, the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament.
• But against that didactic paternalism was a deep-rooted responsiveness to his middle-class audience and its culture. An avid amateur actor, Tenniel incorporated strong gestural and theatrical elements into his work. Above all he drew upon the conventions of visual satire. Reform theory was based on the creation of social change, and so tended to see the past as separate from the present. Satire acted as the restraining social conscience against political excess, and against change.
• In his satires of the medieval revival in Punch in the 1850s, Tenniel deyeloped a purely visual, gestural, historicist burlesque that parodied the revival but was also a genuine adaptation of historical forms to a contemporary context. He created a traditionalistic cosmos in which the past permeated and enriched the present - culminating in the great high satire of his Alice work; a triumph of English common sense.
• Tenniel's career would seem to prove the opposite hypothesis. After Westminster, Tenniel would transfer the cold, hierarchical imagery that he evolved there to his work as the principal political cartoonist for Punch. He held the position for nearly forty years, and he developed a style of imperial allegory that brought him immense respect and exerted an enormous influence over political cartooning at home and abroad until well into the twentieth century.
• That project and his work for it raise a number of serious questions of ongoing significance - concerning the need for state patronage of art, the possibility of imposing foreign forms upon an unresponsive public, and the plausibility of the idea that art can effect social change. Many believed that the state machinery that had become necessary for the effective government of industrial culture was also necessary to ensure the survival of a vigorous art reflecting the values of that culture.
• This study deals with the early works of the influential illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, and with the ways in which the great debate of the 1840s in favor of the creation of an English school of history painting manifested itself in his art. Indeed, the historicist revival would be the driving force behind virtually all of his artwork throughout the whole of his life, including the work by which he is best known, his illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Subject

Tenniel, John, 1820-1914 > Criticism and interpretation

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

pt. I. Art and Reform: The Westminster Project. 1. "The Spirit of Justice" The Crisis of Depiction: The State Patronage of Art. The Competitions. "The Spirit of Justice" and the Critics. The Iconography of Reform. 2. Art and Institutions. "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" After Westminster: From Reform to Empire. "British Valhalla" John Tenniel and the Art-Union of London: From Pretense to Parody -- pt. II. John Tenniel and the Language of Satire: "The Evangel of Common Sense" 3. Mr. Punch and the Pope. 4. The Eglinton Tournament. Satire and the Medieval Revival. The Tournament. John Bull: The Nature of Satire. 5. From Punch to Alice: The Tradition of Satire. Minor Cuts: The Decorative Initials. Minor Cuts: Punch "Shakspeare" Satire and Children's illustration. 6. Alice and the Popular Tradition. Alice and the Gothic Tradition. Alice and the Tradition of 184Os Satire. 7. The Final Years.

ISBN

0838634931

LCCN

^^^91058943^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library