Artist/Maker: John Tenniel - Aberystwyth University School of Art Museums and Galleries

Born: 1820, UK, England, London, Bayswater Died: 1914, UK, England, London, West Kensington

Painter, illustrator and cartoonist. Son of a dancing and fencing master of Huguenot origins. Friends e.g. with painter John Martin (1789-1854) and illustrators Charles Keene (1823-91) and John Leech (1817-64). Exceptionally gifted, he sold his first oil painting aged 16 at the Society of British Artists in 1837. Trained at the Royal Academy, under the tutelage of Sir Frederick Madden (1801-73) and studied the works of the Nazarenes in Munich in the mid 1840s. In 1850, he started working for Punch and became its principal political cartoonist after Leech’s death in 1864; he only retired in 1900. One of his most famous images for the magazine is Dropping the Pilot (March 1890) which parodies the German Kaiser’s dismissal of Chancellor Bismarck. He created his best-knows book illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). He preferred drawing his designs on a woodblock with a 6H pencil and worked with wood engravers such as the brothers Edward and George Dalziel and father and son Joseph and Joseph Blomley Swain. He was knighted in 1893. In addition to his illustrations, he also painted classical and romantic subjects in watercolour.

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker