Sir John Tenniel: Google Doodle celebrates English illustrator and political cartoonist’s 200th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates a notable English illustrator and political cartoonist for the magazine ‘Punch’ Sir John Tenniel’s 200th birthday on February 28, 2020.

Sir John Tenniel was born in Bayswater, West London, to John Baptist Tenniel, a fencing and dancing master of Huguenot descent, and Eliza Maria Tenniel. He was an English illustrator, graphic humorist, and political cartoonist conspicuous in the second half of the 19th century. He was knighted for his artistic accomplishments in 1893.

Sir John Tenniel is recalled particularly as the principal political cartoonist for Punch magazine for more than 50 years, and for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871.

Sir John Tenniel was a quiet and introverted individual, both as a kid and as a grown-up. He was content to remain firmly out of the limelight and appeared to be unaffected by competition or change. His biographer Rodney Engen composed such Tenniel’s “life and career was that of the supreme gentlemanly outside, living on the edge of respectability.”

In 1840, Sir John Tenniel, while working on fencing with his dad, got a genuine eye twisted from his dad’s foil, which had incidentally lost its defensive tip. Throughout the years, Tenniel step by step lost sight in his right eye; he never told his dad of the seriousness of the injury, as he didn’t wish to upset his dad further.

Sir John Tenniel’s first book illustration was for Samuel Carter Hall’s The Book of British Ballads, in 1842.

In 1861, Sir John Tenniel was offered John Leech’s position at Punch, as a political cartoonist, yet Tenniel despite everything kept up a sense of decorum and restriction in the warmed social and political issues of the day.

Sir John Tenniel contributed around 2,300 cartoons, incalculable minor drawings, some double-page cartoons for Punch’s Almanac and different specials, and 250 designs for Punch’s Pocket-books. By 1866 he could “command ten to fifteen guineas for the reworking of a single Punch cartoon as a pencil sketch,” close by his “comfortable” Punch pay “of about £800 a year”.

Regardless of a great many political cartoons and several illustrative works credited to him, quite a bit of Sir John Tenniel’s fame originates from his illustrations for Alice.

Sir John Tenniel drew 92 drawings for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1871).

Regardless of his propensity towards high art, Sir John Tenniel was at that point referred to and acknowledged as a humorist and his initial friendship with Charles Keene encouraged and built up his ability for scholarly exaggeration.

In 1900, when Sir John Tenniel was eighty, he retired as the principal cartoonist at Punch. The eyesight in his left eye was failing because of overwork, yet he despite everything kept on painting watercolors until he went totally visually impaired.

When Sir John Tenniel died on February 25, 1914, he was 93 and about 50 years had gone since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published.