John Tenniel Wiki

Sir John Tenniel (February 28, 1820 – February 25, 1914) was an illustrator, graphic humorist and English political cartoonist featured in the second half of the 19th century. He was knighted for his artistic achievements in 1893. Tenniel is especially remembered as the leading political artist of Punch magazine for over 50 years, and for his illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking-Glass , and What Alice found there (1871).

John Tenniel Age

Tenniel was born in Bayswater, West London on February 28, 1820. He was 91 years old.

John Tenniel Early Life

Tenniel was born in Bayswater, west London, of John Baptist Tenniel, a fencing and dance master of Huguenot descent, and Eliza Maria Tenniel. Tenniel had five brothers; two brothers and three sisters A sister, Mary, would later marry Thomas Goodwin Green, owner of the pottery that produced Cornishware. Tenniel was a calm and introverted person, both as a child and as an adult. He was glad to remain firmly out of the spotlight and seemed unaffected by competition or change. His biographer Rodney Engen wrote that “Tenniel’s life and career was that of a supreme gentleman outside, living on the edge of respectability.” In 1840, Tenniel, while practicing fencing with his father, received a serious wound in the eye of his father’s blade, which accidentally lost its protective tip. Over the years, Tenniel gradually lost his sight in his right eye; He never told his father about the seriousness of the injury, since he didn’t want to bother his father anymore. Despite his tendency to art, Tenniel was already known and appreciated as a humorist and his early company with Charles Keene fostered and developed his talent for academic cartoons.

John Tenniel Career

Tenniel’s first book illustration was for The Book of British Ballads by Samuel Carter Hall, in 1842. While participating in his first book illustrations, several competitions were held in London, as a way in which the government could fight the growing Germanic Nazarene style and promote A true national English art school. Tenniel planned to participate in the 1845 House of Lords competition among artists to win the opportunity to design the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. Despite not meeting the deadline, he presented a 16-foot (4.9 m) cartoon, An Allegory of Justice, to a design contest for the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. That is why he received a bonus of £ 200 and a commission to paint a fresco in the Upper Waiting Hall (or Hall of Poets) in the House of Lords.

John Tenniel Death

Tenniel died on 25 February 1914. His cartoons dealt with the issues of the Victorian Era. They were “issues of working class radicalism, labour, war, economy, and other national themes,” according to Pook Press.

He was his country’s “foremost political and satirical cartoonist,” the site reports. In particular, he was negative toward Irish nationalists in his cartoons.

After he died at age 93, Daily Graphic wrote, “He had an influence on the political feeling of this time which is hardly measurable… While Tenniel was drawing them (his subjects), we always looked to the Punch cartoon to crystallize the national and international situation, and the popular feeling about it – and never looked in vain.”