What’s it like to illustrate a book already known for its iconic illustrations? Alice in Wonderland, originally drawn by Sir John Tenniel, was first published 150 years ago; here Anthony Browne describes his new surreal take on Alice. Look out for the primates!
One of the main problems when illustrating Alice was how to avoid being too influenced by Sir John Tenniel’s imagery. For the Mad Hatter I tried to get round the Tenniel version by getting rid of his top-hat and replacing it with with lots of different hats, and further suggesting his madness by splitting his face into one half happy and one side sad. Interestingly I later learned, after the book was first published, that a contemporary of Lewis Carroll had written of him that “ ...the two sides of his face looked as if they belonged to two different people.”Photograph: Anthony Browne
Again Sir John Tenniel’s image of the duchess, based on a painting by the Flemish Renaissance painter Quintin Massys “A Grotesque Old Woman,” was difficult to get round, so I thought about a duchess and what she was, and if she had a baby who turned into a pig, what did that make her? I tried to show the porcine aspects of her - the bow in her hair that may remind us of a pig’s ears, the nostrils like a snout, she’s dressed in pink, and, if that’s not enough, there are even sausages round the cook’s apron.Photograph: Anthony Browne
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