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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