John Leech
British, 1817 - 1864
(not assigned)London, England, United Kingdom, Europe
BiographyBorn Southwark, London, 29 Aug 1817; died London, 30 Oct 1864.English illustrator and caricaturist. He showed promise in drawing from an early age. He was educated at Charterhouse School, Surrey, and entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, to study medicine, where he showed aptitude in anatomical drawing. His family’s bankruptcy in 1830 ended this career, and he was compelled to find work as an artist to support himself. Friendships with William Makepeace Thackeray at Charterhouse and with the comic writers Albert Smith and Percival Leigh at St Bartholomew’s gave him useful connections in illustration and journalism.
In 1836 Leech briefly studied at Versailles with an unidentified French caricaturist, being one of the few British artists to do so. Returning to Britain, he brought a new approach to social satire in the tradition of the French comédie humaine. His first productions in this style were a series of lithographs, published by W. Soffe as Droll Doings and Funny Characters (1836–8; e.g. see Houfe, p. 37), spirited exercises in a technique he shortly abandoned. With the revival of wood-engraving and the burgeoning of comic magazines in this medium, Leech learnt the art from the engraver Orrin Smith and joined the staff of Bentley’s Miscellany in 1840. With the founding of Punch in 1841, Leech gradually established himself as the foremost artist of early Victorian pictorial satire in its pages. His work epitomizes the change in taste from the savagery of Regency caricature to the more gentle world of bourgeois domestic humour. He was less strong in draughtsmanship than some contemporaries, but his weekly Punch sketches provided a new freedom in execution and a vibrant view of the world that is an unerring barometer of Victorian trends and fashions.
From 1843 Leech shared the Punch cartoons with John Tenniel, completing 720 before 1864. He was at his best in political work, such as Substance and Shadow (Punch, v, 1843, p. 23), a biting attack on the government for favouring, in the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, a genteel brand of High Art that singularly failed to address the pressing social issues of the time. (Leech’s subtitle, ‘Cartoon No. 1’, was the first use of the word in its modern sense.) His most popular illustrations, however, were of sport, in particular the hunting field and the depiction of the follies of fashion. A wider public enjoyed his work through the pages of R. S. Surtees’s novels, which he illustrated with wit and vigour between 1853 and 1864, immortalizing the characters of Soapy Sponge and Mr Jorrocks in Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (London, 1853) and Handley Cross (London, 1854). Leech contributed illustrations to numerous novels, ballads, short stories and children’s books between 1840 and his death, most notably for Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (London, 1843–4), The Battle of Life (London, 1846), The Haunted Man (London, 1847–8) and volumes by such other Victorian writers as Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and R. H. Barham.
Leech contributed extensively to illustrated periodicals including The New Monthly Magazine, The Illuminated Magazine, The Illustrated London News and The Field. His circle included such leading artists as Sir John Everett Millais, William Powell Frith and Augustus Egg, who were influenced by his scenes of everyday life. From 1860 Leech experimented with a new process for producing oil sketches, using enlarged copies of his own Punch engravings printed on canvas that he tinted in oils. The series was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, London, in 1862 and was well received. Despite continental cures, ill health and strain overtook him. A set of enlarged chromolithographs of his work, which remained popular for the rest of the 19th century, was published (London, 1865) by Agnew’s.
Simon Houfe. "Leech, John." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050015 (accessed May 1, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
