Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger – The Hunting of the Snark

The Queen and the Snark

My article “The Queen and the Snark” has been published in the magazine ILLUSTRATION (Volume 21, Issue 80, dated Summer 2024, but published in February 2025). From the editorial of the magazine: “[…] and we
have one essay which finds half-hidden allusions in Henry Holiday’s visual interpretation of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Is any of this real? It is up to you, the reader, to decide.”

I fully agree with that: Since the end of 2008 I think that Holiday’s illustrations are an important contribution to the interpretation of Carroll’s tragedy. They are as important as the text of the poem.

The publishing of this issue of the magazine had been delayed. For details please check with Cello Press in the UK. (As of today, the page for issue 80 still is empty.)

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2025-01-01, update: 2025-03-04

When the Queen met the Boojum

This is the first page published in snrk.de, a blog which was set up in 2017. It’s mostly about Lewis Carroll‘s, Henry Holiday‘s and Joseph Swain‘s illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark.

In his Illuminated Snark, John Tufail assumed that the night sky in the front cover of The Hunting of the Snark could be a map. Together with my assumption that Henry Holiday drew inspiration from several paintings by Marcus Gheeraerts (I+II), John’s paper helped me to find the Ditchley Portrait. That again helped me to find the painting by an unknown artist depicting Elizabeth I at old age.

It took me several years to find another map to which Henry Holiday might have referred as well.

2017-08-28, update: 2024-05-12

It Looks Furry

This is from an exTwitter thread:

No Spring til now: Mary Throckmorton, Lady Scudamore, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts in 1614. What was that message about, I wonder? pic.twitter.com/aBE2TxD6oa

— Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) January 20, 2019

exquisite. what is she hiding/nursing?

— Christine Bagot (@cm_bagot) January 20, 2019

That's what I was wondering. It looks… furry

— Aphra Pell (@AphraPell) January 20, 2019

Could be a flohpelze or zibellino – could she have been pregnant at the time?

— Sally Hickson (@HalcyonSilks) January 20, 2019

To some those scarfs might look "furry". @AphraPell, it is interesting that you say that, because perhaps that's what Henry Holiday "saw" when he got inspired by Gheeraerts for an illustration to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". — https://t.co/DhiHH0Usu0 pic.twitter.com/PtwlHPhmDE

— Goetz Kluge (@Bonnetmaker) January 20, 2019

2/2 Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn, beautifully painted also in 1614 by Marcus Gheeraerts. It’s his day today. pic.twitter.com/l7RDGIEycB

— Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) January 19, 2019

inspiration by re-interpretation

2019-01-20, updated: 2023-10-05

The Bandersnatch fled
as the others appeared

509 The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared
510 Led on by that fear-stricken yell:
511 And the Bellman remarked “It is just as I feared!”
512 And solemnly tolled on his bell.

※ Lewis Carroll (text) and Henry Holiday (illustration)
※ Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder
※ Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
※ On Borrowing

2022-05-31 (my 5696×4325 assemblage: 2013)
update: 2022-11-08

On Borrowing

One of the surest tests [of a poet’s superiority or inferiority] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

T. S. Eliot, p. 114 in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920

Likewise, a good illustrator welds the theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different and sometimes even funnier than that from which it is torn.

Main image: John Martin’s painting The Bard (c. 1817).
Inset: From a segment of an illustration (1876) by Henry Holiday to the chapter The Beaver’s Lesson in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.

And Lewis Carroll may have borrowed from Thomas Gray.

All art is infested by other art.

(Leo Steinberg, in Art about Art, 1979)

Gustave Doré was an inspired master thief too:Segments from:
※ Plate I (mirror view) of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1863),
※ Matthias Grünewald’s Temptation of St Anthony (c. between 1512 and 1516, a panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, now located at Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France).