Lewis Carroll, Henry Holiday and Joseph Swain's Tragicomedy
You find many renderings of John Martin‘s The Bard in the Internet. I think that in this comparison the left one is the right one and that the right one is not John Martin’s.
In Henry Holiday’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark there are several references to John Martin’s original painting. Some are funny, some are spooky.
2018-10-24, update: 2019-02-09
2017-11-25, update: 2019-02-06
A Snark article in the Knight Letter
(with lots of help from the editors Chris Morgan and Mark Burstein)
Source: Knight Letter (ISSN 0193-886X), Fall 2017, Number 99
When I wrote this article, I failed to mention that already in 1973 Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear (MG058). I am sorry for not having mentioned that.
I posted my article online with permission of the Knight Letter editors. In the online copy, I fixed the wrong URL kl.snr.de. It’s kl.snrk.de. Furthermore, four additional images have been attached to my online version.
2018-02-09, update: 2018-12-30: Reference to Elizabeth Sewell
2018-12-30, updated: 2022-08-01
Could this be a pictorial reference by Alfred Parsons to The Hunting ot the Snark?
I am struggling with this one.
2017-08-29, updated: 2018-12-25
Today I start to refer to Martin Gardner’s annotations to The Hunting of the Snark in a more systematical way. Admittedly, I should have done that much earlier. I didn’t read the annotations carefully enough. As an example, Martin Gardner annotated (MG058) to The Hunting of the Snark that Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense (1973) that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear. I found that in Google.
I should have mentioned Elizabeth Sewell in my article Nose is a Nose is a Nose in the LCSNA Kight Letter № 99, Fall 2017, p. 30~31.
“MG058” stands for the 58th annotation in the annotated Snark and links to articles and blog entries which contain issues to which Gardner had referred. In this case it is about Lewis Carroll’s and Edward Lear’s waistcoat poetry.
“MG0” leads you to all entries in snrk.de which refer to issues addressed by Martin Gardner.
Joseph Swain engraved Henry Holiday’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. As the details (including the hatching) of Holiday’s illustration drafts are important, I assume that Swain knew about Holiday’s pictorial allusions.
This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose. I found it in the Victorian Web in an article by Simon Cooke.
left]: Henry Holiday: Segment from a depictionof the Baker’s visit to his uncle (1876) in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (engraved by Joseph Swain).
[center]: Doesn’t this thumb look more like a piece of cloth rather than like a thumb?
[right]: John Everett Millais: Redrawn Segment from Christ in the House of His Parents aka The Carpenter’s Shop (1850), at present on display at Tate Britain (N03584).
See also: snrk.de/page_sphinx#4panels | Twitter
Christ in the House of his Parents: Details from a stained glass window (Brechin Cathedral, source: BSMPG @ Twitter) by Henry Holiday and from a painting by J.E. Millais.
The images are quite different. Important things they have in common with other Carpenter’s Shop paintings are the depiction of Joseph as a real carpenter at work and the wood shavings.
The big beast perhaps gave birth to a Boojum.
(John Tufail made me aware of this illustration by J. J. Grandville.)
From Mahendra Singh’s The Dream Book of Mr. Pyridine
Matte painting by Matthew Scheuerman (see also interview by Richard Cave) for Michael McNeff‘s movie
Usually elements 
