An exhibition at Tate Liverpool is celebrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the influence it has had on subsequent generations of visual artists. It includes the manuscript for the original story, which was originally written as a private gift for Carroll to 12-year-old Alice Liddell in 1864. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who went by the pen name Lewis Carroll, came up with the story of Alice and her trip to a fantasy world while on a boat trip with the real Alice and her family in Oxford in 1862. The exhibition includes photos of Liddell taken by Carroll taken in 1858.
Carroll was persuaded to publish the story and approached the artist John Tenniel, known for his cartoons for the magazine Punch, to provide the illustrations. The first book was published in 1865.
The books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass became huge successes by the end of the 19th Century, with spin-off gifts manufactured including board games and card games, dolls and figurines and slides for magic lantern shows.
Pop artist Sir Peter Blake is among those who have used the stories for inspiration in subsequent years. Sir Peter said he was captivated by the “magical realism” of the stories and aimed to capture “the sense of living one’s life through other characters”.
US photographer Anna Gaskell took pictures of a pair of twins dressed as Alice in a modern fantasy world for her series Wonder in 1996.
American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, the wife of artist Max Ernst, painted Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) in 1943.
(Taken from BBC)
