Valerie Browne Lester, the author of Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens (2004) has commented: "On listening to Dickens's synopsis of the plot, he would quickly understand that this particular book did not divide itself clearly into two forms of artistic subject matter. This upset Browne, who had always worked on his own. During this period Leech and his wife became close friends with Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Dickens.ĭickens suggested that Leech should co-illustrate his next book, Martin Chuzzlewit, with Hablot Knight Browne that was to be published in January 1843. Mrs Leech was frequently the model for his drawings of young women. They had a daughter, Ada, and a son, John George Warrington Leech. In May 1842 Leech married Anne Viola Eaton of Knutton, Staffordshire. Leech was a tall, handsome man with fine features, a wave of brown hair, and blue eyes. Simon Houfe has argued: "Leech created a dramatis personae of lovable characters who were instantly recognizable to the Victorian public: the sturdy British householder, the henpecked husband, the plain spinster, the intrepid sportsman Mr Briggs, the Brook Green volunteer, and the dandified and time-serving flunkey Jeames." Over the next twenty-three years the magazine published 3,000 of Leech's drawings and 600 cartoons. Leech's humourous drawings were extremely popular and was one of the main reasons the magazine became a great success. The following year he was recruited by a new journal, Punch Magazine, founded by Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew. He was a skilled and rapid designer, co-operative, witty, and self-effacing."Īlthough influenced by the work of James Gillray and George Cruikshank, Leech's humour was as one critic pointed out "less grotesque, less boisterous, less exaggerated, nearer to the truth and to ordinary experience." John Ruskin, the most important art critic of the time wrote: "John Leech's work contains the finest definition and natural history of the classes of our society the kindest and the subtlest analysis of its foibles, the tenderest flattery of its pretty and well-bred ways, with which the modesty of subservient genius ever immortalised or amused careless masters." Punch Magazineġ840 Leech was employed by the London Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany to supply illustrations. Though the author was an exacting taskmaster, Browne supplied everything Dickens needed in an illustrator. Patten, has pointed out: "Dickens recommended Browne for the position. Leech was short-listed to become Seymour's replacement but the job eventually went to Hablot Knight Browne. While working on The Pickwick Papers Seymour committed suicide on the 20th April 1836. Leech's work was compared to Robert Seymour, who at the time was working with Charles Dickens. For the next few years he produced a series of humourous pamphlets including the Comic Latin Grammar, The Fiddle-Faddle Fashion Book and the Children of Mobility. His first known published work was a pamphlet called Etchings and Sketchings (1835) and included drawings of street characters such as cabmen, policemen, street musicians, etc. Leech left medical school in 1834 and tried to make a living from drawing and painting. The author of John Leech and the Victorian Scene (1984) has argued: "The effect of this collapse, a great disgrace in Victorian London, was to colour the remainder of the younger Leech's life and leave a great scar between father and son." The money was needed as his father's business had failed and in the court of bankruptcy. Leech's teachers should became aware of Leech's superb anatomical drawings and began commissioning him to paint portraits. Leech was educated at Charterhouse where he became friends with William Makepeace Thackeray. As his biographer, Simon Houfe, has pointed out: "The young John Leech was brought up therefore in an atmosphere of sociability, debate, and knowledge of the public prints, mixing with politicians, businessmen, and journalists in his father's public rooms." John Leech, the only son of a Coffee House proprietor, was born in London on 29th August, 1817.
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