John Leech

London, 1817 - 1864, London

BiographyLCNAF n79054670
Leech, John (English illustrator and caricaturist, 1817-1864)

LC Heading: Leech, John, 1817-1864
Biography:

Leech, John (1817–1864), humorous artist and illustrator, was born at 28 Bennett Street, Stamford Street, London, on 29 August 1817 and baptized on 16 November at Christ Church, Southwark, London, the only son of John Leech, (d. c.1870), the assistant proprietor of the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill, and his wife, Esther, née Amery. His father had been brought over from Ireland by his uncle, John Leech sen., of the London Coffee House, about 1813; he was a partner by 1819 and the sole proprietor of the establishment by 1823. 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.

Leech was adept with a pencil from an early age, and one of his sketches was shown to John Flaxman who commended it. He became a day boy at Charterhouse School, just north of St Paul's Cathedral, in January 1825 at the age of seven and a half. In September 1826 he became a boarder, joining a complement of about 600 boys in the historic school buildings. An outgoing, sporting boy, he did not shine academically and preferred fencing with Henry Angelo to study. He was well known for decorating his school books with drawings and became acquainted with a more senior boy, William Makepeace Thackeray, who remained a lifelong friend.

In 1833–4 Leech studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London with a view to a medical career. He became friendly with fellow students such as Albert Smith, Percival Leigh, and Arthur à Beckett, whose literary careers were to be of great assistance to him, and he excelled in anatomical drawing under Dr Edward Stanley. After Bart's he was passed down through various doctors' practices but never succeeded in anything but his splendid caricatures and drawings. His medical career ended as suddenly as it had begun, in January 1834.

John Leech's father was a poor businessman and less worldly-wise than his uncle. The London Coffee House lost money and he decided to sell it and purchase another in Fleet Street. Within eight months this second business had failed and the elder Leech was in the court of bankruptcy. 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.

In the straitened circumstances of the Leech family, Leech's talents as a draughtsman changed from being a hobby to being a lifeline. He took up the popular medium of lithography and drew on stone a series of humorous street characters as ‘Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq’ (1835). He admirably captured the mood of the moment by combining the caricature of types with the humour of sports, in a similar manner to Robert Seymour, his contemporary. It was in 1836 that he missed his first chance to be an illustrator of Dickens when he was shortlisted to take the place of the recently deceased Seymour on the highly popular Pickwick Papers.

In the same year Leech travelled to France and spent some weeks at Versailles studying with a French artist, one of the few illustrators of his generation to have done so. The result of his study was not only a reflection of the general reaction against scurrility in Britain but also a marked shift from the savage caricature of the Regency towards the new satire of the comédie humaine exemplified by Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni. This is at once apparent in the single-caricature lithographs issued by Spooner and Soffe in 1837–8, notably Droll Doings and Funny Characters, which are more domestic in subject. In the following two years Leech established himself as a fluent draughtsman and one who could as easily draw on stone as on steel. He had a great success in 1840 with his satire on the ‘Mulready envelope’ which had been developed by the newly created Post Office. In the same year he illustrated two books by Percival Leigh, The Comic Latin Grammar and The Comic English Grammar, with numerous wood-engraved illustrations, though his tour de force was the French-inspired Children of the Mobility (1841), a poignant skit on popular albums. In May 1842 he married Anne Viola (Annie) Eaton (bap. 1818, d. 1868) of Knutton, Staffordshire. They had a daughter, Ada Rose, and a son, John Charles Warrington Leech. Mrs Leech was frequently the model for the popular ‘Leech young ladies’.

By 1840 Leech was already ‘second’ illustrator to George Cruikshank in Bentley's Miscellany, but his great moment came in August 1841 when he became associated with the new magazine Punch. After a faltering start in the first and second volumes of the publication, he became a regular contributor from the end of 1842, often in harness with Percival Leigh. In July 1843 he began a series of ‘Cartoons’, full-page subjects satirizing the Westminster Hall murals. The name stuck and so Leech effectively gave to the English language the meaning of ‘cartoon’ as a large satirical print. For the next twenty years he produced hundreds of brilliant and incisive sporting and domestic illustrations for the weekly magazine. They were collected together as Pictures of Life and Character (1854–69) and reissued again in the 1880s. 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. The last was really the creation of the Punch contributor Thackeray in 1845, but Leech was to continue it for many years. His holidays were spent among his sporting friends hunting, shooting, and fishing in the shires, a rich quarry for his humour and sketches, often including landscape. He was always more at home in portraying the social scene than in setting down the ‘big cut’ or political cartoon, though he did some notable ones during the Crimean War, such as ‘General Février Turned Traitor’ (February 1855). He supplied numerous half-pages to the Punch Almanacks over the years, a task which he loathed, as he was a poor timekeeper and worked to the last minute. His frontispieces to the Punch Pocket-Books (1844–64), etched and coloured by hand, are among his most charming works.

Leech was also making a name as an illustrator of contemporary fiction, mostly by secondary writers, such as Douglas Jerrold's Story of a Feather (1846) and A Man Made of Money (1849), and Gilbert à Beckett's Comic History of England (1847) and Rome (1852). He brought his own drolleries to Hood's Comic Annual and the children's book Jack the Giant Killer (both 1843). He excelled in depicting precocious juveniles, as in his own The Rising Generation (1848).

Leech's greatest opportunity to work with a substantial author came with Charles Dickens's Christmas books (1843–8). His illustrations to A Christmas Carol (1843) remain the most enduring images of this classic, though his work for the later books was careless and less successful. He also acted in Dickens's amateur theatrical company. Perhaps his most important partnership came with his introduction by Thackeray to R. S. Surtees. Although Henry Alken and Phiz (H. K. Browne) had drawn for Surtees, Leech's caricatured but more modern approach was the perfect foil to Surtees's writing; Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour appeared in parts in 1852, followed by Handley Cross (1853) and three further novels by Surtees. Leech's Jorrocks and Soapy Sponge became part of the national consciousness. He worked extensively for Once a Week, Punch's sister paper, and for the Illustrated London News. Two later successes were A Little Tour in Ireland (1859), in conjunction with his friend the Revd S. R. Hole, and Puck on Pegasus by C. Pennell (1861).

Leech was a tall, handsome man with fine features, a wave of brown hair, and blue eyes, all of which were best captured in John Everett Millais's portrait of 1854 (National Portrait Gallery, London). He dressed well and was a sociable figure among friends but shy of public acclaim. Like many Punch artists he yearned to be considered a serious painter. In the early 1860s he utilized a new patent for printing with rubber in order to enlarge some of his illustrations to painting size. These were then printed on canvas and coloured by the artist. He held two exhibitions of these ‘sketches in oil’ at the Egyptian Hall and the Auction Mart in London in 1862 and catalogues of all the exhibits were published. They were financial successes, greatly helped by Thackeray's favourable reviews.

Leech's lack of artistic training gave him a freedom of expression and a verve which was immediately popular with the public. Although his drawings lacked the precision of John Tenniel or the finesse of Millais, they had an immediacy which summed up the moment. For this reason he was extravagantly praised by Ruskin and suggested as an academician by Millais (royal commission on the Royal Academy, 1863, 185–6). Between 1845 and 1862 Leech had acquired increasingly bigger London houses, where he lived in some style. The expense drove him to take on more work and this taxed his physical strength. The onset of angina was not helped by the constant pecuniary demands from his indigent father and importunate sisters. He developed a sensitivity to street noise, particularly music (a frequent subject of his work). Affected by Thackeray's death in 1863, curative holidays failed to improve his health and he died at his home, 6 The Terrace, Kensington, London, on 29 October 1864 and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery, London, on 4 November. He was survived by his wife.

Simon Houfe
(Simon Houfe, ‘Leech, John (1817–1864)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2014 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/16322, accessed 16 May 2016])

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Last Updated8/7/24

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