Alice’s little adventure is made of insanity, but so is the artwork within the pages. Cheshire, by Sir John Tenniel, is one of the pieces used in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Tenniel illustrated both this book and Through the Looking Glass, both books contain similar pictures: odd, because of the depiction of the story, no color, which makes the illustrations stand out more, and with odd proportions. The piece Cheshire by Tenniel is an overall odd work.

First, all of Tenniel’s pieces are in black and white. This may be because the books were printed without color, or he may have purposely done this. The lack of color makes you imagine the colors in the picture, like Alice’s dress may be a bright pink while the tree is orange, to go along with the delusional text in which the piece is placed. It makes the observer try to organize the insanity on the page. The fact that Cheshire is not in grayscale, but made of hatching and stippling, and maybe crosshatching, makes all the shadows more defined, making the piece have an eerie feel to it.

What stands out very much are the proportions. The Cat who is sitting on a tree branch is almost the size of Alice. Having never read or seen anything involving Alice and her Adventures, this is odd. Also, Alice seems a bit short herself in comparison with the tree by which she is standing. The tree looks as if it is a normal tree, where the first branches start over the heads of children, but children can still jump to reach them. Alice doesn’t look as if she could reach the branch at all. Then there’s the comparison between the tree and the Cat. The tree looks very small compared to the Cat, in turn making Alice look even smaller.

The overall oddity of this piece, yet with still being simplistic, shows that Tenniel is indeed a very talented artist. Alice, in the piece, is standing with a calm stance, hands behind her back, looking up at the Cat. As that happens in one of Alice’s escapades, it may not seem as that unique, but to be able to show through a picture how absolutely normal it happened, as opposed to how weird it actually is, shows talent. Tenniel did a wonderful job of making the Cat’s Cheshire smile just a creepy as it is (most likely) described. He also did a great job on making a very large cat sitting on a tree branch that looks like it could break look totally normal, no matter what the laws of science say.

The odd components of Cheshire by Sir John Tenniel make this piece interesting and thought-worthy. The color-lacking shading, the wonderful telling of the story, and the disproportional figures makes Cheshire a fantastic piece with the addition of helping to tell a story. Alice should be thankful that she had such a talented artist to make her story a little more believable, as a picture is worth a thousand words.