John Tenniel

Victorian Britain's voice of measured authority. Tenniel drew for Punch for more than half a century and produced over 2,300 political cartoons and illustrations. His style was clean, statuesque and dignified rather than grotesque, which made his rare cruelties land harder. His best-known cartoon, Dropping the Pilot, shows Bismarck leaving the ship of state he had steered for almost 20 years, and Bismarck himself thought it a fine one. The same hand fixed the public image of Alice and the other characters of Lewis Carroll's books, and in 1893 Tenniel became the first illustrator or cartoonist to be knighted.