Merry Christmas

Here is Robert Seymour, as Bob Cratchit, taking a slide down Cornhill on Christmas Eve, undaunted by Scrooge's bad attitude towards the holiday:

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year, to all of you!

Stave 1 : Bob Cratchit in the Tank

Task to come, time permitting : to read the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers, through to the end of the sections completed at the time the illustrator Robert Seymour killed himself on April 20, 1836.  This, because I am curious about the coincidence of Jacob Marley's death occurring seven years before the events in A Christmas Carol and Seymour's committing suicide seven years before Dickens wrote it.  I've modeled Bob Cratchit after a self-portrait by Seymour.  There were problems between Dickens and Seymour over The Pickwick Papers, and Dickens was one of the last people to see Seymour alive.  However, Seymour had some pre-existing mental health problems.  I wonder, did Dickens find himself feeling guilty about Seymour?  See the link below to the Wikipedia article on Seymour for more information.  It's a bit complicated.

Dickens doesn't give much of a physical description for Bob (his most notable feature is his clothing, a white "comforter," or scarf, and "no great-coat"), but Seymour would have been about the right age, based on the number and ages of Bob Cratchit's children.  English law on suicide during that period prevented his wife from inheriting anything from him, leaving Bob Seymour's family probably as badly off as Bob Cratchit's.  Again, please see the Wikipedia article.

And what about Seymour's illustrations for Thomas Hervey's 1835 Book of Christmas - did these have an influence on A Christmas Carol?  I'd be surprised if Dickens hadn't been familiar with it.  So I have another task to come, time permitting : to read all of Hervey's Book of Christmas.

Here are some relevant links :

Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Seymour_(illustrator)

Wikisource : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Seymour,_Robert_(DNB00)

The Pickwick Papers, from Project Gutenberg : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/580/580-h/580-h.htm

Thomas K. Hervey's Book of Christmas (1835, reprinted 1888) with illustrations by Seymour, also from Project Gutenberg (found via its mention in the above link to Wikisource) : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42622/42622-h/42622-h.htm

And here is my original sketch of Bob Cratchit, showing both the outlines of his comforter and his entire face :

Stave 1 : The Ghost of Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Jean-Michel

I used to live in New York.  This was a good idea, and a bad one, as most ideas are.  The problem with New York is, there is so much there, a person can forget What Else Is Out There In The World.  Fortunately, I failed as a New Yorker, and got to see something of What Else Is Out There In The World.

I have not based Jacob Marley on a historical figure.  I was inspired by a photograph I took in New York, on Great Jones Street, of a weathered stone architectural detail.  I think the street address is 43 Great Jones.  I have always thought of it as the Ghost of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had a studio at the end of the block at number 57.  I always thought that the weathered face should have some kind of ornament fixed on it, or a crown.

So, anyway, I made a sketch from my photograph and built up Jacob Marley's features from the proportions in the stone, and expanded upon the surrounding scrollwork to form the door-knocker, where Marley's Ghost first appears to Scrooge.

Stave 1 : Repairing the Gas-Pipes, finished

Here is the completed image, an aerial view of the activity in the court outside Scrooge's office :

I have tried to depict one of the street kids at the brazier to match the following image (also shown in a previous post), which is the same brazier seen from the perspective of the child :

(You can see all of the images I've made to date at flickr.com or on facebook.  My screen name for both is V.A. Kenyon.  Please leave a comment here, or on my flickr and facebook pages.)

Stave 1 : Repairing the Gas-Pipes, continued

Here are some more scans and one photograph of my work on this scene.

This is a tracing of the background from my original sketch : 

This is that tracing, transferred and inked on the background sheet : 

This is the background, colored in :

And this is a studio shot, showing the figures and brazier being colored in and cut out : 

You can see all of the images I've made to date at flickr.com or on facebook.  My screen name for both is V.A. Kenyon.  Please leave a comment here, or on my flickr and facebook pages.

Stave 1 : Repairing the Gas-Pipes

"In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture."

I am making two images for this (although I am completing them in reverse order...art doesn't tend to follow a straight line).  The first image is an aerial view of the workmen doing the repair work at the top of the image, with the street people at the bottom of the image.  This image is an unfinished preliminary sketch.  The second image, which is finished, "breaks the fourth wall", showing the workmen's brazier from the perspective of one of the street people (a child).  

I have relied on two main sources for this.  The first is, of course, Wikipedia : 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_manufactured_gas

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drawing_the_retorts_at_the_Great_Gas_Establishment_Brick_Lane.png

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gas_plant_Accum_(1815).JPEG

My second source is my own experience, of working construction many years ago, and of witnessing people suffering obvious and needless poverty in the United States and elsewhere, notably Southeast Asia.