Two Noses

2014

Thank you. Perhaps this is something which only is interesting to visual artists (like you). "The Hunting of the Snark" is around since almost 140 years, yet people seem to focus mainly on alleged textual allusions in Lewis Carroll's poem and keep missing the pictorial conundrums constructed by Henry Holiday, which in some cases are quite obvious. The comparison shown on the top of this page is especially interesting. In some of his Snark illustrations, Holiday re-interpreted shapes: a shawl turned into a beaver, a queen turned into a bouy etc. However, in this case a nose was inspired by a nose. But here, Holiday did not simply "copy" the original nose, he mirrored it vertically so that it became a nose with a new shape, which he then "transplanted" onto The Banker's face.