A to Z of artists Leech, John 1817 - 1864

John Leech was born in Bennett Street, London on 23 August 1817, the son of a vintner. Educated at Charterhouse, he later gave up studying medicine at St Bartholmew’s Hospital to become an illustrator. With influential friends in the literary and artistic worlds, Leech produced his book of Etchings and Sketchings, caricatures of Londoners, in 1835. He was taught how to draw on wood and it was as a black and white illustrator that he joined the staff of the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany in 1840, and contributed his first of numerous drawings to Punch the following year. Leech illustrated more than ten humorous sporting books stretching from R.S. Surtees’s Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, published in 1853, to the same author’s Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (1861). Lacking confidence to paint directly in oils, some of his cartoons were enlarged and ‘printed’ on canvas which Leech then coloured (in oils). An exhibition of these works was held at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in June 1862, and twelve hunting scenes were published as large prints: one plate was from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour and one of Jorrocks from Handley Cross. He had previously contributed to The Sporting Review among a very large number of other journals and magazines of his day. Much praised in his lifetime, Leech’s pungent, but not unkind, wit provides an essential understanding of the lives of all levels of mid-Victorian society. He died in London after a short illness on 29 October 1864.