Art: Otherwise

“I quite agree with you” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—’Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—’Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'”

—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The hideous Flemish masterpiece, newly acquired by London’s National Gallery, looked strangely familiar. Probably, said the National Gallery experts last week, Illustrator John Tenniel had used it as the model for the Duchess in Alice. Flemish Master Quentin Matsys (1466-1530), who had painted the original, had intended it as a caricature of Margaret (nicknamed “Pocket-mouth”), Countess of Tyrol. About the only change Tenniel made, agreed the London News Chronicle, was to add “ermine to the headdress and sausage curls to the forehead.” Otherwise little was otherwise.