This painting was completed from a drawing of 1973 and an oil sketch of the same date.
The Walrus is depicted as a man, as the Cockney expression for a grizzled old man is ‘an old Walrus’.
The model for the Walrus was yours truly wearing a coat I wore at Art School. In the coat pocket can be seen a bottle of meths.
The Carpenter who is carrying a piece of driftwood has a leering countenance and certainly looks like he would have eaten all the oysters without any twinge of conscience.
The subject comes from Lewis Carrol’s story ‘Through the looking-glass’ and specifically the poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.
I feel this is one of my most humerous and accomplished portrayals of people and pays homage to the illustrator John Tenniel.
