When Art Imitates Art: Portraits of Literary Characters by Famous Artists
From Picasso's Don Quixote to Lichtenstein's Tintin
Recently, I stumbled on a portrait of a character I’ve loved from childhood (Tintin) created by an artist I admire (Roy Lichtenstein) that I had never seen before. Because it is my job to make lists of things for the internet, I then wondered what other visual artists, contemporary or otherwise, had taken famous literary characters as their subjects. I went hunting; below is some of what I found. Note that of course there are many, many paintings of Shakespeare characters, so I’ve chosen just a few representative pieces here. I’m still on the lookout, so if you know of any good ones that I’ve missed, do us all a public service and drop a link into the comments.
“Tintin Reading” by Roy Lichtenstein, 1995
“Ophelia,” by Sir John Everett Millais, c. 1851
“Don Quixote,” by Pablo Picasso, 1955
“After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue,” by Jeff Wall, 1946
“Down the Rabbit Hole” (Alice and the White Rabbit), by Salvador Dalí, as part of a set of illustrations for the book, 1969
“Miranda,” by John William Waterhouse, 1916
“Courtroom Scene from Alice in Wonderland,” by Ralph Steadman, 1967
“Cruella De Vil,” by Keith Haring, 1984. (Admittedly, this is probably a representation of the Disney version—but she was a literary character first!)
The cover for The Little Mermaid: A Fairy Tale of Infinity and Love Forever by Hans Christian Andersen and Yayoi Kusama, 2016
“Don Quixote Defeated,” by Gely Korzhev, 1990
“Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing,” by William Blake, c.1786
“The Three Witches,” by Johann Heinrich Fussli, 1783
Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nightown, by Carl Van Vechten, October 29, 1958
“Moby Dick,” by Frank Stella, 1989
“Captain Ahab,” by Rockwell Kent, 1930
Emily Temple
Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
