(1817–64). English caricaturist John Leech was notable for his contributions to the satiric British magazine Punch. He created sketches and cartoons depicting middle-class life and political situations.
Leech was born on August 29, 1817, in London, England. He was educated at Charterhouse, where he met William Makepeace Thackeray, who was to be his lifelong friend. Leech then began to study medicine but soon drifted into the artistic profession. In 1835 he published Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq., comic character studies from the London streets. Five years later Leech began contributing to magazines with a series of etchings in Bentley’s Miscellany; he also collaborated with George Cruikshank, whose work his own resembled in both style and subject.
Leech subsequently illustrated Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol (1843), the Comic History of England (1847–48), and the Comic History of Rome (1852). These were followed by numerous etchings and woodcuts of sporting scenes in the novels of his friend Robert Smith Surtees.
Leech’s first of about 3,000 caricatures and other illustrations to Punch magazine appeared in 1841. Leech concentrated on social caricature, as in Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr. Punch (1854, 1860, and 1863). Leech and the English illustrator John Tenniel were the creators of the conventional image of John Bull—a jovial and honest Englishman, sometimes in a Union Jack (the British flag) suit vest with a bulldog by his side. Leech also contributed to Punch almanacs and other products, to the periodical Once a Week, and to the newspaper The Illustrated London News, as well as to numerous novels and miscellaneous volumes. Leech died on October 29, 1864, in London.