Leech, John

Leech, John

(born Aug. 29, 1817, London, Eng.—died Oct. 29, 1864, London) British caricaturist. He gave up the study of medicine to produce comic sketches and etchings for magazines, notably Punch. He collaborated with George Cruikshank but later departed from the horrific and satirical elements of traditional English caricature to develop his own style of comfortable, warmly humorous middle-class urbanity, underlining character by emphatic contrasts of stock types. With John Tenniel he created the image of John Bull, a jovial, foursquare Englishman, sometimes in a Union Jack waistcoat, with a bulldog at heel.