Talking about thumbs:


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Beyond thumbs (but still with J. E. Millais):

Snark hunting is fun:

(by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and Henry Holiday)

Snark hunting can be spooky too:

(by Henry Holiday and John Martin)

Why do artists hide images in images? In case of Henry Holiday's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark one reason probably was conundrum construction. Another reason simply is: Fun!

From severnbeachantiques.com/famous-rare-1980-huntley-and-palmer-rude-garden-party-ginger-nuts-tin you learn about one of many reasons why artist hide images in images:
"I did them out of devilment, purely for a laugh.I've always been a bit of a naughty boy but I've nothing against Huntley & Palmers. There have been rumours that I got made redundant and did it out of revenge. But that's not true - I was only ever a freelance. I just felt like adding a bit of smut to the proceedings."
That is what Artist Mick Hill said about his hidden surprises in the cover (1980) of a Huntley and Palmer garden party ginger nuts tin.

A comment by Jean-Michel Frodon on artsciencefactory.fr (now redesigned as artsciencefactory.com): "21 février 2011 à 21 h 47 min
Cette semaine, nous avons mis en ligne dans la Factory les contributions d’un nouveau membre de la communauté artsciencefactory, Goetz Kluge. La recherche proposée par M. Kluge porte sur la réutilisation de formes visuelles dans un autre contexte que celui par lequel elles ont été créées. Cette recherche est menée d’une manière qui s’appuie d’abord sur la sensibilité, elle ouvre de nombreuses perspectives quant à la compréhension de la construction des représentations. Plus d’un siècle avant qu’on ait pour la première fois entendu parler de copié/collé ou de remix, un dessinateur, Henry Holiday, met en oeuvre un système très sophistiqué de citations visuelles pour produire ses propres oeuvres, qui n’ont rien de plagiats ou d’imitations. Il n’est ni le premier ni le seul, mais l’observation attentive de Goetz Kluge, et son utilisation d’outils informatiques récents, aident à comprendre « de quoi sont faites les images » – plastiquement, mais aussi mentalement. Une telle démarche intéresse non seulement les artistes mais aussi tous ceux qui ont à produire des représentations, des visualisations et utilisent pour cela un « vocabulaire » et une « grammaire », le plus souvent sans en être conscients. JMF"

My backup of the source: www.snrk.de/le_petit_bleu_qui_trouble

In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters:
"I will not refrain from setting among these precepts a new device for consideration which, although it may appear trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, that if you look at any walls spotted with various stains, or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expression of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well-conceived forms. With such walls and blends of different stones it comes about as it does with the sound of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and word you can imagine."
Source: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pareidolia&oldid=610862866#Art (2014-05-13) and nevalalee.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/leonardos-ink-blots (2014-06-07)
See also "OF DEVICES FOR PAINTERS 173" (MS. 2038, Bib. Nat. 22 v.) in www.archive.org/stream/leonardodavincis007918mbp/leonardodavincis007918mbp_djvu.txt

How I got into Snark hunting:

trueoutsider.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/henry-holidays-snark
"Some interesting detective work showing Henry Holiday’s borrowings from the above etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder is here."

Nice encouragement. The link would direct you to an old site using Flicke. But in 2013 I moved to ipernity. Additionally now there is a "subreddit": /r/TheHuntingOfTheSnark

Wie recht der Herr Nietzsche hatte -

"One of the surest tests [of a poet's superiority or inferiority] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

Thomas Stearns Eliot, in Philip Massinger's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922.

- www.goodreads.com/review/show/1125436332
- www.goodreads.com/review/list/7955917-goetz-kluge?shelf=snark-hunting
- www.goodreads.com/review/list/7955917-goetz-kluge?shelf=art

In 2017 I created my own Snark blog snrk.de

I maintain my Ipernity account to keep the history of my Snark hunt in the internet.

One of my Snark findings is mentioned in the website of the British Museum.
See also bm.snrk.de