Derek Hudson

“ Rackham cast his spell over the play; his drawings superseded the work of all his predecessors from Gilbert to Abbey, and for fifty years have enriched the imagination; his conception of Puck and Bottom, Titania and Oberon, Helena and Hermia, his gnarled trees and droves of fairies, have represented the visual reality of the Dream for thousands of readers. Here he excelled especially in landscape, and in reconciling dream and reality, giving himself to the luxury of rich detail a rare generosity. ”

“ Rackham’s external life was as reliable and conforming as might be expected of anyone who keeps his accounts, as he did, with Victorian precision. Within the studio, his intense artistic imagination, his love of beauty and of his craft, his power of assimilating himself to nature in all its forms – especially the smaller creation – made him inevitably a man apart. ”

“ True to human nature and human ways of considering human experience, sifted and transmuted till they become truer than truth, essence’. He had ‘no use for the flimsy representation of spiritual realities’. Whether an artist believed in his fairy or not, Rackham knew that ‘he must make it as real as if he did’, as real as the tree the fairy is sitting on, or the mist around the tree. ”

“ A large gathering applauded his ‘random thoughts of an illustrator’. The artist knew, said Rackham, that ‘for his illustrations to be worth anything he must be regarded as a partner, not as a servant’.
‘...An illustration may legitimately give the artist’s view of the author’s ideas; or it may give his view, his independent view, of the author’s subject. But it must be the artist’s view; any attempt to coerce him into a mere tool in the author’s hands can only result in the most dismal failure. Illustration is as capable of varied appeal as is literature itself ”

“ And that is the best advice I can give you.
‘You might perhaps make a precarious living out of such work for Scraps &c – but after a few years of it, you would feel it cramping debasing hack work, killing the art in you, & robbing you of the joy of true art expression which is, after all, the one & only reason for your being an artist at all. The living from art is a poor one – for only a very few is it better. For numbers it is dismal failure – for some perhaps who appeared in youth to be really talented & who started with the utmost enthusiasm. ”

“ One does not know which to admire most – the superb artistry of his landscapes, the poetry of the scenes of Rip by the riverside, the charm of his children and fairies, or the grotesque groups of Henrick Hudson and his crew which so long anticipated the art of Walt Disney (see pages 63 and 65) . With Rip Van Winkle he began his fruitful association with the firm of William Heinemann, who issued the book in a limited edition and a trade edition, while American, French, German and other foreign editions were also called for, setting a pattern of publication to be followed for many years. ”

“ A casual visitor’s impressions of a stranger will usually bring qualifications or contradictions from those who have known him more intimately – we have seen, for example, that Rackham’s isolation, a synonym perhaps for his artistic integrity, was consistent with a strong loyalty and devotion to his family and friends. Yet Mr Ward is not the only chance observer of Arthur Rackham who has retained a similar impression of him. The artist had indeed lived for many years in a world of fantasy that was consistently and recognizably his own. ”

“ The critics were largely of Barrie’s view in the matter, as, for example, the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Not the least part of that good fortune that follows Mr Barrie’s steps is his choice of an illustrator. Mr Rackham seems to have dropped out of some cloud in Mr Barrie’s fairyland, sent by a special providence to make pictures in tune to his whimsical genius.’ Rackham’s friends and fellow illustrators were genuinely delighted at his success. ‘It may be that your pictures are a craze, that people have lost their heads and that the dealers are keeping the thing up – it may be!’ wrote Harry Rountree. ”

“ The inconveniences were cheerfully accepted by Rackham, who had no liking for modern inventions. While he admitted to an affection for the bicycle, it was a favourite assertion of his that the fall of man began with the invention of the wheel. He would never have become a motorist if his wife, increasingly a semi-invalid, had not discovered a passion for being driven round the countryside for thirty miles a day at thirty miles an hour in the back seat of an open car. ”

“ She would launch herself into daring arguments in favour of free-love or Communism – but entirely theoretically, for she herself lived the mildest and
strictest of lives. ‘I rather like bad people but I can’t stand bad art’ – that phrase has seemed to her daughter to sum up exactly her attitude to life. By the time that she met Arthur Rackham, who was two months older than herself, Edyth Starkie already knew much of the world. ”

“ Certain characteristic strains ran through the lives of most of his children. There was a didactic, discriminating, scholarly strain; a strain of cheerful humour; an artistic strain; a conscientious strain, born perhaps of legal precision, which showed itself in strict application to business and financial matters. Arthur Rackham combined these qualities to a marked degree.
As a child in the house in South Lambeth Road, Arthur showed a precocious talent for drawing, and especially for fantastic subjects. ”

“ Although the waves and eddies of Undine bear the mark of Art Nouveau, the work was still another step forward for Rackham, the unity of conception in the line drawings and the colour plates, the assertion of contrast in the moods of the heroine, rendering it a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding. Rackham had become a public figure. Writers, well-known and less well-known, continually invited him to illustrate their works ”

“ That he has suffered from the diminishing acceptance of fairies in a disillusioned world is obvious. To those who consider them to be as imperishable and as necessary as folk-lore itself, Rackham is a valiant figure, for he, more than anyone, has kept the fairy world alive for children in the twentieth century. ”

“ He was fond of all inventive games, and never minded being invaded in his studio, in fact people and conversation around him never disturbed him while he was working. Barbara would often watch him at work, sitting at his drawing desk, with a paint brush in his mouth while he used a pen, or vice versa, making the weird grimaces of his characters as he drew them – a fascinating performance for a child. ”

“ To have visited the United States and made the acquaintance of so many hitherto unknown admirers remained a lasting source of pleasure to Rackham. Henceforth he often had the American market in mind, as with The Lonesomest Doll by Abbie Farwell Brown (1928) , which was published only in America, and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928) . Many of the drawings for these two books found their way into the collection of Columbia University, New York. In the England of jazz and Noel Coward the whimsical and fantastic had grown increasingly out of fashion. ”

“ This tallied with Mr Ward’s general impression of Rackham on that visit to Limpsfield:
‘I have the recollection of a smallish, ageing, almost wizened person, with a bald domed forehead and a very wide and elfish grin: a gnome, perhaps, though an entirely benevolent one. But there was more to the impression than that: there was something earthy and even elemental about him. ... Nor would it be wholly absurd to say that he resembled one of his own grotesquely poetical trees with (as like as not) faces, for which his own face might have served as the
model. ”

“ Rackham provided admirable new frontispieces for both books and worked on many of the old colour plates. The 1907 Ingoldsby, in its vellum-bound limited edition, is valued by collectors, but the book as a whole lacks consistency of vision. Authentic Rackham is to be found in the frontispiece and occasionally elsewhere, but might seem to have been imposed on a medley borrowed from Beardsley, Hugh Thomson and the monkish slapstick of John Hassall. By 1907 Rackham had not only outdistanced his own earlier self but had also outgrown the coarse humours of Barham. ”

“ But there was no question of his art-studies occupying the whole of his time; he had to prove his ability and work his way. Thus on 11th November 1884, his old masters Rushbrooke and Abbott both took up their pens on his behalf. Rushbrooke recommended him ‘on the score of intelligence, industry and character’, while his late headmaster Edwin Abbott declared that ‘as regards ability, knowledge, character, and gentlemanly bearing Mr Arthur Rackham would be well suited for the clerkship he is now seeking in the Westminster Fire Office’. ”

“ Sometimes he is wanted to add some fresh aspect of interest to a subject which the author has already treated interestingly from his point of view, a partnership that has often been productive of good. But the most fascinating form of illustration consists of the expression by the artist of an individual sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature.’
Rackham’s surviving correspondence shows that he was now in touch with almost as many authors as artists. ”

“ It is one thing to demonstrate the symbolism of a fairy-tale, which may plausibly be done, and another thing to use that information to psycho-analyse the illustrator. As a man’s character is always reflected in his work, we must be aware that Rackham’s sensitivity and the sweep of his imagination were both unusual. This biographical sketch presents the cheerful, methodical artist whom ‘all men knew’, but allows the psychologists to have their say elsewhere. ”

“ But it would be a mistake to suppose that as a young man he was untouched by the appeal of impressionism, for example, or that he fell into his career as an illustrator without any searching of his artistic conscience. In particular, he was well aware that by concentrating on illustration he was limiting his objectives and would be likely to take rank, save for the discriminating few, as a ‘minor artist’. ”

“ The Rackham books, both in their limited and their trade editions, had long established themselves in the book-collectors’ market on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is noticeable that there was now a considerable increase in the number of letters he received from American publishers, collectors, and simple admirers. In 1923, for example, a group of students at the Senior High School, Trenton, New Jersey, chose him, as a ‘noted man’ whose life had made ‘an especial appeal to them’, to be a ‘sort of “guardian” ’ for them ”