Derek Hudson

“ 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. ”

“ But the Rackham world was one to be created on his own terms of diligent and thoughtful application. Designing for the films or for the theatre might have brought large returns; but the backstage atmosphere of hustle and improvisation was not for him. It was left to Max Reinhardt and Walt Disney to realize on the stage and screen the fantasy that Rackham had so long anticipated, and his one experience of the professional theatre – his costumes and scenery for Hansel and Gretel at the Cambridge Theatre, 1933–4 – did not fully satisfy him. ”

“ Rackham enjoyed poking fun at himself – a sure sign of a healthy state of mind. When the American George Macy called on Rackham in the summer of 1936 at his ivy-covered, red-roofed cottage studio off Fitzroy Road, he, too, found him ‘looking like a character out of one of his own drawings’. ‘In the last years of his life, when I knew him,’ wrote Macy in The Horn Book (May–June 1940) , ‘his head seemed always cocked to one side, bright and eager and smiling and cheerful ”

“ Despite his highly developed visual memory for nature and landscape, throughout his life he depended considerably on living models; in addition he kept a large collection of costumes and properties. If a drawing required an attractive woman, no one could satisfy the reader’s imagination more delicately or sympathetically than Rackham. ”

“ If Rackham himself showed less confidence that he had entirely ‘come off’ in the theatre, this was because he felt acutely conscious of operating outside his proper artistic milieu. But at his age Hansel and Gretel was an admirably gallant experiment – though one undertaken too late to influence his career. ”

“ He wondered what could be inside the two big parcels which had arrived at Limpsfield for him from Harraps (‘sheets to sign, I expect’) ; he had a word of inquiry for the Limpsfield robins – birds were an increasing interest; and as usual his last thought was for his wife’s health: ‘Good night, dear old Edy. I hope they do your pillows correctly & that you are sleeping.’
Rackham’s portrait of his daughter Barbara – ‘a charming head, in tone, with landscape background,’ said the critic of The Times – hung in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ exhibition in November 1932. ”

“ Henceforth life will only be possible for me with the aid of a surgical nurse – whether at home or at the hospital as at present. I wish I could stop losing weight – but I eat with difficulty & haemorrhage is frequent & severe. ”

“ I know that Kenneth wrote to a small schoolgirl in an elementary school, who had written a prize essay on “The Wind in the Willows” – “I have always thought of ‘Toad Hall’ as being on the Oxfordshire side of the river” – & I know a house, Elizabethan but somewhat ornate, that might serve as a model. ”