Arthur Rackham

“ Edyth Starkie, with a smooth pink-and-white complexion, unlined to the end of her life, with wide-open Irish blue eyes ever full of mischief, her hair snow-white from an early age, was the antithesis of Arthur Rackham in character. She had a charm which made everybody like her and many people love her. If she was not conventionally beautiful, she gave the impression of beauty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The favour which most artists enjoy gradually dwindles, and memory must supply them with consolations, but Arthur Rackham’s ardour is still like a flame. His ingenuities and his whimsies are mellower than ever before and the new drawings and paintings, many of which are his choicest works technically and artistically, are bound to enhance his reputation and widen his popularity. ”

“ Faith was an unusual-looking girl, with the palest gold hair which she wore tied back with a black velvet ribbon. She had a curious, far-away expression in her great blue eyes and the simplicity of a little child. For Faith had never ceased her odd fashion of living in dreams, so that the real world was yet an unexplored country to her. Indeed, in her quaint short-waisted white muslin frock, with a tiny fan and a bunch of country flowers in her hand, she might have sat as one of the models for Arthur Rackham’s spiritual, half-fairy children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rackham cast his spell over the play; his drawings superseded the work of all his predecessors from Gilbert to Abbey, and for fifty years have enriched the imagination; his conception of Puck and Bottom, Titania and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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Rackham’s art, however, is always conditioned by a moral quality of mind, and a breezy healthfulness of feeling. Even his most fearsome grotesques and terrifying nightmares are invested with a certain delicacy and touched with an ethereal beauty. No matter in what strange realm we may find ourselves, he is always credible because truth underlies his invention and gives it the indispensable note of actuality, and no other artist could have converted a familiar park like Kensington Gardens into such a vividly real fairy-land as Peter Pan’s playground. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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’. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To live here must vulgarise an artist ... I could easily run off & dump my bags & self on the first ship to Europe. ... Bang bang bang bash. That man will bust that drum if no one stops him.’
Later letters were more cheerful. Rackham at sixty was obviously unable to come to terms with New York, but he found much to enjoy there. ‘Everyone is excessively kind,’ he wrote; ‘Everyone was brought up on my work – if young enough – or brought up their families on it if old enough.’ He soon had the run of six New York clubs, and was inundated with invitations. ”

“ When Edyth was sixteen, her mother took her on a tour of Europe. They stayed for a time in Paris, where Edyth studied art, and then went on to Germany, where she became engaged to a Prussian officer at Potsdam, causing a major scandal when she broke off the engagement. After her father’s death, she settled in Hampstead with her mother.
Arthur Rackham admired her not only as a woman but also as an artist, who was then achieving a considerable reputation as a portrait painter. Her pictures are intensely individual and sincere. ”

“ Edyth Starkie: a self-portrait in oils, probably aged about 20.
Arthur Rackham: a self-portrait in oils, aged 24.
Although her career was broken by ill-health, she was an artist to be remembered with honour. It will be readily understood, then, how much Rackham owed to his wife, who was married to him at St Mark’s, Hampstead, on 16th July 1903 (she was a lapsed Catholic, the Rackham family were Anglicans turned Unitarians) . His alliance with this gay artistic Irishwoman brought out the best in Rackham ”

“ 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. ”

“ The leather binding has gold stamping on the cover and gold lettering on the spine, and the cloth binding has the stamping in blind on the cover and gold lettering on the spine; gilt top. Both editions have 562 numbered pages, 35⁄8×6. The frontispiece is in colour, and there are eleven full-page illustrations in black and white, all by Arthur Rackham. This book is one of a series of The Temple Classics For Young People. This book was reprinted in 1909 in a larger edition with added illustrations and will be found listed with the 1909 books. ”

“ Diving into a pile of surviving ‘fan’ letters we find one from Rochester, New York, written in the late nineteen-twenties, which commences ‘My dear Sir Arthur’, and another containing the apology: ‘Everybody here in New York calls you “Sir Arthur”, and that explains why I began my letter that way.’ (A Melbourne correspondent had already asked: “How shall I begin? Not Mr Rackham surely! It doesn’t sound a bit like the artist spirit who creates those wonderful fairy people. ...’) A letter from Texas came from ‘a co-ed with red hair and artistic appreciations’. ”

“ Rackham was fortunate in obtaining Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch as a substitute for Barrie. ‘Q’ not only admired Rackham’s work; he also thoroughly understood a child’s instinctive longing for the imaginative and fanciful. ‘To this instant, constant, intellectual need of childhood no one in our day,’ he wrote, ‘has ministered so bountifully or so whole-heartedly as Mr Rackham.’ And Quiller-Couch was happy, too, in associating the random, impressionistic nature of much of the Book of Pictures with ‘the wayward visions that tease every true artist’s mind, while he bends over the day’s work’. ”

“ Thomas Rackham, Arthur’s grandfather, was a schoolmaster, who first taught in the school of his uncle William Capel in Vauxhall Walk and who opened a private school of his own in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, in 1832. ”

“ And the relation between the man and his drawings was made particularly close in Rackham’s case by his practice of using himself as his own model. Rackham well knew that he was part and parcel of his own creation; and it amused him. Active and supple, he was adept at posing and ‘making faces’. His features (or the suggestion of them) are reflected back to us, usually as by a distorting mirror, from the features of innumerable grotesques and from his own personified trees; sometimes they are reflected, as from a clearer mirror, in recognizable self-portraits. ”

“ 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 served the Guild with scrupulous devotion. A self-portrait in oils, dated 1924, hangs in the hall of the Guild to remind a later generation of what manner of man he was. It shows him wearing a bow-tie and a grey waistcoat; he holds a pencil in one hand, a sketch-book in the other. There is nothing smug about this face, of which the lines are sensitive and thoughtful to the point of severity (in Rackham’s case an introspective exaggeration) . The background shows the River Thames, Waterloo Bridge ”

“ 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. ”

“ If Rackham’s fairies dance lightly out of the range of criticism, this does not mean that all his work is beyond criticism; we find heroic mythological figures who would obviously have been at home in the Edwardian Academy, and we find a degree of archness here and there among the Arcadian idylls; the humour of long noses can be exaggerated. ”

“ More interesting than any of these early efforts were Rackham’s four halftone illustrations and cover design for the first edition in book form of The Dolly Dialogues by Anthony Hope (1894) which had originally appeared without illustrations in the Westminster Gazette. These drawings, stilted as they were – the cover design (see page 41) is the best of them, being in the Beggarstaff manner – served to link Rackham’s name for the first time with a work of literary merit. Soon afterwards came drawings for Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ”

“ Even Punch takes Rackham seriously, and he has been delighting young and old for so many years that in 1922 an admirer can merely follow, with docility, the trails of praise which earlier writers have blazed. His excellences have become byewords, but there are no amusing myths or romantic legends connected with his life to excite the attention of the curious. ”