Rackham

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Listen to me, Alan Rackham, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him, Listen to me.
He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no hint of the travail. ”

“ Rackham cast his spell over the play; his drawings superseded the work of all his predecessors from Gilbert to Abbey, and for fifty years have enriched the imagination; his conception of Puck and Bottom, Titania and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

“ 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. ”

“ There was a measure of artistic talent in the Harris family. James’s brother Henry was a lithographer, and Henry’s son Augustus became a drawing master at Maidstone.
Alfred Thomas Rackham, the father of Arthur Rackham, was born on 11th July 1829, in the house in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, and was christened at old Bermondsey Church. It was then a relatively prosperous neighbourhood, for a number of wealthy men lived in Bermondsey at their business premises. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you know Arthur Rackham’s fairy-land of books—if you know ancient Æsop and modern Peter, and their immortal equals, Rip, Undine and Alice, Puck and Mother Goose; if you know Grimm, who is better than painted gingerbread and striped sugar-sticks, and if you know the gods and giants and dwarfs and nymphs of the legendary Rhine—not only through the wonder-makers who first shaped them for our hearts, but also through the wonder-maker who has reshaped them for our eyes—then you really know as much of Arthur Rackham as can be told. ”

“ Alyn Williams, President of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, and his American wife were Rackham’s companions on the voyage in the liner Republic in early November. ‘Mrs Williams, thank heaven, had never heard of me before,’ Rackham told his wife. In the ship’s gymnasium Rackham and Williams went through a series of exercises designed to make Rackham fatter and Williams thinner. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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’. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Kilgour, who could not get near her, held up five fingers to her above the bobbing heads in the crowd. She counted them gaily, putting down the number.
Rackham was still at her side, insisting, but her answer was the same. He looked at her queerly.
"You seem to be dancing everything, more or less, with your husband."
Kitty Drake, floating in like a smoke wreath, put in her word.
"A husband," she said sapiently, "is the only possible partner for a frock like hers. I always come to the Melton Ball in rags."
But when Rackham had departed, she looked curiously at Susan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His first crude published drawings had appeared in Scraps of 4th October 1884, illustrating the thesis: ‘Mothers in Ceylon have a curious way of preventing their children from eating too much. A fine thread is tied round the child before it commences its meal, and when the thread breaks, the child is considered to have had enough.’ Rackham demonstrated this with the minimum of subtlety. ”

“ Rackham we find the three-colour process never forced, but always at its best, and his happily balanced tones seem to suggest the very atmosphere of mystery and enchantment proper to those worlds of romance and faëry which this fascinating artist delights to picture. But whether he expresses his visions in colour or black-and-white, he gives always new meanings to old tales. ”

“ He did the evil, believing that it was good, out of sheer devotion to Roderick. I always liked Rackham. I really think in a different way, that he loved Roderick more than I did. Yes! Even more; although I would have given my life to save my darling. He will suffer—he must suffer—but from such suffering he will learn the true good. And if he—if he—Aileen?”
“I am here, dear.”
“It is growing dark. I can’t see you. Put your dear arms round me. Yes! I feel happier now. Never doubt, my darling girl, never fear; never despair. You and your good husband have happy years before you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On his last day in America, before sailing in the Olympic at midnight to get home for Christmas, Rackham visited an exhibition of drawings in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, met the young artist, and spent the evening with him and Anne Carroll Moore, who later described the occasion in The Horn Book (Christmas, 1939) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Rackham books published in 1912 and 1913 made a complete contrast to Wagner. In Aesop’s Fables (1912) and Mother Goose (1913) Rackham’s primary intention was to amuse, but his illustrations for the fables of ‘The Moon and her Mother’ and ‘The Gnat and the Lion’ suggest the imaginative refinement that he brought to the task. Rackham was often his own model; there are several self-caricatures to be detected in Aesop’s Fables. He is the man who catches the flea, the pompous gentleman who scolds the drowning boy, the credulous slave-owner who scrubs the black boy (see page 101) . ”

“ 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 ”