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Arthur Rackham, 1867-1939

Arthur Rackham was an artist whose fantastical, beautiful, and sometimes truly creepy illustrations of fairy tale creatures made him famous and brought him the admiration of an international audience of people of all ages.

Arthur Rackham was born in London in 1867. He was a pupil at the City of London School and in 1884 became an evening student at the Lambeth School of Art, earning his daily bread by becoming a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office. He remained in this job for a number of years, increasing his income and building a growing reputation as an illustrator by drawing in a variety of styles for newspapers and journals. In 1892, he gave up his day-job and joined the Westminster Budget as a full-time artist. The improvement of photographic reproduction for newspapers threatened his income as a journalistic artist and contributed to his turning to book illustration and developing his own unmistakable style.

“… Work was hard to get and not well paid, and such efforts as I made along the lines I have since followed received little encouragement. And then came the Boer War. That really was a very thin time indeed for me, and may be considered the worst time I ever had. The kind of work that was in demand to the exclusion of almost anything else was such as I had no liking for and very little aptitude. It was also clear that the camera was going to supplant the artist in illustrated journalism, and my prospects were not encouraging. But my work was becoming less immature and before long my special bent began to be recognized – by artists first.”

In 1900, he met his future wife, fellow artist Edyth Starkie, and her encouragement to exhibit some of his fantasy pictures led to his receiving several commissions to illustrate works suited to his whimsical and at times grotesque style of illustration. Author E.V. Lucas wrote to Rackham congratulating him on the success of the exhibition of his art work for Rip Van Winkle in 1905: his only complaint was that all the pictures he liked best had already been sold to other buyers. Real success and fame came with the commission to illustrate J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Published in 1906, the book proved immensely popular, and Barrie himself was delighted with the illustrations. The two men seem to have appreciated each other greatly; in later years, Rackham owned a Persian tabby-cat named “Sir James” in honour of Barrie. From that time onwards, Rackham had few financial worries as the royalties from his books and money made from selling artwork originals enabled him to support himself and his family. By 1920, he had accumulated enough wealth to acquire a country house at Houghton, near Arundel.

Rackham’s 1907 illustrations for Alice in Wonderland caused some controversy amongst those who remembered and loved John Tenniel’s illustrations and the artist was somewhat dismayed at much of the negative criticism levelled at his work. In later years, however, he ceased to take notice of art critics. “So, when we have put forth our efforts, let us quietly retire to our workshop again and try to do better next time.” His main wish was for people to enjoy his works. He was especially fond of children, and always answered their fan-letters sensitively and seriously. He said of his books: “To end their lives in a nursery … is the most desired end for my books to reach.” Rackham’s fellow artists’ appreciation of his work can be seen in his 1908 election to a full member of the Royal Water-Colour Society, and his membership and later role of Master of the Art-Workers’ Guild. His work was exhibited in many European cities; galleries in Vienna, Barcelona and Paris acquired works for their permanent exhibitions.

Rackham was in his late forties when the First World War broke out, but although too old for regular army service, he joined the Hampstead volunteers and dug trenches in Essex. The modern world largely passed him by, the style and subjects of his drawings changed little with the news of death and suffering from the front. However, he did contribute to publications of a patriotic nature, such as King Albert’s Book (1914), and also illustrated The Allies Fairy Book (1916). After the war, the English market for illustrated books of high quality had shrunk, and the realities of war meant that readers favoured other topics over fairies and fables. However, his work enjoyed increasing popularity in the United States, with 83% per cent of his 1923 income coming from American sources. He illustrated several books specifically for the American market, and took on a commission for thirty drawings on the Early English Aristocracy for the Colgate Company to advertise their Cashmere Bouquet Soap. In 1927 he even travelled to New York to attend an exhibition of his works and meet with publishers and editors. Nevertheless, the gradual shrinking of Rackham’s income, combined with his wife Edyth’s ill-health, necessitated a move from their beloved Houghton home to Surrey in 1929.

Towards the end of the 1920s, the market for Rackham’s work picked up again, with limited editions of the works he illustrated being the most popular. He continued to be successful as a book illustrator and enjoyed most of his commissions up to the end of his life, with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of mystery & imagination, of which Rackham said that the illustrations “were so horrible I was beginning to frighten myself.” The last book he illustrated was The Wind in the Willows, a book of which he had always been particularly fond. 30 years earlier, he had had to refuse, reluctantly, a commission to illustrate the book because other projects had kept him too busy, and he relished the opportunity to fulfil his desire to illustrate the story. Even as he worked on this last commission, he was suffering from cancer, and despite an operation in 1938 his health deteriorated. However, he was determined to complete his commission, and, in April 1939, just five months before his death, he finished the pictures for The Wind in the Willows in spite of illness and constant exhaustion.

Rackham was best known for his fantasy illustrations but he was also an accomplished painter, and although he preferred water-colours, he also worked in oils. He counted his paint-box as his “constant companion” from the time he had first received one as a small boy. He sold many of his water-colours but they are not as well-known as his book illustrations, as many of them are in private collections and therefore not available for public viewing. Rackham was also drawn to portraiture, although this was more his wife’s domain; she was a member of the International Society and won prizes for her paintings. Rackham first became known for his line drawings, and only later added colour to his repertoire, letting other artists colour his pictures until he developed the confidence to do it himself. He showed a great talent for sensitively coloured illustrations in subdued tones, with occasional flashes of bright colour. His usual starting point for a book illustration was first a pencil and then a pen and ink drawing, to which colour would only be added at a later stage. Rackham was something of a perfectionist and laboured tirelessly over the proofs for the plates in his books, sometimes sending them back several times so that the colours might be just right. He said of himself: “I’m a very slow and painful worker.” Although many of his plates are contained within a traditional rectangular frame, his obvious preference was for free, rough-edged vignettes, in which his fantastical figures break free of all traditional confines.

Rackham’s work was mainly focused on the world of fantasy, even during the First World War, when so many artists depicted war and suffering. Yet unlike many fairy illustrations, his are by no means sentimental, cute or sweetly pretty, but show an understanding of the fairy folk as distinctly other, and often dark and eerie. His vision created a whole new fairy world in the imaginations of those who read the books that he illustrated, a world that influences fantasy writers and artists to this day. Yet although his pictures can be frightening, they also have a whimsical, dream-like quality, which is shown especially in his famous gnarled anthropomorphised trees with their hidden faces and long, wind-tossed limbs. His drawings of animals capture at once the essence of the animal and infuse it with believable and fondly portrayed humorous human qualities. Many of his fantastical trees and creatures were based in reality: he took as his models real trees, his friends and family and paid models, and even kept a notebook of the models he used, with a physical description and the guises in which he had drawn or painted them. The darkness that often lurks at the edges of his pictures, but is occasionally found in their very centre, shows that he was not interested in drawing in the sentimental fashion favoured by many Victorians and Edwardians. Instead, he drew as he saw fit the pictures that the texts of the books he illustrated suggested to his creative genius.

In direct contrast to the fantastical nature of his pictures, Rackham was a practical and methodical man, well able to conduct his own business concerns, tidy, neat and energetic, as little like the cliché of the eccentric and self-centred artist as it is possible to be. His daughter Barbara described him thus:

“He seemed to me always to look much the same, small and thin, with a deeply grooved but a clear-cut face, and smooth pepper-and-salt hair at the sides of his bald head. If he grew slightly balder, more wrinkled and silvery during the years, it hardly altered his general appearance. He was active and precise in all he did, whether working or playing, in which was really little difference since he enjoyed his work and took his play seriously.”

Rackham’s nephew Walter Starkie remembers his first impression of Rackham as being like one of the goblins from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and he does, in fact, often appear in his own pictures in the form of a gnome, an idea which obviously tickled his sense of humour. This quiet and always kindly sense of the ridiculous in human nature is strongly evident is Rackham’s fantastical illustrations. A fellow artist described him as “one of the most inexhaustibly imaginative painters of poetic and grotesque fantasies whom our water-colour school has ever produced.”

Arthur Rackham died in September 1939, having published more than 3300 individual images and decorations during his career as a book illustrator. Many of the classic works he illustrated are still in the bookshops today; his imaginative illustrations never bettered and still beloved of a wide readership.

 

Bibliography:

• Dickens, Charles. A Christmas carol. Illus. Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
• Gettings, Fred. Arthur Rackham. London: Studio Vista, 1975.
• Grimm, Jacob, and Grimm, Wilhelm. The fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. Trans. Mrs. Edgar Lucas. Illus. Arthur Rackham. London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1909.
• Hamilton, James. Arthur Rackham: a life with illustration. London: Pavilion Books Limited, 1995.
• Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: his life and work. London: Heinemann, 1974.
• La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl. Undine. Trans. W.L. Courtney. Illus. Arthur Rackham. London. William Heinemann, 1909.
• Latimore, Sarah Brigg, and Haskell, Grace Clark. Arthur Rackham: a bibliography. Jacksonville, FL.: San Marco Bookstore, 1987.
• Niebuhr, Barthold Georg. The Greek heroes. Illus. Arthur Rackham. London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1903.
• Rackham, Arthur. Arthur Rackham’s book of pictures. London: Heinemann, 1913.