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ARTHUR RACKHAM, VPRWS (1867-1939)
If the major gift book illustrators were to divide the world between them, Arthur Rackham would claim the northern lands. His early familiarity with the English countryside was soon matched by a fascination with Germany, stimulated by walking tours. The knowledge that he gleaned from these travels gave him the authority to represent touchstones of Romanticism, from Andersen to Wagner, in uncanny detail. His vision is so comprehensive and so convincing that it seems we need look just a little harder; if we do, we too would see Shakespeare’s fairies playing in the hedgerows and Grimm’s goblins looming out from the shadows cast by twisted trees.
Rackham was born in Lewisham on 19 September 1867 and was educated at the City of London School. He visited Australia in 1884 and, on his return, enrolled in evening classes at Lambeth School of Art as he looked for work. Employed as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Insurance Office between 1885 and 1892, he resigned from the post to join the staff of the weekly Pall Mall Budget, later transferring to the Westminster Budget.
Rackham began to illustrate books in 1894, and this activity provided a field in which he could expand his imaginative gifts. He assimilated a wide variety of influences, including the work of E J Sullivan and the Victorian fairy painters, and by the turn of the century had evolved his characteristic style. Working in both black and white and colour, he enhanced the expressive linear quality of his drawing with a muted range of pigments. This restricted palette was affected in part by the requirements of the new three-colour half-tone printing process. However, it offered the artist much, including the opportunity to suggest an atmospheric sense of space. For some fifteen years his only serious rival as a fairy story and gift book illustrator was Edmund Dulac. His first publications included, most notably, The Ingoldsby Legends (1898) and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1899); and with Rip Van Winkle (1905), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1908) his reputation was assured.
Exhibiting widely at home and abroad, including several solo shows at the Leicester Galleries, Rackham won many awards. He was elected an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1902, a full member in 1908, and Vice-President in 1910. He was also Master of the Art Workers Guild in 1919, and a member of the Langham Sketching Club.
After 1920, Rackham undertook painting in oils and began to show at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. He visited America in 1927, and in 1931 went to Denmark where he made studies for illustrations to Hans Andersen; these were further used, in 1933, as the basis of his designs for a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, his first professional theatrical project. These last twenty years were something of an anti-climax, partly due to the decline in the standard of book production. But he continued to produce some excellent illustrations, such as those for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) and Peer Gynt (1936). Despite declining health, he completed his last set of designs, for The Wind in the Willows, shortly before his death at Limpsfield, Surrey on 6 September 1939.
For further information, see: James Hamilton, Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration, London: Pavilion Books, 1990; Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work, London: Heinemann, 1960
