Arthur Rackham 1867 – 1939

Arthur Rackham 1867 – 1939 was an English book illustrator.

Rackham’s wife Edyth was an advocate of homeopathy, which she used to recover from heart disease (James Hamilton, Arthur Rackham: A Life With Illustration, (Pavilions books, 1995)).

Rackham’s publisher was William Heinemann, who also published Rudyard Kipling and Herbert George Wells,

From http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/rackham.htm With thanks to Jim Vadeboncoeur Jnr:  Arthur Rackham was born in 1867 into a Victorian age that he perpetuated and documented by way of his art. He was one of twelve children. He studied at the City of London School where he won prizes and a reputation for his art.

At the age of 18, he became a clerk. It was, after all, a Dickensian world as well, where clerks played a significant role in both fiction and real life. He clerked and in his spare time studied at the Lambeth School of Art. He made occasional sales to the illustrated magazines of the day like Scraps and Chums.

In 1891 and 1892, he had a close association with the Pall Mall Budget as one of this weekly’s main illustrative reporters. He was competent. Rackham’s early work showed facility but little else. The humor and romance and soul that were to make him the premier illustrator of the early twentieth century had not manifested themselves yet.

In 1892, he left his clerk position at the Westminster Fire Office for the uncertainty of a career as an illustrator. He landed a regular job at the Westminster Budget, a weekly magazine, that provided him with regular work as a reporter as he tackled the burgeoning book market. His first efforts were decidedly non-fantasy and are very indicative of an artist in search of a style…

His first book illustrations were published in 1893 and they were mostly reused images from magazines or books featuring the work of several illustrators (Tales of a Traveller is one such).

The first book with illustrations done specifically on commission was in 1896. That book, The Zankiwank and The Bletherwitch, to my mind marks the first hints of the lighter side of Rackham…

Nineteen more book assignments followed during the 1890’s, with dozens of pictures for two major children’s magazines: Cassell’s and Little Folks and even one for the venerable St. Nicholas. It’s intriguing to watch the progression of subject matter of the books during this period.

His second book was In the Evening of His Days. A Study of Mr Gladstone in Retirement, his third Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving. His fourth and sixth were The Money Spinner and other Character Notes and Captain Castle, and A Tale of the China Seas. He did another boy’s adventure book titled Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon, and several books on English Gardens and hunting and fishing.

Not really the stuff of fantasy and fairy tales, but there was The Ingoldsby Legends in 1898 (with 12 color plates and 80 line drawings) and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm in 1900 (with a color frontispiece and 95 pen & ink drawings).

By far his greatest efforts were being expended in the service of fantasy. The Ingoldsby Legends, by the way, was radically revised and updated in 1907.

From 1900 to 1904, it was pretty much more of the same: gardens, golf, cricket, bird watching, farming, shooting, Two Years Before the Mast, and several boy’s books like Mysteries of Police and Crime, The Argonauts of the Amazon, and Brains and Bravery.

While the subject matter remained fairly constant, Rackham was developing a style that was not only his own, but was to influence a generation of children and artists. The roots of the style were surely evident in many of the books listed above, but the flowering took place in 1905 in a stunning edition of the old Washington Irving classic, Rip Van Winkle. It was Rackham’s first major book.

The publisher, William Heinemann, knew it had a sure best seller. Rackham painted 51 color plates, tipped in and gathered together at the rear of the book. They featured all of the traits that were soon to be as famous as his signature, a sinuous pen line softened with muted water color, forests of looming, frightening trees with grasping roots, sensuous, but somehow chaste, fairy maidens, ogres and trolls ugly enough to repulse, but with sufficient good nature not to frighten, backgrounds filled with little nuggets of hidden images or surprising animated animals or trees.

Most obvious, in retrospective, is the calm and good humor of the drawings. They seem imbued with a gentle joy that must have been reassuring to both the children and their parents.

Rackham had found his niche. His drawings would convey a non threatening yet fearful thrill and a beauty that was in no way overtly sexy or lewd. It was a perfect Victorian solution and he seems to have taken to it with an impish delight.

To touch on just few of the literally dozens of highlights of a long and successful career, Rip Van Winkle was followed in 1906 by one of his two masterpieces, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, another 50 plate extravaganza - this from Hodder and Stoughton…

1907 saw an edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from William Heinemann. J M  Dent reissued Ingoldsby and Constable & Co and Grimm, both in revised, updated editions.

In rapid succession, amid a wealth of other books (some minor, some important), William Heinemann published four books intended for adults: in 1908 - A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in 1909 - Undine; in 1910 and 1911 The Rhinegold and the Valkyrie and Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. These four books contained 115 color plates from Rackham’s paintings…

Through the teens and twenties he continued to create wonderful images and books. Many of vellum bound limited editions of the era are from Rackham. Many of his books were revised and re-released. There was even a Peter Pan portfolio. It seems like every classic was fair game for him.

Through 1940, he did versions of Aesop’s Fables, Mother Goose, A Christmas Carol, The Romance of King Arthur, English Fairy Tales, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Irish Fairy Tales, A Fairy Book, The Allies Fairy Book, Comus, A Wonder Book, The Tempest, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Chimes, The Night Before Christmas, The Compleat Angler, The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, The King of the Golden River, Goblin Market, The Pied Piper, Peer Gynt, The Wind in the Willows and more. Note how many of these same titles were also issued with illustrations by Edmund Dulac.

He never lost the joy and sense of wonderment and he never gave in to the baser styles that fell in and out of favor over the years. From Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 to the start of World War I, Rackham’s illustrations preserved a lifestyle and a sensibility that kept the frighteningly modern future at bay.

His beautiful drawings were the antithesis of the industrial advances that allowed them to be printed at affordable prices. Even into the twenties and thirties, his art was a constant reminder of those aspects of innocence that had been left behind. He always kept his gentle humor and his Wind in the Willows, published posthumously in 1940, is as much a children’s classic as his Peter Pan.

Rackham died in 1939.

Of interest:

Marjorie Rackham 1883 - , sister in law of Arthur Rackham, was Chairwoman of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and a friend of Lydia Ernestine Becker, Millicent Fawcett,