Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 3

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER THREE

Marriage and Success

lthough by the end of the century Rackham had made his mark as an illustrator, and although the responsibilities of marriage which he assumed soon afterwards increased his determination to devote himself to this branch of his art, there are some early sketches in oils, including a self-portrait of 1892 (see page 55), which show that he was anxious to experiment in that medium, while several interesting and highly deliberate portraits and self-portraits, undertaken at intervals throughout his life, emphasize that portraiture remained one of his unfulfilled ambitions. It is probable that he was never fully satisfied with his portraits and doubted his ability to make a livelihood out of them, with the result – which we cannot regret – that he devoted himself to that kind of work, mostly based on themes provided by literature, which the public came to expect of him and in which he was successful both financially and artistically. But it would be a mistake to suppose that as a young man he was untouched by the appeal of impressionism, for example, or that he fell into his career as an illustrator without any searching of his artistic conscience. In particular, he was well aware that by concentrating on illustration he was limiting his objectives and would be likely to take rank, save for the discriminating few, as a ‘minor artist’.

To his work in his chosen field Rackham brought the gifts of an unusual visual memory, especially for landscape and natural growth in all its forms (less, perhaps, for architecture), and a fertile imagination guiding a hand of great sensibility and skill in draughtsmanship. He was fond of children and a close observer of their moods and movements; he understood the delight most of them have in fairies, which does not mean that he himself ‘believed in fairies’. He had also a keen eye for the odd and grotesque and for the ironies of incongruous juxtaposition.

Some of his drawings – those for Edgar Allan Poe, for example – could be gruesome, and there was ‘symbolism’, conscious or unconscious, in many of the fairy tales he illustrated. But an analysis of ‘symbolism’ in Rackham’s drawings, or a psychological interpretation of his work – not many of his commissions, be it remembered, were entirely of his own choosing – would be unlikely to reveal interesting repressions or afford valuable insights into Rackham’s character. Gifted with a prolific poetic imagination and fertile invention, he enjoyed a cheerful happy temperament. Methodical and businesslike, he was careful with his money but could be exceedingly generous in presents to others.

If Rackham depended for general inspiration on the pre-Raphaelite tradition and on the Gothic and Italian primitives, more particular influences on his style may be found in Cruikshank, Caldecott, Dicky Doyle, Arthur Boyd Houghton, the artists of Germany and Japan, and the decorative contrasts of Beardsley. There was in Rackham’s work, as in that of Charles Ricketts, his contemporary at the Lambeth School of Art, a flavour of Art Nouveau, which is especially noticeable in some of his cover designs and borders of illustrations, and in the elaborate curves of his foam-topped waves. But this influence, never predominant, was a diminishing one before 1914. By contrast

A nightmare: horrible result of contemplating an Aubrey Beardsley
after supper. W.B., 20 July 1894.

he was an admirer of the work of Edmund J. Sullivan and helped him from his earnings as early as 1900 (‘My dear Rackham, you’re a brick,’ reads one of Sullivan’s letters to him in that year). When it was suggested that he might have been influenced by Indian miniatures, Rackham wrote to his brother Bernard (22nd September 1936):

 

‘I was amazed at the comparison of my work with the Indian. Except in one or two later drawings there has been no direct or even suspected influence. Actually, but remotely, more from the Japanese. But of course my very general use of the bounding line is a usual oriental style. I think I myself am more conscious of Teutonic influence. … Thinking it over, I fancy the only drawings I have done consciously influenced by the Indian are one (only one I think) in The Tempest, and two (especially The Old Man of the Sea) in The Rackham Fairy Book. P.S. And, when consciously, it has been Persian rather than Indian.’

 

The first year of the new century marked a turning point in Rackham’s career, for in it were published his original illustrations for Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (see pages 31 and 33) – ninety-nine drawings in black and white with a coloured frontispiece. The book was immediately successful, and its publication marked the beginning of Rackham’s lasting fame. Two new editions were called for within ten years. At intervals from 1900 onwards Rackham worked on the original drawings, partially or entirely redrawing some of them in colour, adding new ones in colour and in black-and-white, and generally overhauling them as a set, the final and best-known edition, of 1909, contained forty coloured illustrations and fifty-five line drawings. Rackham wrote to Frank Redway on 28th May 1914: ‘In many ways I have more affection for the Grimm drawings than for other sets. (I think it is partly one’s childhood affection for the

Drawing of a man in period dress, 1895.

Sketches from the nude.

stories.) It was the first book I did that began to bring success (the little, earlier edition, that is)….”

In this letter Rackham touches on one important reason for his triumph as an illustrator of the classics – his very thorough knowledge of the texts. Though he was completely faithful to his authors, there was nothing of slavish pedantry in his interpretations; the personal and imaginative always transcended the literal. A comparison between the first and the last editions of his Grimm emphasizes the remarkable progress that Rackham made in a decade; yet the earlier drawings that he allowed to stand can hold their own with the later ones. A reviewer of the enlarged book in the Westminster Gazette of 1909 enlisted the help of two small boys to make another point that

Madame Zola at the Mansion House. W.B., 29 September 1893.

Richardson, the crack Surrey Bowler. Westminster Budget,
9 June 1893 (from a reproduction).

How authors work: Mr Hall Caine – the clock strikes five!
Westminster Budget, 5 October 1894 (from a reproduction).

told strikingly in Rackham’s favour: ‘When it came to the contemplation of Mr Rackham’s drawings there was never a second’s hesitation. They understood them at once, and entirely.’

Nevertheless, even after 1900, the fanciful element in Rackham, where his true genius lay, did not overcome the temptations of the commercial or conventional without a struggle. During the next few years he contributed many drawings to the sporting and ‘open-air’ books in Dent’s Haddon Hall Library; he also illustrated such diverse publications as Mysteries of Police and Crime (1901) which he had anticipated in drawings for a magazine article several years earlier, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1904), and Gulliver’s Travels, for an edition that was refurbished, like his Grimm, when his reputation had advanced. He was particularly successful with his dramatic contrasts in Gulliver. All this was but a part of a very large miscellaneous output.

He received strong encouragement to follow his natural bent for fantasy from his fellow artist and future wife Edyth Starkie, whom he met about the year 1900 when she and her mother were neighbours of his in Wychcomb Studios, Englands Lane, Hampstead. Her nephew Walter Starkie’s earliest memories of Rackham date from that year. Walter had arrived from Dublin, aged six, on a visit to his grandmother. ‘My first impression of the painter was coloured by the fairy stories my aunt Edyth told me at bedtime,’ he writes. ‘His face was wizened and wrinkled like a ripe walnut, and as he peered short-sightedly at me out of his goggle spectacles I thought he was one of the goblins out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Dressed in his shabby blue suit and hopping about his studio in his carpet slippers, he reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin, but when he was armed with palette and paint brushes he became for me a wizard, who with one touch of his magic wand could people my universe with elves and leprechauns. He would take me out for walks over Primrose Hill or in Kensington Gardens where he would sketch the trees, and as he worked he would

After the ball. W.B., 20 October 1893.

tell me stories of gnomes who lived in the roots and churned butter out of the sap owing from the knotted branches.’

This may have been an exaggerated view of Rackham at the age of thirty-three, but it is true to say that in appearance he had aged rapidly – his, after all, was a life of intense application. The clear-cut, earnest, distinguished features above the high collar (as we see them in many early photographs) soon became deeply grooved; he lost his hair young; except in bed, he was never without steel or gold-rimmed spectacles, of which he owned a great variety – reading spectacles, spectacles for tennis, bi-focal spectacles. He remained a neat, alert person, tidy, energetic, punctual. Amateur theatricals were for many years a persistent interest; in 1900 he played Blore the butler in Pinero’s Dandy Dick, and he also designed the scenery and acted in performances of Gilbert and Sullivan. He kept himself fit with lawn tennis and exercise on a trapeze. He was active and precise in all he did, whether working or playing, in which there was really little difference since he enjoyed his work and took his play seriously. If he grew slightly balder, more wrinkled and silvery during the years, this hardly altered his general appearance.

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. She made her friends laugh without ever really saying anything particularly witty, and she could give great comfort by her sympathy and understanding. Servants and tradesmen adored her. An original experimenter in interior decoration, she was keen on new ideas of all kinds, with a passion for motoring and later for the wireless. She would launch herself into daring arguments in favour of free-love or Communism – but entirely theoretically, for she herself lived the mildest and

Two photographs of Arthur Rackham at his drawing board, one taken in his thirties, the other in later life.

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. Born on the west coast of Ireland at Westcliff, near Galway, on 27th November 1867, the youngest of six, she had spent most of her youth at Cregane Manor, Rosscarbery, near Cork, a curious mixture of a house, basically old but with considerable Victorian additions, standing stark on a headland overlooking Rosscarbery Bay. Its whitewashed walls, Gothic doorways, and castellations, and its jumble of soft blue-grey slate roofs, are ringed round by a grove of windswept trees; dotted about the grounds are the whitewashed cottages of ‘the tenants’. There Edyth rode to hounds, sailed in the bay and teased her brothers’ tutors. Her father, R. M. Starkie, apparently an attractive but lazy man, is said to have performed his duties as Resident Magistrate in dilatory fashion, but taught himself to play the violin, an accomplishment inherited by his grandson Walter.

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. They are remarkable for their deep sense of character, and with their low tones and sombre lighting recall the early portraits of James Pryde. Like Pryde, she was a member of the International Society; works by her were bought for the National Museum, Barcelona, where she won a gold medal in 1911, and the Luxembourg, Paris.

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; for she was always his most stimulating, severest critic, and he had the greatest respect for her opinion. In return he gave her unswerving loyalty and devotion, so that the marriage, despite its temperamental ups-and-downs, proved a very happy one. Walter Starkie shows the nature of it:

 

‘Aunt Edyth was the romantic one of the family, and my father used to tell my sister Enid and myself anecdotes of her flirtations and her seven engagements, and the story of the duels that had been fought for her when she was an art student in Germany. My uncle was taciturn and observant, and would cock his head and look at my aunt quizzically when my father used to embroider these stories. Uncle Arthur had a strange habit of disappearing and re-appearing suddenly like the Cat in Alice in Wonderland. When my aunt would say: “I wonder where Arthur is,” he would appear a moment later by her side as though he had popped up through a trap door. He was more staid than my aunt, and with his prim precise English manner was an admirable foil and when in company she would always do her best to shock him.’

 

Rackham had exhibited successfully at the Royal Academy, at the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, at a ‘Loan Exhibition of Modern Illustration’ at South Kensington (1901), and at various provincial exhibitions before he was elected an Associate of The Royal Water-Colour Society in February 1902 (he became a full member in 1908). He received considerable encouragement to pursue his individual style of decorative illustration from the Friday evening meetings of the Langham Sketching Club, of which he was chairman for two consecutive years, 1905–6 and 1906–7 – a sure proof of his popularity with his fellow artists, for the chairman was elected primarily to preside at the supper table. His ‘Windfalls’, now in the Melbourne National Gallery, and ‘Cupid’s Alley’, now in the Tate Gallery (see page 59), were both painted in 1904; ‘The Magic Carpet’ was bought for the Bradford Gallery in 1907 and ‘Treasures of the Deep’ for the Preston Gallery in 1909. But the first work that greatly advanced his fame in the years immediately following his marriage was his edition of Rip Van Winkle, with its fifty-one colour plates, published in 1905.

This lovely book decisively established Rackham as the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period. One does not know which to admire most – the superb artistry of his landscapes, the poetry of the scenes of Rip by the riverside, the charm of his children and fairies, or the grotesque groups of Henrick Hudson and his crew which so long anticipated the art of Walt Disney (see pages 63 and 65). With Rip Van Winkle he began his fruitful association with the firm of William Heinemann, who issued the book in a limited edition and a trade edition, while American, French, German and other foreign editions were also called for, setting a pattern of publication to be followed for many years. Another profitable precedent was established by the exhibition of the originals at the Leicester Galleries in March 1905. All except eight of the pictures were sold, and the deluxe edition of the book was fully subscribed before the exhibition closed. Henceforth Rackham’s book illustrations were regularly exhibited at the Leicester Galleries at the time of their publication, and they found ready buyers.

E. V. Lucas was one of those who wrote to him at this time:

 

 

‘Dear Mr Rackham,

‘I have at last been able to get to your exhibition; which I enjoyed immensely. Hitherto one has had to go to the Continent for so much mingled grace & grotesque as you have given us. The drawings seem to me extraordinarily successful & charming. The only thing I quarrel with is the prevalence of “sold” tickets – one on every picture that I liked best. Barrie tells me he has the same grievance. I am glad to hear that you think of treating Peter Pan in the same vein. Believe me yours sincerely,

Invitation card, printed in sepia, 11 March 1905.

The Dance in Cupid’s Alley. A drawing of 1904 illustrating Austin Dobson’s lines:
‘O, Love’s but a dance, where Time plays the fiddle!’ (Tate Gallery).

Rackham had begun to draw for Punch in the Almanac at Christmas 1904, and another who now congratulated him on ‘a very successful show’ was F. C. Burnand, the editor. ‘If you have anything that might suit Punch,’ Burnand urged on 7th April 1905, ‘will you let me see it – or them? Whether singular or plural the drawings shall be returned directly I have seen them if they are not quite what we require in Punch and I may be then able to suggest some “legends” you might like to treat for Mr Punch’s gallery.’

Henceforth Rackham was an occasional contributor to Punch whenever his commitments allowed. We see him thus in 1905 at the outset of twenty years of the most prolific and prosperous creative work ever enjoyed by an English illustrator.