Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 5

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER FIVE

The Impact of 1914

n 31st January 1910, the Authors’ Club paid Rackham the compliment of entertaining him at dinner in Whitehall Court. The occasion served to emphasize his standing as the leading illustrator of the day, and was reported to the extent of a column and a half in the Morning Post. A large gathering applauded his ‘random thoughts of an illustrator’. The artist knew, said Rackham, that ‘for his illustrations to be worth anything he must be regarded as a partner, not as a servant’.

‘…An illustration may legitimately give the artist’s view of the author’s ideas; or it may give his view, his independent view, of the author’s subject. But it must be the artist’s view; any attempt to coerce him into a mere tool in the author’s hands can only result in the most dismal failure. Illustration is as capable of varied appeal as is literature itself; and the only real essential is an association that shall not be at variance or unsympathetic. The illustrator is sometimes expected to say what the author ought to have said or failed to say clearly, to fill up a shortcoming, and not infrequently he has done so. Sometimes he is wanted to add some fresh aspect of interest to a subject which the author has already treated interestingly from his point of view, a partnership that has often been productive of good. But the most fascinating form of illustration consists of the expression by the artist of an individual sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature.’

Rackham’s surviving correspondence shows that he was now in touch with almost as many authors as artists. There are letters in these and later years from Laurence Housman, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Noyes, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling (whose Puck of Pook’s Hill he illustrated for an American edition), Maurice Hewlett, James Stephens, Eden Phillpotts. Much of his correspondence related to commissions that eventually matured; more, perhaps, to abortive projects that came to nothing. And occasionally there are isolated notes, not easily explained, that provokingly suggest the width of his acquaintanceship, as with the following postcard from Bernard Shaw:

‘I am afraid I can’t say Yes or No straight off – that is, if you can leave the question of my coming open. I have had an accident which has disabled my motor car. If it can be repaired in time to take me out of town on Sunday morning I can stay over Saturday night. If not, I must go away by train on Saturday afternoon. If I can come, may I bring my wife?

‘I am greatly hurt at your calling me a slight acquaintance. I regard you as quite an old pal.

‘I adore Sumurun.

‘Many thanks for the invitation.

G.B.S.’

In the years before the 1914 war the Rackhams lived a full social life, entertaining their literary and artistic friends at dinner-parties and

‘To hear the sea-maid’s music.’ A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, 1908.

‘At Homes’. ‘Sumurun’, adored by Shaw, was apparently a dancer who performed at Mrs Rackham’s ‘At Homes’. Holidays were usually spent on the Continent, especially in Germany, where they visited Bayreuth for the Wagner festival, and in Switzerland. In 1909 they went to Spain; and in that year Rackham enlarged his circle by becoming a member of the Art-Workers’ Guild. Thereafter he was a regular attender at the Guild’s meetings.

His work was exhibited almost annually at this time in one or other of the cities of Europe. He won a gold medal in Milan as early as 1906. In 1912 he won a medal at Barcelona and held a special exhibition in Paris of his Wagner drawings at the invitation of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, which made him an Associate and awarded him another gold medal. Works by Rackham were acquired for the galleries at Vienna and Barcelona, and for the Luxembourg, Paris.

He was now receiving letters from admirers all over the world. Those that children always gave him pleasure; he replied to them straightforwardly and seriously, without any ‘talking down’ to his youthful correspondents. (This accorded to his usual practice in conversation with children.) In 1910, for example, a little girl entirely unknown to him, Rachel Fry, aged twelve, who loved his books, thought that it would be wonderful if Arthur Rackham could come to stay with her at her home near Ipswich. She received the following reply:

 

‘My dear Miss Fry,

‘I should have answered your kind letter before, but that I have been away from home for a few weeks – and not so very far from where you live, as I have been at Walberswick on the Suffolk coast.

‘It is very kind of you to want me to come & stay with you, but I

‘The Knight took the beautiful girl in his arms and bore her over the narrow space
where the stream had divided her little island from the shore.’ Undine, a drawing of 1909.

am afraid I cannot manage to do that though I know I should enjoy it. But I am kept so busy at home over my books & pictures that I have not time to accept half the kind invitations I receive.

‘I am very glad you like my illustrations. I am rather afraid that the books of mine that are coming out this year & next, which illustrate Wagner’s great Music-stories, the “Ring of the Nibelungs”, are not very well suited for those lucky people who haven’t yet finished the delightful adventure of growing up, but soon, perhaps, you will know & be fond of Wagner’s music and writings, & then you may like these drawings of mine as well as the others.

‘Believe me,
Sincerely yours
Arthur Rackham’

The Wagner illustrations that Rackham had been working on and which appeared in two parts in 1910 and 1911 as The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie and Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods (see page 95), represented an important achievement for him. It cannot be denied that Rackham was to some extent the victim of his success in the Christmas book trade, and of his mastery of the technical process of colour reproduction. His genius for fanciful improvisation appeared so inexhaustible – for he was remarkably consistent in his patient application to his craft – that it was all too easy to undervalue him as an artist of the creative imagination. Yet there are many drawings throughout his best books, such as Rip, Peter Pan, or the Dream, which reveal to the discerning what an original artist he was (and the tail-pieces and other decorations in the text must not be overlooked in this search). The drawings for Wagner gave him above all a theme – the Norse Myths – which appealed to his nordic sympathies, and with it a series of noble motives. Although the heroic did not really suit his talent, his gods and Rhine-maidens were realized on a high plane of imagination, probably because Wagner had deeply

‘“Little niece,” said Kühleborn, “forget not that I am here with thee as a guide.” ’
Undine, a drawing of 1909.

stirred him personally. To take one example that could easily be overlooked, his title-page of the Rhine-maidens and Nibelungs supporting the Ring, reproduced on the title-page of this book, is a brilliantly successful and truly inventive design. When some of these drawings were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in a room adjacent to drawings by another distinguished illustrator, Hugh Thomson, the latter appeared remarkably trivial.

Rackham’s determination to maintain and to raise the standard of his work was incessant. As he had written a few years earlier (10th December 1906) to M. H. Spielmann, who had drawn his attention to a favourable criticism: ‘I’ve just seen the Graphic & I blush. Well, I can only do my best to live up to it. But the farther I go (& I do hope I am gaining ground) the harder it becomes & the more impossible the “arrival”.’

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).

The Mother Goose drawings, illustrating a collection of the old nursery rhymes, appeared in the American St Nicholas Magazine, 1912–13. Here Rackham laid himself out to please the children, and was completely successful. The initial letters at the beginning of each chapter of this biography are taken from Mother Goose, Rackham himself figuring in the initial I at the opening of the first chapter. The House that Jack Built, shown on the next page of text, was a drawing of his own home in Chalcot Gardens.

Aesop’s Fables and Mother Goose are small books that have had a

‘Nothung! Nothung! Conquering sword!’ Frontispiece from Siegfried and The Twilight of
the Gods, 1911 (by courtesy of the Hon. Lady Nicolson, C.H.).

large sale, and at the time of writing are still in print. Unfortunately many of Rackham’s larger volumes published during these years now have to be sought in the second-hand book-sellers’ shops (where they are expensive to buy), among them the delightful Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures (1913), which is of particular biographical interest. For the most part this was a collection of unpublished work, though a number of the forty-four coloured illustrations had been previously published in magazines or periodicals, usually as first sketches in black and white. At least one of the water-colours, ‘Elfin Revellers’, which dates from 1900 and suggests the influence of Alma-Tadema, might have been better omitted; but Rackham did well to include several sketches, virtually unaltered, which had originated in the two-hour sessions on Friday evenings at the Langham Sketching Club. A single coloured drawing for one of his books would normally take him several days; but these Langham sketches show how quickly and effectively he could work against the clock when it was necessary for him to do so.

Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures brings together a number of drawings unrelated in theme. Most of them, it is true, are drawings of

‘This is the house that Jack built.’ A drawing of 16 Chalcot Gardens, reproduced in Mother Goose, 1913.

‘There was an old woman
Lived under a hill.’

Mother Goose, 1913: a drawing of 1912.

the supernatural, of goblins, elves and fairies, and many are based on actual fairy tales; but there are also delightful straightforward drawings of children at the seaside or in the Broad Walk, Kensington Gardens; there is the well-known ‘Cupid’s Alley’ (see page 59), which illustrates verses by Austin Dobson, and there are subject pictures and landscapes of wide variety. It was important that such a book should be drawn together by an introductory essay, and natural for Rackham to invite Barrie to write it. The answer he received was cordial but disappointing:

 

‘Dear Rackham,

‘I wish I could, but I have promised to write two introductions this autumn, and had better not undertake more. Added to which I would be very bad at it as I have no skill in criticism. I am very glad to hear of the book and look forward to it. You have no greater admirer than myself, and few there are more warmly indebted to you.

‘Yours very sincerely
J. M. Barrie’

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’.

‘As one who has been doing the day’s work in another form of art, and for more years than he cares to count, I wish it were possible for

‘The man in the wilderness asked me
How many strawberries grew in the sea.’

Mother Goose.

someone to make for me such a collection of fugitive impressions, hints of beauty, threads caught and followed (often tenaciously) only to be lost in the end; scraps of song; stories that after one bright apparition faded away into limbo. They would make one’s best biography. … Mr Rackham has been more fortunate, and I congratulate him. But let the purchaser who, turning these pages, may happen to wish that they told a connected story, reflect that he may have hold of something better worth his money; the elusive dreams of an artist such as the goblin in Hans Andersen saw and adored for the moment as he peered down the chimney into the student’s garret over the huckster’s shop; the dreams of an artist who has taught English children in our time to see that

‘All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linkèd are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.’

The chance survival of a set of block-maker’s proofs of the year 1913 affords an opportunity of considering in detail Rackham’s meticulous labours for Mother Goose and the Book of Pictures. So particular was he about the colour reproduction of his work that he would often send the proofs back and forth many times. He studied the technique with deep seriousness, and would even alter his own use of colour in an attempt to limit himself to those colours which reproduced most faithfully.

The first proof for his illustration in Mother Goose (see page 99) of

‘The man in the wilderness asked me
How many strawberries grew in the sea.…’

‘… his new master thought his colour was due to his late owner’s
having neglected him, and that all he wanted was a good scrubbing.’
A Rackham self-caricature, from Aesop’s Fables, 1912.

is annotated: ‘Rather gloomy & patchy. … Red wants steadying badly. … I think either the blue or grey block is too dense. …’ On the second proof Rackham wrote: ‘This is a most unpleasant reproduction altogether. It is better than it was – which is the best I can say of it – & I suppose (with the little alterations made) I shall have to pass it.’ A momentary exasperation with the difficulties of four-colour reproduction flared up when he added: ‘Try to get the Suffragettes to knife the man who invented 4 col. & every living man who won’t swear never to use it again.’ The third proof found him slightly mollified. ‘This is better,’ he wrote; but he still complained of details – ‘I’m afraid the sky must have more attention,’ and ‘This tree must be more like the others.’

The proof of the drawing ‘Adrift’, an illustration of Hans Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ included in the Book of Pictures – it is here reproduced afresh from the original (see page 103) – shows Rackham at his most despairing. ‘Is it possible anything can be made of this?’ he wrote at the top of the proof. ‘If so, I am afraid I can be of no assistance.’ And at the foot of the proof he lamented: ‘I can’t make any remarks about this. It is too hopelessly muddled. I can only leave it to the block-makers to pull through.’

Rackham’s proofs reveal a perfectionist who drove himself to the limit in order to give his readers the very best of which his own art and contemporary reproduction technique were capable. Ironically, much of his effort was devoted to improving colour subtleties which the layman, seeing only an apparently successful plate, would never have been likely to question. It is almost a relief to discover one proof out of this batch, the drawing (see page 97) for

‘There was an old woman
Lived under a hill. …’

in Mother Goose, of which the artist can say ‘This promises well’.

‘Adrift’. Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures, 1913: a drawing of 1909 illustrating Hans
Andersen’s The Snow Queen (by courtesy of W. Mostyn-Owen, Esq.).

The outbreak of war in 1914 found Rackham, approaching his forty-seventh birthday, inundated with work and commissions. The war years did not prove easy for him. The quality of book-production inevitably declined. In 1915 his earnings dropped considerably, though they gradually increased again. He contributed generously to many publications of a patriotic nature – to King Albert’s Book (1914); to Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914); to The Queen’s Gift Book (1915), published in aid of Queen Mary’s Convalescent Auxiliary Hospitals – and he also illustrated The Allies’ Fairy Book, which appeared in 1916 with an introduction by Edmund Gosse. There was a little dinner at the Windham Club in April of that year, at which Gosse entertained Asquith, Lord Newton, Haddon Chambers (the playwright), Arthur Rackham, and others. And when The Allies’ Fairy Book was published, Gosse wrote to Rackham (6th November 1916): ‘Will you think me impertinent if I tell you how beautiful I think your illustrations. … Their variety, and ingenuity, and the delicacy of your fancy, and the romantic ardour of your mind, were never more victoriously manifested. I am proud to be associated – though to so humble a degree – in a work so charming.’

It was typical of Rackham that he should not be content with serving his country as an artist. Like Keene in an earlier emergency, he had to serve also as a man. A self-caricature (reproduced here) on the fly-leaf of a copy of The Queen’s Gift Book, which he gave to his sister-in-law Ruth Rackham, shows him standing at ease with oriental inscrutability in the grey cotton uniform of the Hampstead Volunteers. Mr Gilbert Foyle writes of those days:

‘I was then (1915) Sergeant Major of the Company, and it was great fun to see him endeavouring to do the “Army Drill”. He found difficulty in “forming fours”, and at rifle drill was a scream. But he was a good recruit, and did his best to please and to learn. He enjoyed

going with the Company on Sundays to dig trenches in Essex, near Chelmsford”

The war years held other worries for Rackham. His wife now became seriously ill, from a heart attack after pneumonia. She never recovered her full health but suffered from cardiac and nervous weakness for the rest of her life. Her painting had to be almost entirely abandoned.

A large part of the war was spent by Mrs Rackham and her daughter in furnished houses at Rustington, near Littlehampton, while her husband remained at 16, Chalcot Gardens, paying them visits when he could. In this way Edyth Rackham avoided the strain of the 1914–18 air raids, which, though overshadowed by the bombing of

An informal self-portrait at the time of Rackham’s war service in January 1916.

the Second World War, were sufficiently disturbing in their time. Rackham’s undated letters to her describe the ‘bomb-craters on Parliament Hill’, the clatter of the anti-aircraft guns and the dangers of falling shrapnel: ‘I went to Wandsworth [where his mother and two sisters lived] yesterday. And right through town from here the road is full of groups of kneeling children with all manner of tools gouging & digging out the shrapnel from the wood pavement. Our guns keep going like hell.’ Inspecting the row of craters at the foot of Parliament Hill, near Gospel Oak, he talked to a man who had been in the Duke of St Albans’ public house when the bombs fell: ‘He says that it was all over before you knew. Bang! the glass in! Silence. The broken gas main flared up outside – but nothing much, he says. No time to be frightened. He didn’t appear to have minded in the least. A man of 55 or so.’ (Thus Cockney sang-froid, anticipating the ‘blitz’ of 1940.) A letter to his daughter of 1917 shows Rackham as a grass widower indeed, trying to cut the neglected lawn and prune the overgrown trees in his garden.

Rackham worked steadily through all these disturbances, and, apart from numerous minor publications of ephemeral interest, produced several books of lasting value during the war years. He is not usually remembered as an illustrator of Dickens, but A Christmas Carol (1915) was decidedly successful, for he contrived to adapt the tradition of ‘Phiz’ and Cruikshank to his own characteristic style in the pictures of Victorian London (see page 107) and at the same time found scope for his fantasy in the ghost scenes. We also find him here developing his special talent for silhouette, rare among illustrators. That he only once attempted Dickens again – with The Chimes for the Limited Editions Club in 1931 – may be a matter for regret, for he was well qualified by sympathy to interpret Dickens in certain of his moods.

With Little Brother and Little Sister (1917), Rackham added forty more stories by the Brothers Grimm to the sixty which he had already

‘“What do you call this?” said Joe. “Bed-curtains!”’ A Christmas
Carol, 1915.

illustrated, his inspiration showing no decline. His drawings for Swinburne’s poems of childhood, The Springtide of Life (1918), again attracted the admiration of Edmund Gosse, who expressed his appreciation in a preface and told Rackham personally (18th October 1918): ‘This volume will not merely be the best book of the present art-season, but a joy to all sensitive people for years and years to come.’ It may nevertheless be doubted whether Rackham was at his best with baby worship on such an intensive scale. The immediate aftermath of the war brought Some British Ballads (1919), and the two volumes of Cinderella (1919) and The Sleeping Beauty (1920), retold by C. S. Evans, in which his gift for silhouette was given full play (see pages 110 and 111).

It was during these years that Rackham was most active in the Art-Workers’ Guild. He served on its committee in 1917–18, and in 1919 followed such distinguished predecessors as Walter Crane, William Morris, Sir George Clausen and W. R. Lethaby into the Master’s chair. Among the lectures at which he presided in his year of office were several whose subjects reflected his interests – notably those on ‘Modern methods of Process Reproduction’, ‘Colour Lithography’ and Fairy-tale Illustrations’. The Guild also held an exhibition of Art for Children during this year.

A writer in the Sunday Times after Rackham’s death remembered that in the discussions which followed the fortnightly papers ‘he spoke with quiet decision and an elusive sense of humour that showed itself in a twinkling eye and a dry smile’. 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

Mr Irving as Don Quixote. W.B., 13 September 1895.

Above and opposite: silhouette illustration from The Sleeping Beauty.

1920. Some of the silhouettes in this book were printed in three colours.

and the Shot Tower. Another self-portrait (the frontispiece of this book) painted in 1934, may be thought more successful in suggesting the kindly amusing man behind the mask. This again has a London background – St Paul’s Cathedral. Rackham was always proud to call himself a Cockney. Indeed, he took care to make the further distinction that he had been born south of the Thames. The self-portrait of 1934, when exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, bore the explanatory title ‘A Transpontine Cockney.’^[1]

Although in 1919 he was preparing to ‘twitch his mantle blue’ and make for new pastures beside the River Arun, he kept a studio in London until almost the end of his life.

1. Rackham was painted by Meredith Frampton, R.A., in 1920, but this portrait was destroyed with a large part of Mr Frampton’s studio in 1940.