Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 6

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER SIX

American Friends

ackham’s habitual costume was a navy-blue suit with a stiff white collar and a blue-and-white spotted bow-tie. His tailor made him a new suit now and then of exactly the same cut and colour, and the old one was then relegated to his studio. In the last twenty years of his life he ventured a few concessions to the rôle of the well-to-do country gentleman, and even for a while sported a tweed suit, but those who knew him best felt that this never seemed quite in character.

It was in 1920 – a year of almost fabulous prosperity for Rackham, when his earned income, with the help of the proceeds of American exhibitions, touched seven thousand pounds – that he acquired his first country home, a Georgian flint farmhouse at Houghton, near Arundel. Houghton House, warm, dignified and beautiful, faced the village street immediately opposite the George and Dragon Inn. The garden offered wide views over the Downs and the Arun valley, and gave on to fields sloping to the River Arun, where Rackham used to fish. He was fond of fly-fishing, a sport unknown to that river, and sometimes collected an incredulous crowd to watch him casting over the water. The only fish he could catch there with a fly were small, rather muddy dace. He taught his daughter to clean and cook these in the ashes of a bonfire on the bank.

The purchase of Houghton House meant the sale of 16, Chalcot Gardens, but for his London studio Rackham now acquired 6, Primrose Hill Studios (close to the first home of his married life). At Houghton his studio was a thatched converted barn.

Rackham’s country neighbours proved a congenial mixture of farmers, artists and retired colonels. There were tennis parties on slow erratic grass courts; boating parties up the Arun backwaters; fancy-dress dances in gardens decorated with fairy lights and Chinese lanterns. On summer weekends, when Mrs Rackham was well enough, Houghton House was often filled with artist friends from the London days. It was a primitive house by modern standards, with a well in the wash-house, no main water, candles instead of electric light, and rats scurrying up and down the hollow walls at night.

The inconveniences were cheerfully accepted by Rackham, who had no liking for modern inventions. While he admitted to an affection for the bicycle, it was a favourite assertion of his that the fall of man began with the invention of the wheel. He would never have become a motorist if his wife, increasingly a semi-invalid, had not discovered a passion for being driven round the countryside for thirty miles a day at thirty miles an hour in the back seat of an open car. Reluctantly compelled to use ‘that infernal machine the telephone’, he considered photography, the cinema and the wireless to be degradations of art, and it was as well that he did not have to reckon with television.

Although he appreciated good company and was drawn out by it into joviality, Rackham by nature was a quiet man with simple tastes and an abstemious, almost austere attitude to life. No doubt owing to his straitened circumstances in early years, he was unable easily to spend money on pleasure. For him, however prosperous he became, the only really legitimate excuses for spending were health and education. He firmly believed in the essential rightness of working and saving for the fundamentals of existence.

Trilby on the stage: Mr Tree as Svengali. W.B., 13 September 1895.

At some time he did acquire the habit of a nightly glass of Marsala. This he enjoyed to the last. Any other form of drinking he considered a luxury, though he was not unappreciative of an occasional bottle of wine. He did not smoke. He had no very advanced appreciation of the pleasures of the table. His favourite meal was cold roast beef. An influential art dealer and prospective buyer once found him in his London studio, at three o’clock in the afternoon, eating sardines off a newspaper. When Rackham cheerfully described the encounter to his wife, Mrs Rackham was horrified. Rackham believed, incidentally, in the virtues of newspaper for all sorts of uses – as blotting-paper, as wrapping, for keeping warm in bed, for filing (his correspondence, notes, etc., were neatly collected in folded copies of The Times, labelled in chalk on the outside), for drying out damp shoes, as a tablecloth. …

Perhaps the indulgence that pleased him most was to travel abroad, very simply, walking or cycling with a man friend, always with a sketch-book in his pocket. He spent several sketching holidays in Italy, and almost (but not quite) became a Roman Catholic after one visit to Assisi.

The simplicity of his life helped Rackham to keep remarkably fit for his age. To the younger members of the Daleham Lawn Tennis Club, St John’s Wood – where Rackham used to play in the early nineteen-twenties – he naturally appeared quite an old man. But his energy amazed them. Mr George E. Heath remembers it:

‘He would come to the club looking rather wizened and very like one of his own dwarf drawings, and would play tennis – he was an average club player – for about three hours without stopping. After about six sets, he would leave with only the briefest of farewells to any of the other members. He took, as far as I can remember, practically no part in the club’s social activities, but was always extremely popular, and greatly admired for his fantastic energy and enthusiasm.’

Olive trees above Assisi (by courtesy of Bernard Rackham, Esq., C.B.).

For a number of years after 1920 Rackham’s output was maintained, and with it his high earning power, which was now considerably supplemented by an income from investments. In 1920 came his illustrations for Irish Fairy Tales by the poet James Stephens, who told Rackham that it was ‘a great pleasure’ and ‘a great privilege’ to work with him. Walter Starkie recalls one evening from their friendship:

 

‘Arthur Rackham considered drawing a more important accomplishment for his daughter than writing, for drawing was more natural: it was like dancing to the rhythms that spring up spontaneously in a child’s mind. Barbara when a tiny tot danced one evening in the garden for James Stephens who was with us. I fiddled an Irish fairy reel and the little sylph-like figure with her fair hair glistening in the moonbeams flitted here and there under the trees, while the poet intoned softly his poem “The Whisperer”:

The Moon was round!
And, as I walked along,
There was no sound,
Save when the wind with long
Low hushes whispered to the ground
A snatch of Song.’

Remembering another occasion when Augustus John was present, Walter Starkie sees John and Rackham, in his mind’s eye, ‘as Big Claus and Little Claus, and between them I spy the diminutive Pan-like figure of James Stephens seated cross-legged upon a table thrumming a guitar and gazing wistfully at the two painters’.

The appearance of Eden Phillpotts’s A Dish of Apples brought a characteristically appreciative letter from its author (24th September 1921): ‘I am immensely pleased at the charm & originality of your most attractive drawings. The humour of them especially drew me.’ Rackham was achieving a new harmony of colour, his drawings for A Dish of Apples, to quote an American admirer Martin Birnbaum, being ‘light and sparkling with passionate rose, glowing greens and primrose yellow’. Another, more important, publication of Rackham’s in 1921 was a long-delayed edition of Milton’s Comus, the drawings for which, begun before the war, deserve to rank with his best work of that earlier period, though it is an uneven book. Rackham here ran the gamut of his artistic emotions. The ‘rout of Monsters’ provoked him to several disconcerting drawings in what was for him an unusually disturbing vein, exploited again later in his illustrations for Poe. Beardsley’s influence marks several pages of Comus; yet these alternate with passages of pure poetry that recall Rackham’s own work for Peter Pan and the Dream.

In 1922 came Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book; and in 1925 Christopher Morley’s Where the Blue Begins, which brought the artist the friendship of that most warm-hearted of authors. In 1926 an excitingly original edition of The Tempest showed Rackham experimenting in a simplified dramatic technique that was refreshingly and effectively ‘modern’.

During the immediate post-war years several old successes, notably Grimm’s Fairy Tales were revived in separate new editions. Rackham for the first time allowed himself to be tempted into the commercial field by a highly lucrative offer for a series of advertisements from Colgate’s in 1922–23–24. An advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salts (1928), a chocolate-box cover for Cadbury’s (1933), and covers for book catalogues in the ’thirties represented almost his only other incursions into a sphere that little appealed to his sensibility. He appeared more appropriately, in miniature, in Volume I of The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House (1924). And in 1927 Queen Mary bought an illustration of King Arthur, ‘The Holy Grail’, from the R.W.S. Summer Exhibition.

Rackham’s work had long had its supporters at the Royal Academy (‘I have a great admiration for it personally,’ Sir Edward Poynter, P.R.A., had told him in 1916 when urging him to contribute to a special exhibition for the Red Cross). In 1922 he allowed Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton to put him down for election as an ‘Associate Engraver’, but, not surprisingly, he lost the ballot to that great engraver H. Macbeth-Raeburn by 26 votes to 11. ‘Draughtsmen’, as such, were not then admissible as Associates of the Academy. Rackham’s candidature may have done something to settle the question of their eligibility for the engraving section, but the rules were not changed until after Rackham’s death, and Edward Bawden is still (1960) the only ‘draughtsman’ so elected.

There is no reason to suppose that Rackham was disturbed by this reverse. Apparently he did retain to the end of his life the lingering remnant of a frustrated youthful ambition to succeed as a painter in oils; but he had realized when he embarked on his career as an illustrator that he would be unlikely to attain the formal honours of the Academy. As compensation he had enjoyed fame, prosperity and the affection of a very wide circle of admirers, young and old.

A more serious cause for disappointment was the increasing difficulty of publishing illustrated books of high quality in England during the ’twenties. The market for fine books was not what it had been in the prosperous decade before 1914. And there was more to it than that. The realities of war had dealt a blow to imaginative craftsmanship in general, and to fairyland in particular. It was a symptom of the changed situation that Rackham’s exhibition of recent work at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1919 was the last that he was to hold there for many years; these exhibitions had been a mutual source of profit to him and to Messrs Ernest Brown and Phillips since 1905, and had played an important part in establishing his reputation.

Fortunately for Rackham, the changed situation in England coincided with a marked display of enthusiasm for his work in the

The incoming ride. Pencil and watercolour, exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1916 (by courtesy of Mrs Harris Rackham).

United States. The Rackham books, both in their limited and their trade editions, had long established themselves in the book-collectors’ market on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is noticeable that there was now a considerable increase in the number of letters he received from American publishers, collectors, and simple admirers. In 1923, for example, a group of students at the Senior High School, Trenton, New Jersey, chose him, as a ‘noted man’ whose life had made ‘an especial appeal to them’, to be a ‘sort of “guardian” ’ for them; and they begged ‘a little letter of kindly interest’. Rackham responded gallantly after a pause for thought: ‘If you possibly can, be makers & not dealers. Aim at the highest quality in your work. Go on improving it. Never be satisfied with it. Aim at taking pleasure in work for its own sake, & not for what you can make out of it.’ It was exactly what he had done himself.

Diving into a pile of surviving ‘fan’ letters we find one from Rochester, New York, written in the late nineteen-twenties, which commences ‘My dear Sir Arthur’, and another containing the apology: ‘Everybody here in New York calls you “Sir Arthur”, and that explains why I began my letter that way.’ (A Melbourne correspondent had already asked: “How shall I begin? Not Mr Rackham surely! It doesn’t sound a bit like the artist spirit who creates those wonderful fairy people. …’) A letter from Texas came from ‘a co-ed with red hair and artistic appreciations’. European correspondents, who had long addressed him as ‘Dear Master’, were surpassed by the Viennese lady who began ‘Most Venerated Master … please fulfill my passionate wish to me’. Many of the letters, particularly those from isolated parts of America, are moving evidence of the joy which his books brought, particularly to the young and to invalids who could not travel to art galleries.

Rackham’s American fame was greatly stimulated by profitable exhibitions of his work held at Scott and Fowles’, New York, in 1919, 1920 and 1922. The New York World, discussing his Comus exhibition in 1922, wrote of him as ‘always going ahead, never backward’. Americans have pioneered the bibliographical study of Rackham, a field which his industry and the multiplicity of variant editions combine to make exceedingly complex. A short bibliography of Rackham’s work by Frederick Coykendall was privately printed in 1922 at Mount Vernon, New York, designed by Bruce Rogers. It was followed fourteen years later by the bibliography compiled by Sarah Briggs Latimore and Grace Clark Haskell, published in Los Angeles, which remains the fullest bibliographical record available.

During the nineteen-twenties it became increasingly clear that Rackham would sooner or later have to accede to the requests of his American admirers that he should come over to ‘pick up his laurels’. He went at last in 1927, not only with the object of meeting some of these friends, and of hanging a large exhibition of more than seventy of his works (including the drawings for The Tempest) at Scott and Fowles’ gallery, New York, but also with the intention of talking business to publishers and editors. Alyn Williams, President of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, and his American wife were Rackham’s companions on the voyage in the liner Republic in early November. ‘Mrs Williams, thank heaven, had never heard of me before,’ Rackham told his wife. In the ship’s gymnasium Rackham and Williams went through a series of exercises designed to make Rackham fatter and Williams thinner. These Rackham illustrated in a long letter home. Protesting at a suggestion that he should diet, Williams told the instructor: ‘Look at Rackham, talk to him, he eats more than I do.’ (‘Probably not true,’ added Rackham in parentheses). ‘ “Oh, he may eat what he likes,” says the pro: much to Williams’ disgust.’

The voyage was smooth, but Rackham found it rather boring and depressing, although he could report: ‘The pianist Percy Grainger is on board & played at the concert. … He runs round the deck several times before breakfast every day,’ an observation that will cause no surprise to the many friends of Grainger. Rackham did not put on much weight; when he reached New York the scales showed ‘two pounds under 10 stone’.

He stayed at the Yale Club, and at a first impression New York appeared to him ‘surprising and exciting’. His enthusiasm waned when he found it extremely noisy, and the comfortable Yale Club no exception to the rule: ‘Oh that brass band – in our hall now. Every third tune is the Wacht am Rhein … I imagine Yale must have bagged the tune for a college song. Bang, bang, bang, blare, squeal.’ He found ‘everything overdone … much too much – of everything. To live here must vulgarise an artist … I could easily run off & dump my bags & self on the first ship to Europe. … Bang bang bang bash. That man will bust that drum if no one stops him.’

Later letters were more cheerful. Rackham at sixty was obviously unable to come to terms with New York, but he found much to enjoy there. ‘Everyone is excessively kind,’ he wrote; ‘Everyone was brought up on my work – if young enough – or brought up their families on it if old enough.’ He soon had the run of six New York clubs, and was inundated with invitations. ‘The nature of my work seems to have made my name familiar to so many others than artists: the bookish people – librarians, book-lovers & so on. … The artists are extraordinarily friendly, too. I cannot think any American artist coming to our country (except a Whistler or Sargent) could find himself so heartily greeted.’

Rackham’s meetings with many publishers and magazine editors in their ‘gorgeous offices’ proved satisfactory and productive, though he was disappointed to find that, as in England, ‘all the publishers are shy of costly books’. A book-seller encouraged him to ‘get together a complete set of all I have ever done. They have sold one such lot for about £400’. He visited Mrs Joseph Pennell, who ‘said she thought I was even better known here than in England’. He was introduced to Gene Tunney, ‘an engaging young giant with a gentle handshake’. He went out of town to spend a Sunday with Christopher Morley, ‘genial & pleasant & very unaffected’, and his wife and four small children. He played bridge at a party with the actress Cissy Loftus, ‘quite white-haired now’.

The delay in delivery of letters from his wife worried him, but on a flying visit to Boston he was able to write: ‘I’m in much better spirits now I have had your letters, dear dear old Edyth.’ His anxiety about her health, and the effect on it of his own absence, drew from him one reassuring letter that was deeply personal: ‘Oh my dear old Edyth, it is so difficult for me to make you feel how close close close, how one our lives have been for me. How outside, how unrecorded, how without influence my wanderings have been to me. … The reality of my life has been that with you. …’

One of the most interesting results of Rackham’s trip was a commission from the New York Public Library to provide for the Spencer Collection there a series of special water-colours illustrating A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. These were exhibited at the Library in 1929, and bound up in a beautiful manuscript book written by Graily Hewitt. The closing days of his stay were spent on a water-colour portrait – ‘a handsome young Jewess’ – for which he was paid £250. His sitter proved ‘very amiable & patient fortunately & anxious that her mother, for whom it is, should have a Christmas present that she will like’.

On his last day in America, before sailing in the Olympic at midnight to get home for Christmas, Rackham visited an exhibition of drawings in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, met the young artist, and spent the evening with him and Anne Carroll Moore, who later described the occasion in The Horn Book (Christmas, 1939). He told them he was ‘free to kick up my heels until sailing time’, so they drove him in a taxi over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to see the lights of the city, took him to supper at the Brevoort Grill, and escorted him on board the Olympic with a present of chocolates for his daughter and a candle of good luck to be lit in his cabin.

 

To have visited the United States and made the acquaintance of so many hitherto unknown admirers remained a lasting source of pleasure to Rackham. Henceforth he often had the American market in mind, as with The Lonesomest Doll by Abbie Farwell Brown (1928), which was published only in America, and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928). Many of the drawings for these two books found their way into the collection of Columbia University, New York. In the England of jazz and Noel Coward the whimsical and fantastic had grown increasingly out of fashion. With The Vicar of Wakefield of 1929 and The Compleat Angler of 1931 (see pages 127 and 131), the frontispiece for which is to be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Rackham played safe by turning to historical costume and river landscape, in which he had long been supremely accomplished and successful.

Altogether, despite some good years and the high prices paid for Rackham originals in America, the post-war period had been somewhat disappointing to one who had made his name in the Edwardian era. Rackham summed up the situation a trifle despondently in a letter to Howard Angus Kennedy of 28th June 1929:

 

‘…I need not say what a difference the war has made. The market is now divided up among stacks of cheaply produced & relatively inexpensive books. The “Trades” have so settled it – not without great consideration. And the difficulty of bringing out a rather better book is so great as to be all but prohibitive. I recently went over to the States to see for myself exactly what the conditions were there. And found them much the same. I might tell you of one experience. One of the great firms of New York agreed, after much deliberation,

‘A Favourite Song of Dryden’s.’ The Vicar of Wakefield, 1929 (by courtesy of George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd).

to do a book for me: but on hearing that other illustrations of mine were arranged to appear the same season, they at once withdrew their offer. As a matter of fact the better class books do not sell half the number that they did before the war, & there is not as much profit to be made out of each book as there was, so neither publishers nor illustrators are having much of a time. The only men of my craft who are flourishing, are portrait painters, & advertisement designers – branches that I only occasionally enter. …’