Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 7

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Last Years

y 1929 it had become necessary for the Rackhams to leave Houghton House, partly because Mrs Rackham’s health was now too precarious for her to be able to cope with servant problems in the old-fashioned farmhouse, and partly because Rackham had reluctantly decided that he was no longer justified in keeping up two establishments, and believed that he would not need to do so if he lived nearer London. In fact, however, he did not dispose of 6, Primrose Hill Studios until 1938, a year before his death.

He now built a house in an attractive situation on the Common at Limpsfield, Surrey, close to the golf course on which he often played. Stilegate was comfortable, easy to run; the garden was delightful; but neither Rackham nor his family were entirely happy there. Rackham naturally missed the surroundings he had loved at Houghton – the rambling old house with its barns and outhouses, the winding Arun, the wooded hills, the Amberley quarry, the beech tree with its knobbly, twisted roots, the magnificent elm, the Elizabethan cottages facing his garden wall – all preserved, here and there, for those who can recognize them, in his drawings of the nineteen-twenties.

Limpsfield had a suburban conventionality that Rackham grew to dislike. His new neighbours, friendly enough, were mostly wealthy business men lacking interest in the arts, with certain notable exceptions including Edward and Marjorie Pease, the well-known founder-Fabians and socialists, and his old friends the Keen family. Mrs Rackham became increasingly an invalid, and hardly went out at all, except for her motor drives. Few visitors came to the house. More than ever, Rackham found that he needed his London studio as a pied-à-terre to bring him into touch with his friends at the Arts Club, at the R.W.S. or the Art-Workers’ Guild.

It would be misleading to show him in his last decade as an unhappy man, or his wife as totally subdued by ill-health. But it is undeniable that Mrs Rackham’s health, her progress and treatment, and the various ‘cures’, orthodox and otherwise, that she tried enthusiastically one after another, absorbed the thoughts of the Stilegate household. Other interests tended to revolve around this problem.

Rackham worked on as determinedly and enthusiastically as ever. Harraps were now his principal publishers, and for them he illustrated Goldsmith and Izaak Walton, Ruskin (The King of the Golden River), Hans Andersen, Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market), Browning (The Pied Piper of Hamelin), Edgar Allan Poe, and Ibsen (Peer Gynt). For Harraps, again, he prepared The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book.

His nephew Walter Starkie spent many months in the years 1932–6 wandering through Castile, Andalusia and La Mancha, journeys bearing excellent fruit in his three gypsy books, Raggle-Taggle, Spanish Raggle-Taggle, and Don Gypsy, for which Rackham drew the frontispieces. The gypsies fascinated Rackham; but when Starkie proposed to his uncle that he should illustrate Don Quixote, Rackham was not attracted, saying that the Don appeared so often that variety was impossible. Starkie suggests that ‘Rackham’s genius was so essentially Gothic that it needed the fantastic trees of the forest and felt ill at ease in the bare steppes of La Mancha’.

The undertaking that meant most to him in the early ’thirties was

‘The quietest and fittest place for contemplation.’ Frontispiece study of Izaak Walton from The Compleat Angler, 1931: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.

his edition of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, a project that had been in his mind for many years (page 135). With Barbara he paid a preparatory visit to Denmark in the autumn of 1931, and while in Copenhagen met an old lady who as a child had hidden under a table in order to hear Andersen himself reading some newly written stories to a gathering of adults. Rackham sketched busily both in town and country, visiting farms and local museums. ‘It is rather fatiguing,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I have to talk so much & behave myself so well all the while, taking notes & notes for dear life. But everyone is most delightfully friendly & anxious to help. Of course Andersen is their great god. And all, and at the bookshop, are greatly interested in what I have to do.’

At one farm he went into the pigsty. ‘But an indoor pigsty. No good for Andersen’s Swineherd. And that’s a mercy. For the stench was so appalling that I thought I should be sick.’

A deputation of Danes took Rackham and his daughter to visit Hans Andersen’s grave. As none of the Danes could speak English, and the Rackhams could not speak Danish, the conversation was entirely in mime. At the graveside one of the deputation startled Rackham by producing a large wreath, which he handed to him with a deferential but purposeful gesture towards the grave. While the Danes stood with bared and bowed heads, Rackham rather sheepishly laid the wreath on the grave. As he did so, he muttered to his daughter, ‘This is the sort of thing an Englishman does very badly, I’m afraid!’ ‘Amen, Amen!’ responded the Danes, and replaced their hats.

In a note to his Hans Andersen volume (1932), Rackham emphasized that he had made no attempt in his illustrations ‘to look through Danish eyes’, but he explained:

 

‘I think that my visit to Denmark, which, with all its modern progress, happily preserves in town and country a genial atmosphere of old dignity in comely everyday use, did give me just that nearer view of the author’s country that I needed – a view that helped me to realise again the sensation I felt as a child when I first read Andersen. This sensation experienced in childhood in foreign fairy tales is a foretaste of that encountering of familiar things in unfamiliar guise which later is one of the joys of foreign travel.’

 

The Observer invited Hugh Walpole to choose the best picture-book of 1932. ‘I give the prize without hesitation to Rackham’s Hans

From the invitation card to the ‘Daddy and Mummy party’. W.B., 10 January 1896.

Andersen,’ Walpole replied. ‘He has risen nobly to his subject. He has acquired a new tenderness and grace. His fantasy is stronger than ever.’ Twenty-five years after its publication, the Hans Andersen had become one of the most difficult of Rackham’s books to buy second-hand.

With the Hans Andersen may be mentioned The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, undertaken in the same propitious mood and published in the following year. The illustrations were all new, though it was not the first time, as Rackham admitted in his preface, that he had illustrated several of these old favourites of the nursery, ‘in the thirty years and more that my work has led me through enchanted lands’.

When we compare these two books with Rackham’s achievement in his Edwardian prime, the most remarkable thing to note is that he was maintaining such a consistent standard of excellence at the age of sixty-five. His methods had nevertheless undergone a subtle and almost imperceptible change. There was slight tendency away from over-all pre-Raphaelite fidelity to detail, and towards a measure of impressionism, at least in the backgrounds. A. S. Hartrick has described^[1] a typical example of Rackham’s method in Edwardian days: how he would run a fairly strong tint of raw umber over his pen drawing – except for a few whites when he needed some accents of pure colour in the end. ‘This warm tone he lifted with a wet brush as he went along, working in local colour as wanted, while carefully watching the main gradations – warm to cold, and vice versa.’ It had been a method helpful to reproduction, giving a pleasing general tone ‘like old vellum’, and with variations it had served Rackham well. In later years, however, his approach was more flexible and adaptable; a little influence may perhaps be allowed to weakened eyesight; we notice him using cleaner, brighter colours (and his elves and goblins have sharper noses!). Conscious of working for a new generation, Rackham intended to please them as he had pleased their

‘When Night was come and the Shop Shut Up.’ Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, 1932 (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd), illustrating The Goblin and the Provision-dealer.

fathers. Although he would probably have wished posterity to judge him by books such as Rip Van Winkle and Peter Pan, he was too consistent a craftsman for anyone to be able to speak of a ‘falling-off’ in the high standard he had set himself.

A letter written to his wife from the Arts Club in 1932 (13th October) gives an impression of Rackham’s daily activity while in London. He was then pre-occupied with the business of the Royal Water-Colour Society; he served on its council many times and for three years was a Vice-President; his work had always been an attraction at the Society’s exhibitions, and the Society welcomed his advice no less on business affairs than on artistic matters. ‘I find I have to be at the R.W.S. on Saturday,’ he writes, ‘so I shall not be able to come home until Sat. evening. … Hanging at the R.W.S. was tiring but I always like doing it and my lecture came off very well.’ The next day ‘a man from Cadbury’s’ was coming to see him (about his one-and-only chocolate box), and in the evening there was ‘the Harrap dinner’. He supposed that he would ‘have to begin settling on next year’s book at once’, though the trade ‘atmosphere’ in general seemed ‘slower than ever’. He wondered what could be inside the two big parcels which had arrived at Limpsfield for him from Harraps (‘sheets to sign, I expect’); he had a word of inquiry for the Limpsfield robins – birds were an increasing interest; and as usual his last thought was for his wife’s health: ‘Good night, dear old Edy. I hope they do your pillows correctly & that you are sleeping.’

Rackham’s portrait of his daughter Barbara – ‘a charming head, in tone, with landscape background,’ said the critic of The Times – hung in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ exhibition in November 1932. When Barbara brought a friend of hers, the writer R. H. Ward, to Stilegate, Limpsfield, in the summer of the following year, he saw the portrait on the wall of Rackham’s studio – ‘a building in the garden’ (so Mr Ward remembers it), ‘separate from the house, separate (one felt) from ordinary affairs, very separate from the politely rural suburb in which it was in any case surprising to find him living, and as retired as a wild creature’s den.’ Mr Ward thought the portrait ‘a recognizable likeness of Barbara Rackham as she was at that time; but the interesting thing was that it made her look much more like her father than she appeared (to me at least) to do in reality; and one had the impression that he had painted himself into it, or in other words that his vision, so highly individual, was as highly subjective’.

This tallied with Mr Ward’s general impression of Rackham on that visit to Limpsfield:

 

‘I have the recollection of a smallish, ageing, almost wizened person, with a bald domed forehead and a very wide and elfish grin: a gnome, perhaps, though an entirely benevolent one. But there was more to the impression than that: there was something earthy and even elemental about him. … Nor would it be wholly absurd to say that he resembled one of his own grotesquely poetical trees with (as like as not) faces, for which his own face might have served as the

Title-page drawing for The Children and the Pictures, 1907.

model. As I’ve suggested, it was impossible not to be confused as to which was which, the artist himself or the creatures, human, half-human or non-human, of which he had drawn so many. It wasn’t in the least that he made one diffident in his presence; one simply couldn’t get over seeing so many of his drawings walking about in the shape of one man. It was even surprising that he spoke ordinary English, and not some strange language of fairy-tale or the woods. … One of the strongest impressions he gave me was of a person very much “by himself” in every sense. …’

 

A casual visitor’s impressions of a stranger will usually bring qualifications or contradictions from those who have known him more intimately – we have seen, for example, that Rackham’s isolation, a synonym perhaps for his artistic integrity, was consistent with a strong loyalty and devotion to his family and friends. Yet Mr Ward is not the only chance observer of Arthur Rackham who has retained a similar impression of him. The artist had indeed lived for many years in a world of fantasy that was consistently and recognizably his own. And the relation between the man and his drawings was made particularly close in Rackham’s case by his practice of using himself as his own model. Rackham well knew that he was part and parcel of his own creation; and it amused him. Active and supple, he was adept at posing and ‘making faces’. His features (or the suggestion of them) are reflected back to us, usually as by a distorting mirror, from the features of innumerable grotesques and from his own personified trees; sometimes they are reflected, as from a clearer mirror, in recognizable self-portraits. Despite his highly developed visual memory for nature and landscape, throughout his life he depended considerably on living models; in addition he kept a large collection of costumes and properties. If a drawing required an attractive woman, no one could satisfy the reader’s imagination more delicately or sympathetically than Rackham. Yet his models were often employed merely as human lay figures. One of these models, Marita Ross, has testified (Everybody’s Weekly, 27th September 1947) that ‘a young girl might equally well serve him as the Vicar of Wakefield or an evil old witch. I remember one who even acted as a dismembered corpse …’.

Rackham’s external life was as reliable and conforming as might be expected of anyone who keeps his accounts, as he did, with Victorian precision. Within the studio, his intense artistic imagination, his love of beauty and of his craft, his power of assimilating himself to nature in all its forms – especially the smaller creation – made him inevitably a man apart. But the Rackham world was one to be created on his own terms of diligent and thoughtful application. Designing for the films or for the theatre might have brought large returns; but the backstage atmosphere of hustle and improvisation was not for him. It was left to Max Reinhardt and Walt Disney to realize on the stage and screen the fantasy that Rackham had so long anticipated, and his one experience of the professional theatre – his costumes and scenery for Hansel and Gretel at the Cambridge Theatre, 1933–4 – did not fully satisfy him.

Basil Dean’s production of Hansel and Gretel which opened on Boxing Day, 1933, with Ernest Irving’s arrangement of Humperdinck’s score played by members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, nevertheless had considerable merits. Rackham plunged into his task with boyish enthusiasm; and Alick Johnstone, the scene painter, did full justice to his designs. Punch (3rd January 1934) felt that the choice of Rackham as the decorator had been ‘a peculiarly happy if, when you come to think of it, obvious inspiration’, and described Rackham’s forest as ‘a scene of authentic theatrical enchantment’. H. E. Wortham in the Daily Telegraph (27th December 1933) declared his drop curtain ‘a masterpiece with its two impish children so deliciously unselfconscious of being the centre of an elaborate design’ (see page 141). If Rackham himself showed less confidence that he had entirely ‘come off’ in the theatre, this was because he felt acutely conscious of operating outside his proper artistic milieu. But at his age Hansel and Gretel was an admirably gallant experiment – though one undertaken too late to influence his career.

The hard working day served him a little longer. He still longed to succeed in portraiture, and in 1934 received 250 guineas for a posthumous portrait of his former neighbour Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce. His illustrations for The Pied Piper (1934) were thoroughly happy, and his drawings for Peer Gynt (1936) remarkably fresh and interesting (see page 143). Between them came Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935), one of the few commissions that Rackham did not really enjoy. He contrived a touch or two of his old romantic poetry, but for the most part was concerned to match his illustrations to the macabre quality of the text. He told Marita Ross that he doubted whether he could do it. In the event he almost overdid it, and assured her ‘that his pictures were now so horrible that he was beginning to frighten himself!’ They are a revelation of the concealed power hinted in Comus, but the book is not one with which lovers of Rackham are tempted to linger.

In 1935 he tested the public’s affection by holding another exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, this time chiefly of works from Hans Andersen and The Compleat Angler, but including some ‘straight’ landscapes. It was the first time he had exhibited there since 1919, and he was delighted to find himself welcomed back in the Sunday papers as ‘A Great Illustrator’ and ‘The Goblin Master’. A high proportion of the drawings were sold, two of them to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The exhibition may have solaced him for the marriage of his daughter in the same year, which he celebrated by a wry drawing of himself as a typical ‘Rackham’ tree with two affectionate birds on one of its branches and a nest on another. This drawing is the best answer to those who would invest Rackham’s ‘subjectivity’ with an over-serious psychological significance. It reminds us again that he was

Design for act-drop of Hansel and Gretel, produced at the Cambridge Theatre, London, in 1933 (by courtesy of Peter Lazarus, Esq.).

fully aware of the joke and, on informal occasions, had been willing to contribute to it. Rackham enjoyed poking fun at himself – a sure sign of a healthy state of mind.

When the American George Macy called on Rackham in the summer of 1936 at his ivy-covered, red-roofed cottage studio off Fitzroy Road, he, too, found him ‘looking like a character out of one of his own drawings’. ‘In the last years of his life, when I knew him,’ wrote Macy in The Horn Book (May–June 1940), ‘his head seemed always cocked to one side, bright and eager and smiling and cheerful; his cheeks were pink and bright; his eyes bright blue and clear; his emotions used his face as a field to play on.’ Macy had called on behalf of the Limited Editions Club of New York to invite Rackham to illustrate James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold. He found him, for

Peer and the Threadballs. Peer Gynt, 1936: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.

the first time for many years, at something of a loose end. Rackham soon agreed to tackle The Crock of Gold, but said that he would be glad to have another commission as well, so that he would know what he could turn to after his work for Stephens’ book was finished.

The pair sat in the studio for a long while, talking vaguely of what he might do. In a desultory fashion, Macy eventually threw out the suggestion: ‘What about The Wind in the Willows?’

Macy then saw Rackham much moved. ‘Immediately a wave of emotion crossed his face; he gulped, started to say something, turned his back on me and went to the door for a few minutes.’ When he came back he explained that for years he had ardently wished to illustrate the book, and had always regretted that he had refused the invitation of Kenneth Grahame and his publishers nearly thirty years before. He welcomed the opportunity offered him by Macy with open arms, insisting that he must illustrate The Wind in the Willows before The Crock of Gold. As he was determined to take his time, a contract was prepared by which Rackham agreed to deliver the drawings to the Limited Editions Club in the spring of 1938.

That Rackham’s last subject in book-illustration (for so it proved) should have been one in which he took especial pleasure, and of which he made an outstanding success, demonstrates a kind of poetic justice not commonly found. ‘It’s a splendid book, isn’t it!’ he had written to the Simon children in 1909 (see pages 82–3). To him and countless others it had remained a splendid book; and it is now all the more splendid for later generations because its text can be read side by side with Rackham’s entrancing river scenes and the most sympathetic studies of the small animals that he ever achieved. There is a mellow grace, a gentle wisdom, an affectionate humour in these drawings that make them the perfect farewell.

It is a strange paradox, but one revealing of the man and his character, that these last drawings should have been perhaps the

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‘It was a golden afternoon; the smell of the dust they kicked up was rich and satisfying.’ The Wind in the Willows, 1940 (by courtesy of Mrs Barbara Edwards).

gayest and happiest of all his illustrations; for the work was rendered most arduous for him, first by Mrs Rackham’s increasingly serious illness, then by his own gradually failing health. But he began the task immediately: a letter from the author’s widow, Mrs Kenneth Grahame, at Pangbourne, is dated 8th September 1936. In it Mrs Grahame says that she will be ‘very glad’ to help Rackham ‘to discern the special spots on this reach of the river that might be connected with Toad, Mole and Company’, and she continues:

 

‘The trees which are such a feature along the river-bank here are really more full of “drawing” when the leaves are off – but you may not be able to wait for this aspect – or you may wish to see them (the trees) both in leaf & later on in branch. I know that Kenneth wrote to a small schoolgirl in an elementary school, who had written a prize essay on “The Wind in the Willows” – “I have always thought of ‘Toad Hall’ as being on the Oxfordshire side of the river” – & I know a house, Elizabethan but somewhat ornate, that might serve as a model. There is a lovely backwater where Mole & Rat may have boated, & a spit of foreshore where the swans nest, on which a year or two ago 2 baby otters were found. …

‘I rather hope you may not be time-driven to come till the weather is better again –as at present it is too windy to go on the river – which you might wish to do.

‘I shall be glad to help in any way in my power to show you the scenes & settings most appropriate to your purpose. …’

 

There was no hurry; Rackham’s drawings show trees that are bare and trees that are in leaf; he took-several walks beside the river with Mrs Grahame. By the spring of 1938, he could report only limited progress, however, and in the autumn of that year he went into the Oxted and Limpsfield Cottage Hospital for an operation for internal

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‘ “Shove that under your feet,” he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat.’ Rackham’s last drawing, 1939. From The Wind in the Willows (by courtesy of Mrs Barbara Edwards).

cancer. On 22nd November 1938, he wrote a pencilled note from the hospital to Mrs E. Williams Bailey, an admirer and collector of his work:

 

‘I wish I could give a good account of either my wife or myself. My wife has bone up amid great disturbances astonishingly well, but I fear it cannot be said that she is better. And I – well the less said the better. Henceforth life will only be possible for me with the aid of a surgical nurse – whether at home or at the hospital as at present. I wish I could stop losing weight – but I eat with difficulty & haemorrhage is frequent & severe. So I am very weak.’

 

And on 28th November he wrote to the same correspondent:

 

‘…I am told I must not expect to be able to gauge the future possibilities for my life in less than about a year. It turns on unknown conditions that cannot be got at – due to the capricious behaviour of a gland, that may get tired of its misbehaviour, or the reverse – in which case my difficulties will be very great. However, we must wait & see. My best hope is to feed as well as I can (at present a very poor effort) & never tire myself.’

 

He returned home to Stilegate with no illusions; his London studio was abandoned; and as time showed that he was not to recover he became very low and depressed. He spent much of the time in bed, but there were days when he still felt strong enough to work and deal with his affairs. In April 1939, Mary Truby King wrote to Heinemann from Adelaide, asking permission to use a drawing from Swinburne’s The Springtide of Life – ‘quite the most charming “natural feeding” picture I have seen’ – as a frontispiece for her book Mothercraft, and added: ‘I feel sure that Mr Arthur Rackham, or his trustees (I think he is dead, but am not sure) would not mind the picture being used for this purpose.’ Rackham wrote on this letter, in ink, and in a firm hand, that he had agreed to the proposal for a fee of ten guineas and an appropriate acknowledgement.

In June an old friend, the poet and wood-engraver T. Sturge Moore, sent him a kindly letter full of gossip about mutual acquaintances of their student days, and telling him the latest news of the Art-Workers’ Guild. ‘I was very glad to learn that you enjoy respites from exhaustion sometimes long enough to let you get on with the work you have on hand,’ wrote Sturge Moore; ‘I hope you can enjoy the light and heat and that they will help you to stave off exhaustion.’ It was a fine summer, and once, while he was lying in the garden, Rackham said to his nurse: ‘How nice it would be if I could die here under the trees!’

Slowly, the drawings for The Wind in the Willows neared completion. The last drawing of all to be finished was that of Rat and Mole loading their boat for the picnic (see page 147). Rackham’s daughter remembers his great exhaustion and the extreme difficulty he had in getting it done. When he had, as he thought, finished it, he suddenly discovered that there were no oars in the boat. Barbara tried to persuade him that this was a detail that did not matter, but he insisted that everything must be right, and with great labour he altered the drawing and put in the oars. After he had done this, he lay back in bed and said: ‘Thank goodness, that is the last one.’ And so it proved in every sense.

Arthur Rackham died on 6th September 1939, a few days before his seventy-second birthday. His ending, like his whole life and the strong clear strokes of his pen, had been gallant and true. He had finished his work, and he had made ready his boat for a journey.

1. In The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club Eighteenth Annual Volume, 1940.