THE IMPACT OF 1914
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.’
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.…’
How many strawberries grew in the sea.…’
100
