PETER PAN AND ALICE
water-colour – the care that he took to achieve faithful colour reproduction was extraordinary – his Edwardian books were ‘more distinguished by their opulent appearance than by any bookish quality’. This criticism cannot be brought to bear on the exquisite black-and-white work with which Rackham decorated the text pages of these and later books. If there is some truth in it, the fault lay not with Rackham but with the fashion of the time. His achievement in the contemporary convention of illustration was a superb one; and the collectors’ demand for his books, here and in America, has shown it to be lasting.
The Peter Pan book was a landmark in the life of Rackham’s nephew, Walter Starkie, who writes of it:
‘Whereas Rackham’s illustrations of Washington Irving’s tale fascinated me by their quaint touches of Dutch-American realism in contrast with the eerie atmosphere of the mountains and the ghostly figures playing bowls, Peter Pan became the consecration of my childhood, for I had watched my uncle’s sensitive and agile paintbrushes people those trees with dwarfs and gnomes, and he had often drawn the children’s map of Kensington Gardens before taking me on the Grand Tour through what Sir James Barrie called “the pleasantest club in London”. Although we children went again and again to the theatre to see the play, it was through the Rackham illustrations of Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine that Peter Pan still lived in our memories. (At school, however, Gentleman Starkie became my “bête noire”, for I was forever known as “miserable Starkie”). Years afterwards my uncle introduced me to Sir James Barrie after a performance of Dear Brutus and it was the beautiful actress Faith Celli’s inspired acting that brought back all my childhood memories of those illustrations, for Faith Celli was the embodiment of the Arthur Rackham heroine.’68
