# Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO
Art School and After
We are fortunate in having Rackham’s own reminiscences and his considered opinion of this strenuous period in the office and the school. They are contained in a letter to Mr W. E. Dawe, a young man who found himself in much the same dilemma as Rackham had done, and who wrote to ask Rackham’s advice in 1909, when he was at the height of his fame. The letter is a remarkable example of disinterested generosity from a busy professional to an anxious beginner entirely unknown to him.
‘I was much interested by your letter and it will need rather a long letter to answer it satisfactorily. As you say you appear to be in much the same case as myself in having to go out into the world & earn your living at the age of 17; (and for the next seven years or so I worked as hard as I could out of business hours (9–5) to equip my self as an artist – not being able to embark on a professional career till was nearly 25, & then for many years getting the barest living from my profession & having to do much distasteful hack work.)
‘The king could not contain himself for joy.’ The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm; a drawing of 1907.
‘You say you send things to “Scraps”, so did I at your age, though with the realisation of more serious artistic intentions I soon gave it up & devoted my time to the severest education. And that is the best advice I can give you.
‘You might perhaps make a precarious living out of such work for Scraps &c – but after a few years of it, you would feel it cramping debasing hack work, killing the art in you, & robbing you of the joy of true art expression which is, after all, the one & only reason for your being an artist at all. The living from art is a poor one – for only a very few is it better. For numbers it is dismal failure – for some perhaps who appeared in youth to be really talented & who started with the utmost enthusiasm. And the outlook appears to get steadily worse. As a profession it is one to which no parent would be justified in putting a son without being able to give him a permanent income as well. Then, of course, if he fail, he will have something to live upon: I know several such, &, believe me, their bitter disappointment at their professional failure is only just prevented from being misery by the possession of an independent income.
‘The fact that you can earn a little money at it now means very little. The standard of work that ensures a successful professional career is now technically very high and nothing but years of determined study can equip you for equal competition with the rest in the field.
‘They worked themselves up into such a rage that they tore up trees by the roots…’ The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm; a drawing of 1906.
‘Then in 5 or 6 years you may find that your proved ability justifies you in joining the ranks of professional artists. And if, as is within the bounds of possibility, it doesn’t, you will be far happier living by your business, and practising art as an enthusiastic amateur than as a disappointed, pot-boiling professional.
‘Is this a very disappointing letter? – you needn’t regard it so – for whether you are a genius or not there is only one way of discovering it – it can’t be done without years of study – in art as in any other profession (only perhaps more in art than in any other profession). If you have ability, in 10 years you’ll have shewn it, & you will be, professionally, a mere youth with the future before you. And you will not have burnt your boats too soon.
‘So stick to your business for the present.
Becket at Windsor. Westminster Budget, 24 March 1893.
‘Believe me Sincerely yours Arthur Rackham’
In the event, Mr Dawe stayed in the City, and he has not regretted that he remained an amateur. ‘Now in retirement I have the more time to practise the art I’ve never ceased to love,’ he wrote in 1958. ‘That it has worked out like this would have pleased Rackham.’
With Rackham, of course, it was otherwise. Throughout 1891 his work proved increasingly acceptable to the Pall Mall Budget. In 1891 and 1892 there were few weeks in which his drawing was not represented in that paper. We may follow through his eyes the day-to-day life of London, most diligently recorded. He sketched in the shops and in the streets of London, in the railway stations, at the theatres, in the churches, at the Zoo, and at Burlington House on ‘sending-in day’. He was ready to make excursions to the country or the seaside, and in July 1891, his drawings of ‘A Little Holiday in Belgium’ with his friend Walter Freeman filled two pages of the P.M.B. The humours of cockney cabmen or ‘Winter Bathing in the Serpentine’ alternated with funeral tributes to the Duke of Clarence or C. H. Spurgeon.
‘With this ring I thee wed’: The Duke puts on the ring. Westminster Budget, 7 July 1893 (from a reproduction).
The Patient. Westminster Budget, 15 June 1894 (from a reproduction).
Some of Rackham’s voluminous journalism is shown in this book. For the most part it is conventional and unimaginative – in striking contrast to the work by which he is best known – but already he was demonstrating his mastery of line. An artist so deft and conscientious was an asset to the Westminster Budget. And there were moments, as with his disquieting full-page fantasy ‘The Influenza Fiend’ (1893), which unmistakably foreshadowed the fanciful and at times weirdly imaginative illustrator that he was to become.
The influenza fiend. W.B., 22 December 1893.
Rackham’s work in the ’nineties displayed versatility and experiment. The journalist predominated, it is true, with his large output of factual reportage of high quality. But at the same time a remarkable draughtsman was developing; his pencil studies of old men, dated 1895, in Mrs Harris Rackham’s collection, show him to have learned from Charles Keene (see page 47). Beardsley had become another considerable influence (Rackham parodied Beardsley engagingly in the Westminster Budget of 20th July 1894, but Beardsley was nonetheless a serious influence on his style), and with him the whole German school from Dürer to Menzel and Hans Thoma. The fanciful and poetic element gradually supplanted the conventional as Rackham’s technique developed.
Cover design for the first edition of The Dolly Dialogues.
Title-page sketches for The Vicar of Wakefield.
When Rackham was asked by The Bookman (October 1925) to contribute to a symposium on ‘The Worst Time in My Life’, he said that for several years at the beginning of his career he had had ‘far from an easy time’, but added that the Boer War ‘was a very thin time indeed for me, and may be considered the worst time I have ever had’. Rackham had little liking or aptitude for the sort of journalistic work then in demand; he realized, moreover, that the camera would soon largely supplant the artist in illustrated journalism. His financial success as an illustrator, though merited and overdue, was also a matter of practical necessity.