# Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE
The Impact of 1914
‘…An illustration may legitimately give the artist’s view of the author’s ideas; or it may give his view, his independent view, of the author’s subject. But it must be the artist’s view; any attempt to coerce him into a mere tool in the author’s hands can only result in the most dismal failure. Illustration is as capable of varied appeal as is literature itself; and the only real essential is an association that shall not be at variance or unsympathetic. The illustrator is sometimes expected to say what the author ought to have said or failed to say clearly, to fill up a shortcoming, and not infrequently he has done so. Sometimes he is wanted to add some fresh aspect of interest to a subject which the author has already treated interestingly from his point ​of view, a partnership that has often been productive of good. But the most fascinating form of illustration consists of the expression by the artist of an individual sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature.’
Rackham’s surviving correspondence shows that he was now in touch with almost as many authors as artists. There are letters in these and later years from Laurence Housman, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Noyes, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling (whose Puck of Pook’s Hill he illustrated for an American edition), Maurice Hewlett, James Stephens, Eden Phillpotts. Much of his correspondence related to commissions that eventually matured; more, perhaps, to abortive projects that came to nothing. And occasionally there are isolated notes, not easily explained, that provokingly suggest the width of his acquaintanceship, as with the following postcard from Bernard Shaw:
‘I am afraid I can’t say Yes or No straight off – that is, if you can leave the question of my coming open. I have had an accident which has disabled my motor car. If it can be repaired in time to take me out of town on Sunday morning I can stay over Saturday night. If not, I must go away by train on Saturday afternoon. If I can come, may I bring my wife?
‘I am greatly hurt at your calling me a slight acquaintance. I regard you as quite an old pal.
‘I adore Sumurun.
‘Many thanks for the invitation.
G.B.S.’
‘To hear the sea-maid’s music.’ A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, 1908.
His work was exhibited almost annually at this time in one or other of the cities of Europe. He won a gold medal in Milan as early as 1906. In 1912 he won a medal at Barcelona and held a special exhibition in Paris of his Wagner drawings at the invitation of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, which made him an Associate and awarded him another gold medal. Works by Rackham were acquired for the galleries at Vienna and Barcelona, and for the Luxembourg, Paris.
He was now receiving letters from admirers all over the world. Those that children always gave him pleasure; he replied to them straightforwardly and seriously, without any ‘talking down’ to his youthful correspondents. (This accorded to his usual practice in conversation with children.) In 1910, for example, a little girl entirely unknown to him, Rachel Fry, aged twelve, who loved his books, thought that it would be wonderful if Arthur Rackham could come to stay with her at her home near Ipswich. She received the following reply:
‘I should have answered your kind letter before, but that I have been away from home for a few weeks – and not so very far from where you live, as I have been at Walberswick on the Suffolk coast.
‘The Knight took the beautiful girl in his arms and bore her over the narrow space where the stream had divided her little island from the shore.’ Undine, a drawing of 1909.
‘I am very glad you like my illustrations. I am rather afraid that the books of mine that are coming out this year & next, which illustrate Wagner’s great Music-stories, the “Ring of the Nibelungs”, are not very well suited for those lucky people who haven’t yet finished the delightful adventure of growing up, but soon, perhaps, you will know & be fond of Wagner’s music and writings, & then you may like these drawings of mine as well as the others.
‘Believe me, Sincerely yours Arthur Rackham’
‘“Little niece,” said Kühleborn, “forget not that I am here with thee as a guide.” ’ Undine, a drawing of 1909.
Rackham’s determination to maintain and to raise the standard of his work was incessant. As he had written a few years earlier (10th December 1906) to M. H. Spielmann, who had drawn his attention to a favourable criticism: ‘I’ve just seen the Graphic & I blush. Well, I can only do my best to live up to it. But the farther I go (& I do hope I am gaining ground) the harder it becomes & the more impossible the “arrival”.’
The Rackham books published in 1912 and 1913 made a complete contrast to Wagner. In Aesop’s Fables (1912) and Mother Goose (1913) Rackham’s primary intention was to amuse, but his illustrations for the fables of ‘The Moon and her Mother’ and ‘The Gnat and the Lion’ suggest the imaginative refinement that he brought to the task. Rackham was often his own model; there are several self-caricatures to be detected in Aesop’s Fables. He is the man who catches the flea, the pompous gentleman who scolds the drowning boy, the credulous slave-owner who scrubs the black boy (see page 101).
The Mother Goose drawings, illustrating a collection of the old nursery rhymes, appeared in the American St Nicholas Magazine, 1912–13. Here Rackham laid himself out to please the children, and was completely successful. The initial letters at the beginning of each chapter of this biography are taken from Mother Goose, Rackham himself figuring in the initial I at the opening of the first chapter. The House that Jack Built, shown on the next page of text, was a drawing of his own home in Chalcot Gardens.
‘Nothung! Nothung! Conquering sword!’ Frontispiece from Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods, 1911 (by courtesy of the Hon. Lady Nicolson, C.H.).
Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures brings together a number of drawings unrelated in theme. Most of them, it is true, are drawings of
‘This is the house that Jack built.’ A drawing of 16 Chalcot Gardens, reproduced in Mother Goose, 1913.
‘There was an old woman Lived under a hill.’
Mother Goose, 1913: a drawing of 1912.
‘I wish I could, but I have promised to write two introductions this autumn, and had better not undertake more. Added to which I would be very bad at it as I have no skill in criticism. I am very glad to hear of the book and look forward to it. You have no greater admirer than myself, and few there are more warmly indebted to you.
‘Yours very sincerely J. M. Barrie’
Rackham was fortunate in obtaining Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch as a substitute for Barrie. ‘Q’ not only admired Rackham’s work; he also thoroughly understood a child’s instinctive longing for the imaginative and fanciful. ‘To this instant, constant, intellectual need of childhood no one in our day,’ he wrote, ‘has ministered so bountifully or so whole-heartedly as Mr Rackham.’ And Quiller-Couch was happy, too, in associating the random, impressionistic nature of much of the Book of Pictures with ‘the wayward visions that tease every true artist’s mind, while he bends over the day’s work’.
‘The man in the wilderness asked me How many strawberries grew in the sea.’
Mother Goose.
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
‘… his new master thought his colour was due to his late owner’s having neglected him, and that all he wanted was a good scrubbing.’ A Rackham self-caricature, from Aesop’s Fables, 1912.
The proof of the drawing ‘Adrift’, an illustration of Hans Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ included in the Book of Pictures – it is here reproduced afresh from the original (see page 103) – shows Rackham at his most despairing. ‘Is it possible anything can be made of this?’ he wrote at the top of the proof. ‘If so, I am afraid I can be of no assistance.’ And at the foot of the proof he lamented: ‘I can’t make any remarks about this. It is too hopelessly muddled. I can only leave it to the block-makers to pull through.’
Rackham’s proofs reveal a perfectionist who drove himself to the limit in order to give his readers the very best of which his own art and contemporary reproduction technique were capable. Ironically, much of his effort was devoted to improving colour subtleties which the layman, seeing only an apparently successful plate, would never have been likely to question. It is almost a relief to discover one proof out of this batch, the drawing (see page 97) for
‘Adrift’. Arthur Rackham’s Book of Pictures, 1913: a drawing of 1909 illustrating Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen (by courtesy of W. Mostyn-Owen, Esq.).
It was typical of Rackham that he should not be content with serving his country as an artist. Like Keene in an earlier emergency, he had to serve also as a man. A self-caricature (reproduced here) on the fly-leaf of a copy of The Queen’s Gift Book, which he gave to his sister-in-law Ruth Rackham, shows him standing at ease with oriental inscrutability in the grey cotton uniform of the Hampstead Volunteers. Mr Gilbert Foyle writes of those days:
The war years held other worries for Rackham. His wife now became seriously ill, from a heart attack after pneumonia. She never recovered her full health but suffered from cardiac and nervous weakness for the rest of her life. Her painting had to be almost entirely abandoned.
A large part of the war was spent by Mrs Rackham and her daughter in furnished houses at Rustington, near Littlehampton, while her husband remained at 16, Chalcot Gardens, paying them visits when he could. In this way Edyth Rackham avoided the strain of the 1914–18 air raids, which, though overshadowed by the bombing of
* An informal self-portrait at the time of Rackham’s war service in January 1916.
Rackham worked steadily through all these disturbances, and, apart from numerous minor publications of ephemeral interest, produced several books of lasting value during the war years. He is not usually remembered as an illustrator of Dickens, but A Christmas Carol (1915) was decidedly successful, for he contrived to adapt the tradition of ‘Phiz’ and Cruikshank to his own characteristic style in the pictures of Victorian London (see page 107) and at the same time found scope for his fantasy in the ghost scenes. We also find him here developing his special talent for silhouette, rare among illustrators. That he only once attempted Dickens again – with The Chimes for the Limited Editions Club in 1931 – may be a matter for regret, for he was well qualified by sympathy to interpret Dickens in certain of his moods.
‘“What do you call this?” said Joe. “Bed-curtains!”’ A Christmas Carol, 1915.
It was during these years that Rackham was most active in the Art-Workers’ Guild. He served on its committee in 1917–18, and in 1919 followed such distinguished predecessors as Walter Crane, William Morris, Sir George Clausen and W. R. Lethaby into the Master’s chair. Among the lectures at which he presided in his year of office were several whose subjects reflected his interests – notably those on ‘Modern methods of Process Reproduction’, ‘Colour Lithography’ and Fairy-tale Illustrations’. The Guild also held an exhibition of Art for Children during this year.
Mr Irving as Don Quixote. W.B., 13 September 1895.
Above and opposite: silhouette illustration from The Sleeping Beauty.
1920. Some of the silhouettes in this book were printed in three colours.
Although in 1919 he was preparing to ‘twitch his mantle blue’ and make for new pastures beside the River Arun, he kept a studio in London until almost the end of his life.