Arthur Rackham

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(b Lewisham, London, 19 Sept 1867; d Limpsfield, Surrey, 6 Sept 1939). English illustrator. While earning his living as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Insurance Office (1885-92), he trained at the Lambeth School of Art under William Llewellyn (1858-1941), later PRA. Rackham gained early experience as an illustrator by working (1892-6) for the Westminster Budget and other popular magazines. He became widely known for his illustrations to the classic children's stories and fairy tales commissioned primarily by Heinemann Publishers in special editions from 1900 to 1914. Books such as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1900), his first popular success, and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) brought out his gift for characterizing fairies, gnomes and witches. Despite the fantasy of his subjects, Rackham maintained a strict sense of reality by giving his creatures human traits and foibles, and naturalistic, even known, settings. The heyday of the luxuriously printed and illustrated 'gift book' at the beginning of the 20th century coincided with Rackham's greatest achievements as an illustrator.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Rackham, Arthur (1867–1939), British illustrator, whose gift for gracefully portraying fairy world inhabitants within familiar settings, captured the affection of his contemporaries, and continues to elicit the admiration of critics.

Rackham's first fairy‐tale illustrations, in the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1900), included 95 drawings whose immediate popularity led him to revise some of its illustrations for colour reproduction. In 1902 he illustrated The Little White Bird. His subsequent illustrations for Rip van Winkle (1905) established him as ‘the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period’, in the words of his biographer Derek Hudson. A torrent of illustrations followed: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Alice in Wonderland (1907), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1908) visually based on the Suffolk landscape where he vacationed, de la Motte Fouqué's Undine (1909), Aesop's Fables (1912), Mother Goose (1913), Arthur Rackham's Book of Pictures (1913), which included many goblins, elves, and fairies, The Allie's Fairy Book (1916), Little Brother and Little Sister (1917), 40 additional Grimm tales in Cinderella (1919), The Sleeping Beauty (1920), which displayed his gift for silhouette, Irish Fairy Tales (1920) by James Stephens, and finally The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book (1933).

In 1910 Rackham expressed the idea that an illustrator's partnership with an author reached its highest level when illustrations communicated the ‘sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature’ (Hudson, 88). His work was regularly exhibited in Europe and won international recognition in Milan (1906) and Barcelona (1912).

As a child Rackham had drawn indefatigably. On a journey to Australia at 17 to strengthen his delicate health, he sketched uninterruptedly and determined to make drawing his lifework. Trained at the Lambeth School of Art, he began his career in the 1890s with journalistic illustrations of social and political life for two London weeklies, the Pall Mall Budget and the Westminster Budget. He also illustrated travel books and brochures, memoirs, gardening and nature books, which required a high degree of realism, as well as mystery novels and literary books (by Anthony Hope, Washington Irving, Maggie Browne, Fanny Burney, Ingoldsby, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Shakespeare) which gave scope to his penchant for the fantastic. Exhibiting his technical versatility, his illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen's tales mixed dramatic silhouette, expressively detailed black‐and‐white pen‐and‐ink drawings, and watercolour.

Rackham achieved financial independence early and enjoyed a steady income from commissions from the publisher Heinemann. In 1903 he married Edyth Starkie, herself an accomplished painter who won a gold medal in Barcelona in 1911, a year before her husband did, and who encouraged his bent for the fantastic. His goblins embody emotions that range from sombre malevolence to malicious glee; his human characters can be tenderly beautiful or touchingly earnest, like Gerda and Kay in ‘The Snow Queen’.

Bibliography

• Gettings, F., Arthur Rackham (1975).
• Hamilton, J., Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration (1990).
• Hudson, D., Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work (1974).

— Ruth B. Bottigheimer

One of Rackham's illustrations to Das Rheingold, depicting Fasolt and Fafnir seizing Freia.

Arthur Rackham (19 September 1867 – 6 September 1939) was an English book illustrator.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Career 3 Notable works 4 Influence 5 Gallery 6 External links

Early life and education

Rackham was born in London as one of 12 children. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth School of Art.

Career

In 1892 he quit his job and started working for The Westminster Budget as a reporter and illustrator. His first book illustrations were published in 1893 in To the Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, but his first serious commission was in 1894 for The Dolly Dialogues, the collected sketches of Anthony Hope, who later went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda. Book illustrating then became Rackham's career for the rest of his life.

In 1903 he married Edyth Starkie, with whom he had one daughter, Barbara, in 1908. Rackham won a gold medal at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 and another one at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1912. His works were included in numerous exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914. Arthur Rackham died 1939 of cancer in his home in Limpsfield, Surrey.

Notable works

• The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch by Shafto Justin Adair Fitzgerald (40 line, 1896)
• Two Old Ladies, Two Foolish Fairies, and a Tom Cat by Maggie Browne (pseud. Margaret Hamer) (4 colour plates, 19 line, 1897)
• The Ingoldsby Legends by Thomas Ingoldsby (pseud. Richard Harris Barham) (12 colour, 80 line 1898, reworked edition 23 colour plates, 73 line 1907)
• Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (95 line, 1900, reworked edition 40 colour plates, 62 line, 1909)
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (11 line 1900, reworked edition 12 colour plates, 34 line, 1909)
• Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving (51 colour plates, 3 line, 1905)
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M.Barrie (50 colour plates, 3 line, 1906, new edition 50 colour plates, 12 line, 1912)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (13 colour plates, 15 line 1907)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (40 colour plates, 34 line, 1908)
• Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (15 colour plates, 41 line, 1909)
• The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner(34 colour plates, 8 line, 1910)
• Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods by Richard Wagner (32 colour plates, 8 line, 1911)
• Aesop's Fables by Aesop (13 colour plates, 82 line, 1912)
• Mother Goose (13 colour plates, 78 line 1913)
• The Allies Fairy Book (12 colour plates, 23 line 1916)
• Little Brother and Little Sister by The Brothers Grimm (13 colour plates, 45 line 1917)
• The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Alfred W. Pollard (23 colour and monotone plates, 16 line, 1917)
• English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel (16 colour plates, 43 line, 1918)
• The Springtide of Life by Algernon Charles Swinburne (8 colour plates, 1918)
• Some British Ballads (16 colour plates, 23 line, 1918)
• Cinderella ed. Charles S. Evans (1 colour plate, 60 silhouettes, 1919)
• The Sleeping Beauty ed. Charles S. Evans (1 colour plate, 65 silhouettes, 1920)
• Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens (16 colour plates, 20 line, 1920)
• Comus by John Milton (22 colour plates, 35 line, 1922)
• A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys by Nathaniel Hawthorne (16 colour plates, 21 line, 1922)
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare (20 colour plates, 20 line, 1926)
• The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (12 colour plates, 23 line, 1929)
• The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton (12 colour plates, 22 line, 1931)
• Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (12 colour plates, 43 line, 9 silhouettes 1932)
• Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (12 colour plates, 28 line, 1935)
• Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen (12 colour plates, 38 line, 1936)
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (16 colour plates, posthumously 1940 US, 1950 UK)

Typically, Rackham contributed both colour and monotone illustrations towards the works incorporating his images - and in the case of Hawthorne's Wonder Book, he also provided a number of part-coloured block images similar in style to Meiji era Japanese woodblocks.

Influence

In one of the featurettes on the DVD of Pan's Labyrinth, and in the commentary track for Hellboy, director Guillermo Del Toro cites Rackham as an influence on the design of "The Faun" of Pan's Labyrinth. He liked the dark tone of Rackham's gritty realistic drawings and had decided to incorporate this into the film. In Hellboy, the design of the tree growing out of the altar in the ruined abbey off the coast of Scotland where Hellboy was brought over, is actually referred to as a "Rackham tree" by the director.

Gallery

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman." Illustration to a 1918 English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel	"How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad", from The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Alfred W. Pollard, 1917	"The giant Galligantua and the wicked old magician transform the duke's daughter into a white hind", Illustration to English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel	"The giant Cormoran was the terror of all the country-side.", Illustration to English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel
"The Three Bears", Illustration to English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel	"Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"	"Norns weaving destiny" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"	"Brünnhilde is visited by her Valkyrie sister Waltraute" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"
"Alberich speaking to Hagen" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"	"Rhine maidens warn Siegfried" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"	Siegfried kills Fafner Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"	"The Rhinemaidens try to reclaim their gold" Illustration to Richard Wagner's "The Ring"
"The Twa Corbies", Illustration to Some British Ballads	David, Illustration to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens	Young Beichan in prison.

External links

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Arthur Rackham

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Arthur Rackham

• Works by Arthur Rackham at Project Gutenberg
• The Arthur Rackham Society
• Arthur Rackham and his art
• The Illustrators Project: Arthur Rackham
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Arthur Rackham
• Arthur Rackham art and calligraphy info
• Arthur Rackham art at Art Passions (free online gallery)
• SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages: Fairy Tale Illustrations of Arthur Rackham
• Children's Book Illustrators Gallery - Large Archive of Rackham's First edition illustrations
• Update to Arthur Rackham bibliography in "Studies in Illustration"
• Arthur Rackham artwork at American Art Archives web site
• Complete Arthur Rackham Collection for 'The Ring of the Nibelung'

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