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When Phantasie Takes Flight: the Art & Imagination of Arthur Rackham

The Art of Walter Crane

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"Illustrating the Child Within: Arthur Rackham" Suzan A. Alteri, Curator of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

Arthur Rackham was a most singular middle-class gentleman; a tall, slight, bespectacled and balding middleaged man who believed in hard work, prudence, and frugality. He lived a comfortable life in London with his wife, Edith, a portrait painter, and their daughter Barbara. But when Rackham sat at his drawing board and easel he created, perhaps with a mischievous, devilish grin, another world inhabited by gnarled trees fraught with life, impish dwarves and gnomes, and curious children, forever on the border between the fantastical and the real.

Born in 1867 as one of 12 children, Rackham, unlike many of the artists and illustrators in this exhibition did not spend hours drawing as a child. In 1885, at the age of 18, Rackham began his career at the Westminster Fire Office as an office clerk. Noticing that something was missing from his dull, but secure work as a civil servant, he began studying during the evenings at the Lambeth School of Art. Less than 10 years later, Rackham had illustrated his first book. It was only after he realized he could make a living from his illustrations that Rackham left the safe world of civil service behind, but, unlike many of the illustrators on display, he was not an immediate success.

During the 1890s, Rackham illustrated a total of nine books - steady work to be sure, but it was not until 1900, when he was commissioned to illustrate Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm, that he came to the attention of William Heinemann, George Harrap, and Hodder and Stoughton, publishers of deluxe edition gift books. By 1905, when Rackham illustrated Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, he had become England’s leading book illustrator. Although Rackham had succeeded in creating a totally unique style of illustration with the publication of Rip Van Winkle, his work was not without its influences.

In 1823, the first edition in English of Children and Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm appeared for sale, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, then England’s leading illustrator in black and white. At first glance, one may not notice any similarity between the work of Rackham and Cruikshank, but if one leans in close and studies the illustrations created by Cruikshank, the darker side of fantasy, which Rackham would masterfully portray over 80 years later, may be glimpsed. Walter Crane, who began his career 30 years before Rackham, illustrating nursery rhymes with bold colors and decorative borders, also illustrated a version of Children and Household Stories in black and white. But for Crane, the power of illustration was to educate and inform children in an entertaining manner. Later in his life, Crane would become a detractor of Rackham’s work, which he referred to as ‘ghouls and monsters’ because he believed they disrupted a child’s development. This was a major difference for the time periods in which these two inventive illustrators lived: the prim world of Victorian England versus the romantic golden age of the Edwardian era with only hints of the tragedy the First World War would bring.

If any artist encapsulated the spirit of the Edwardian era in children’s literature, it was Arthur Rackham. His work had a unique effect on the reader because of its mix of the material, real world with the fantastical. This style was ethereal, magical, and mysterious - if one peered closely into the eyes of one of his gnomes or fairies - even grotesque; it was rooted in Rackham’s fantastic and playful imagination and his ability to illustrate the indescribable. Using a cast-off line from part of the text, Rackham could display a mood or an atmosphere, drawing readers not only further into the story, but allowing them to imagine themselves floating in the air with a fairy or being ensnared by one of his many twisted trees. As scholar Selma Lanes stated, “clothe a fairy in material real enough to touch and she, by extension can be touched; she exists.”

Many artists, both during Rackham’s lifetime and after, would try to emulate his style, but none would entirely succeed. Contemporaries of Rackham, such as Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth, became enamored of bold colors. Although Dulac tried to imitate Rackham’s use of sinuous lines, his line-work was lost among his vibrant colors. Modern illustrators, such as Robert Lawson, Charles Vess, Alan Lee, and Michael Hague have tried to recreate the atmospheric, haunting aspect of Rackham’s work, but they inevitably capture the spirit rather than the essence of Rackham’s illustration. The closest anyone may have come to recapturing the imaginative world of Rackham is Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican filmmaker who drew heavily upon what he termed “Rackham’s trees” in the film Hellboy. He again used Rackham’s darker aspects of the grotesque in his creation of the character The Faun for Pan’s Labyrinth.

Of all the illustrators in this exhibition, Rackham stands alone, except for perhaps American Maxfield Parrish who would create illustrations completely unlike Rackham’s but who had, like Rackham, a style all his own. Some of his work even rivals the atmosphere of Rackham. But if the raison d’être of a children’s illustrator is to remember the child within and create a world which readers can inhabit, few can argue that Rackham was the master.
Influences Iconic and instantly recognizable, British illustrator John Tenniel’s tubular Alice laid the foundation for generations of artists to alter images of human beings to convey their impression of an author’s imaginary world. Some artists, such as Charles Robinson, took Tenniel’s image to the extreme of a snake-like head. Others, such as Rackham, deviated from Tenniel and created a new Alice whom people could love. A master of black and white illustration, George Cruikshank skipped along the fence between reality and imagination and influenced similar juxtapositions of the real, surreal, and completely fantastic in many of his successor artists, including Willy Pogány, Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Rackham. Walter Crane’s use of color and light in his Aesop’s Fables acknowledges the priority of reality in his artwork over imagination. At the same time, it is the jubilant mixture of exactitude of form with ebullient splashes of color that would find most favor among his successors. Even Beatrix Potter foreshadowed the movement to anthropomorphization of flora and fauna as she depicted Peter Rabbit leaning against a wall, feet crossed, and hand under chin, exactly as his human counterparts would have stood and ruminated.