Arthur Rackham

When I was younger, I had a very old children’s book, given to me, filled with beautiful illustrations. I never cared for the fairy tales and folklores the book contained, but the illustrations were magical. They really brought the out the spirit of the stories - all the enchantment and fantasy was very alluring. Unfortunately, over the years, the book went missing. I don’t even remember the title of the book anymore, but I remember the illustrations very vividly. Today, I stumbled upon a collection of illustrations by Arthur Rackham, and as chance would have it, he was the illustrator, and the book - “Some British Ballads”:

“Arthur Rackham was born in 1867 into a Victorian age that he perpetuated and documented by way of his art. He was one of twelve children. He studied at the City of London School where he won prizes and a reputation for his art. At the age of 18, he became a clerk. It was, after all, a Dickensian world as well, where clerks played a significant role in both fiction and real life. He clerked and in his spare time studied at the Lambeth School of Art.”

“The roots of [his] style [are] evident in many of [his early books], but a flowering took place in 1905 in a stunning edition of the old Washington Irving classic, Rip Van Winkle. It was Rackham’s first major book… Rackham painted 51 color plates, tipped-in and gathered together at the rear of the book. They featured all of the traits that were soon to be as famous as his signature, including sinuous pen lines softened with muted water color; forests of looming, frightening trees with grasping roots; sensuous yet chaste fairy maidens; ogres and trolls ugly enough to repulse but with sufficient good nature not to frighten; and backgrounds filled with little nuggets of hidden images or surprising animated animals or trees.”

“Most obvious, in retrospective, is the calm and good humor of the drawings. They seem imbued with a gentle joy that must have been reassuring to both the children and their parents. Rackham had found his niche. His drawings would convey a non-threatening yet fearful thrill and a beauty that was in no way overtly sexy or lewd. It was a perfect Victorian solution and he seems to have taken to it with an impish delight.”

“He never lost the joy and sense of wonderment and he never gave in to the baser styles that fell in and out of favor over the years. From Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 to the start of World War I, Rackham’s illustrations preserved a lifestyle and a sensibility that kept the frighteningly modern future at bay. His beautiful drawings were the antithesis of the industrial advances that allowed them to be printed at affordable prices. Even into the twenties and thirties, his art was a constant reminder of those aspects of innocence that had been left behind. He always kept his gentle humor and his Wind in the Willows, published posthumously in 1940, is as much a children’s classic as his Peter Pan.”

Rackham died in 1939.

Text sourced from Been Publishing.