Arthur Rackham: A Bent for Fantasy

"Self-Portrait" by Arthur Rackham

"Arthur Rackham received strong encouragement to follow his natural bent for fantasy from his fellow artist and future wife Edyth Starkie, whom he met about the year 1900 when she and her mother were neighbours of his in Wychcomb Studios, Englands Lane, Hampstead. Her nephew Walter Starkie’s earliest memories of Rackham date from that year. Walter had arrived from Dublin, aged six, on a visit to his grandmother. ‘My first impression of the painter was coloured by the fairy stories my aunt Edyth told me at bedtime,’ he writes:

‘His face was wizened and wrinkled like a ripe walnut, and as he peered short-sightedly at me out of his goggle spectacles I thought he was one of the goblins out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Dressed in his shabby blue suit and hopping about his studio in his carpet slippers, he reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin, but when he was armed with palette and paint brushes he became for me a wizard, who with one touch of his magic wand could people my universe with elves and leprechauns. He would take me out for walks over Primrose Hill or in Kensington Gardens where he would sketch the trees, and as he worked he would ​tell me stories of gnomes who lived in the roots and churned butter out of the sap flowing from the knotted branches.’

This may have been an exaggerated view of Rackham at the age of thirty-three, but it is true to say that in appearance he had aged rapidly – his, after all, was a life of intense application. The clear-cut, earnest, distinguished features above the high collar (as we see them in many early photographs) soon became deeply grooved; he lost his hair young; except in bed, he was never without steel or gold-rimmed spectacles, of which he owned a great variety – reading spectacles, spectacles for tennis, bi-focal spectacles. He remained a neat, alert person, tidy, energetic, punctual. 

Amateur theatricals were for many years a persistent interest; in 1900 he played Blore the butler in Pinero’s 'Dandy Dick,' and he also designed the scenery and acted in performances of Gilbert and Sullivan. He kept himself fit with lawn tennis and exercise on a trapeze. He was active and precise in all he did, whether working or playing, in which there was really little difference since he enjoyed his work and took his play seriously. If he grew slightly balder, more wrinkled and silvery during the years, this hardly altered his general appearance."

To be continued 

(Excerpts from "Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work by Derek Hudson.")