Arthur Rackham: New York Visit

"Titania Lying Asleep" by Arthur Rackham

"Arthur Rackham at sixty was unable to come to terms with noisy New York, but he found much to enjoy there. ‘Everyone is excessively kind,’ he wrote; ‘Everyone was brought up on my work – if young enough – or brought up their families on it if old enough.’ He soon had the run of six New York clubs, and was inundated with invitations. ‘The nature of my work seems to have made my name familiar to so many others than artists: the bookish people – librarians, book-lovers & so on. … The artists are extraordinarily friendly, too. I cannot think any American artist coming to our country (except a Whistler or Sargent) could find himself so heartily greeted.’ 

Rackham’s meetings with many publishers and magazine editors in their ‘gorgeous offices’ proved satisfactory and productive, though he was disappointed to find that, as in England, ‘all the publishers are shy of costly books’.  One of the most interesting results of Rackham’s trip was a commission from the New York Public Library to provide for the Spencer Collection there a series of special watercolours illustrating A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. These were exhibited at the Library in 1929, and bound up in a beautiful manuscript book written by Graily Hewitt.

On his last day in America, before sailing in the Olympic at midnight to get home for Christmas, Rackham visited an exhibition of drawings in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, met the young artist, and spent the evening with him and Anne Carroll Moore, who later described the occasion in The Horn Book (Christmas, 1939). He told them he was ‘free to kick up my heels until sailing time’, so they drove him in a taxi over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to see the lights of the city, took him to supper at ​the Brevoort Grill, and escorted him on board the Olympic with a present of chocolates for his daughter and a candle of good luck to be lit in his cabin."

To be continued

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