Arthur Rackham: Wind in the Willows (Pt. 1)

Arthur Rackham's "Rat & Mole Have a
Picnic" from "Wind in the Willows"

"That Arthur Rackham’s last subject in book-illustration (for so it proved) was one in which he took especial pleasure, and of which he made an outstanding success, demonstrates a kind of poetic justice not commonly found. Of 'Wind in the Willows', ‘It’s a splendid book, isn’t it!’ he had written to the Simon children in 1909. To him and countless others it had remained a splendid book; and it is now all the more splendid for later generations because its text can be read side by side with Rackham’s entrancing river scenes and the most sympathetic studies of the small animals that he ever achieved. There is a mellow grace, a gentle wisdom, an affectionate humour in these drawings that make them the perfect farewell. 

It is a strange paradox, but one revealing of the man and his character, that these last drawings should have been perhaps the ​gayest and happiest of all his illustrations; for the work was rendered most arduous for him, first by Mrs Rackham’s increasingly serious illness, then by his own gradually failing health. But he began the task immediately. 

A letter from the author’s widow, Mrs. Kenneth Grahame, at Pangbourne, is dated 8th September 1936. In it Mrs Grahame says that she will be ‘very glad’ to help Rackham ‘to discern the special spots on this reach of the river that might be connected with Toad, Mole and Company’, and she continues:

‘The trees which are such a feature along the river-bank here are really more full of “drawing” when the leaves are off – but you may not be able to wait for this aspect – or you may wish to see them (the trees) both in leaf & later on in branch. I know that Kenneth wrote to a small schoolgirl in an elementary school, who had written a prize essay on “The Wind in the Willows” – “I have always thought of ‘Toad Hall’ as being on the Oxfordshire side of the river” – & I know a house, Elizabethan but somewhat ornate, that might serve as a model. There is a lovely backwater where Mole & Rat may have boated, & a spit of foreshore where the swans nest, on which a year or two ago 2 baby otters were found. …

‘I rather hope you may not be time-driven to come till the weather is better again –as at present it is too windy to go on the river – which you might wish to do.

‘I shall be glad to help in any way in my power to show you the scenes & settings most appropriate to your purpose. …’ 

There was no hurry; Rackham’s drawings show trees that are bare and trees that are in leaf; he took-several walks beside the river with Mrs . Grahame. By the spring of 1938, he could report only limited progress, however, and in the autumn of that year he went into the Oxted and Limpsfield Cottage Hospital for an operation for internal ​cancer." (to be continued)

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