Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work

Front matter

Arthur Rackham

Books by Derek Hudson

(With Kenneth W. Luckhurst) The Royal Society of Arts, 1754–1954

Beginnings

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

It would make an unusual beginning if his biographer could state with confidence that Arthur Rackham was descended, however remotely, from a pirate. There is a touch of macabre romanticism about the idea that is attractive and could be significant; one goes on to imagine a humorously ineffective pirate, who might have stepped out of Peter Pan, and who spent his time sketching on the quarterdeck when he should have been boarding the enemy with his cutlass.

John Rackham was undoubtedly a pirate. He operated from Providence Island and in 1718 commanded a brigantine. Captured by a man-o’-war in 1720, he was hanged with a number of his crew at Port Royal, Jamaica, on 17th November of that year. Can we connect dishonest John with the entirely respectable branch of the family from which Arthur Rackham sprang? Links in the chain of evidence are lacking. But the theory is supported by family tradition.

For a sound beginning, however, we had better turn to Thomas Rackham, born in the Minories, London, in or about the year 1800. The Rackham family was probably of East Anglian descent. The name Rackham has been derived from the Old-English word for a tick; it may have been a tribute, say the etymologists, to a specially large rick, or to the prominence of ricks around a homestead. Be that as it may, the latter-day Rackhams were cockneys, and Arthur Rackham was proudly conscious of the fact.

Thomas Rackham, Arthur’s grandfather, was a schoolmaster, who first taught in the school of his uncle William Capel in Vauxhall Walk and who opened a private school of his own in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, in 1832. His only brother Joseph also kept private schools, first in Kennington and afterwards in Kensington. In 1824 Thomas married Jane Harris, herself the daughter of a teacher, James Harris, whose private school was in Prospect Row, Walworth. James Harris was an agreeable character, fond of children, a member of the Philosophical Society of London and author of a school book on Algebra. There was a measure of artistic talent in the Harris family. James’s brother Henry was a lithographer, and Henry’s son Augustus became a drawing master at Maidstone.

Alfred Thomas Rackham, the father of Arthur Rackham, was born on 11th July 1829, in the house in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, and was christened at old Bermondsey Church. It was then a relatively prosperous neighbourhood, for a number of wealthy men lived in Bermondsey at their business premises. At the age of seven or eight Alfred Thomas attended lectures given by Wallis the astronomer, Dr Birkbeck and others, at the Southwark Astronomical Society. He did not go to school, but was privately taught by one Mary Sutherland, whom he later described as ‘a very able woman’. Before he was fifteen, he was accepted as a junior clerk by a proctor in Doctors’ Commons at a salary of £20 a year. After two years he proceeded, this time as a full clerk, to Messrs Tebbs and Sons, also proctors in Doctors’ Commons, at £40 a year.

Doctors’ Commons, immortalized by Dickens in David Copperfield, was the name given to the area south of St Paul’s Churchyard, surrounding the College of Advocates in Great Knightrider Street. The College consisted of two small quadrangles wherein the Advocates (Doctors of Law) resided or had chambers. They alone had

The struggle for seats: Scenes at Oxford Circus. Pall Mall Budget, 19 March 1891.

the right to act as Counsel in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts which were held in the large hall of the College. On the first day of each term the court looked very gay, when, after prayers in the adjoining dining-hall, the Judge and the Advocates, in their scarlet robes as Doctors of Law, assembled with the proctors – who corresponded to solicitors in the other courts – wearing black gowns and hoods lined with white fur.

The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 gave A. T. Rackham a chance of advancement. In war-time the business of the Admiralty Court was greatly increased, for it had cognizance of all naval prize matters. At twenty-four, A. T. Rackham’s experience in Messrs Tebbs’ office stood him in good stead. He entered the Civil Service in the Registry of the Admiralty Court with a salary of £200 a year, and was soon extremely busy preparing the Declaration of War and other papers. Much was expected of him, and he did not spare himself. Once, while copying a document for the Queen’s signature, he heard St Paul’s clock – the ‘heart of London’, as Dickens called it – strike three in the morning. Having failed three times to fill the large sheet of gilt-edged paper without a mistake, he had to return to the office earlier than usual, only a few hours afterwards, to accomplish the feat.

A. T. Rackham remained in the Registry until he became Chief Clerk, moving with it first to Somerset House and then to rooms in the new Law Courts. In 1896, while still retaining the Chief Clerkship, he was appointed to the ancient office of Admiralty Marshal and Serjeant at Mace of the High Court of Justice, at £800 a year. During each of the three years of his Marshalship he took part in the annual procession of judges and officials up the central hall of the Royal Courts of Justice on the first day of the sittings after the long vacation.

In September 1861, A. T. Rackham was married to Anne, second daughter of William Stevenson, a draper of Nottingham (her grandfather was Principal of the General Baptist College). They spent a fortnight of their honeymoon at Ventnor and another fortnight in

‘ “Hey! up the chimney, lass! Hey after you!” ’ The Ingoldsby Legends. Frontispiece to 1907 edition.

Paris, returning to set up house at 210 South Lambeth Road, where Rackham’s mother and father lived with them until they died in 1873 and 1874 respectively.

In this house all their twelve children were born. The two eldest, both boys, died young. Then, in 1866, came Margaret, a clever girl, who studied at Bedford College and became an examiner in the King’s College Civil Service classes. Arthur, the subject of this biography, was born on 19th September 1867. Harris was born in 1868, and after a brilliant career at the City of London School and Christ’s College, Cambridge, was elected to a classical fellowship at Christ’s in 1894. The next two children, a girl and a boy, both died in their infancy. In 1873 Winifred was born; she became a school-teacher and married Herbert Edward Adams, who taught mathematics at Dulwich College. Another girl, who survived only a few months, was born in 1875. The tenth child, Bernard, born in 1876, was to become Keeper of the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an outstanding authority on his subject. Two more boys completed the family – Stanley, born in 1877, who studied agriculture, and farmed in Canada; and Maurice, who was born in 1879 and in 1901 joined the Admiralty Registry.

This, then, was a typical middle-class Victorian family of the best sort. The father, himself a man of distinction, had at least three unusually distinguished sons – Arthur, Harris and Bernard. Certain characteristic strains ran through the lives of most of his children. There was a didactic, discriminating, scholarly strain; a strain of cheerful humour; an artistic strain; a conscientious strain, born perhaps of legal precision, which showed itself in strict application to business and financial matters. Arthur Rackham combined these qualities to a marked degree.

As a child in the house in South Lambeth Road, Arthur showed a precocious talent for drawing, and especially for fantastic subjects. Put to bed early, he smuggled paper and pencil with him and drew while the daylight lasted. When this was forbidden, he still managed to hide his pencil and draw on the pillows. In the nursery Arthur was healthily mischievous. He discovered a small hole under the saddle of the large dappled rocking-horse; successive nurses lost their thimbles; and, when the children rode the rocking-horse, a mysterious and increasing rattle sounded from the interior. A note to Arthur from his grandmother Stevenson when he was nine congratulated him on a letter which was ‘very nicely written’ and had obviously been freely illustrated with caricatures. ‘The sketches are from life I suppose. … Well, you have not made any of you very handsome.’ As for one of the girls ‘what a nose she has, and a cap fit for her grandmother’.

He entered the City of London School at the age of twelve, in September 1879. The school was then in Cheapside, and Arthur moved with it to the Victoria Embankment in 1883. Years later (28th June 1929) he wrote of his school days to his friend Howard Angus Kennedy, secretary of the Canadian Authors’ Association:

‘So we come from the same school! I went there first at the end of ’79 so we were never together. Old Joey was still in great form, & was my master before the school moved to the Embankment – and a great master he was. Then at the “New School” – as we then called it, I settled down under Rushy, whose back benches I occupied for a long time – never flying higher. But he & I were friends until his death: & he had a great collection of my drawings done in unorthodox hours & bagged by him. And even Abbott turned a blind eye to my delinquencies of that kind. …’

‘Old Joey’ was the Rev. Joseph Harris; ‘Rushy’ was W. G. Rushbrooke, the senior assistant classical master and a former Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; and ‘Abbott’ was Edwin A. Abbott, the headmaster. Arthur did not distinguish himself particularly by his

scholarship, though he won several prizes, including one for mathematics in his last year; but he endeared himself to his masters by his humour and character, and by his precocious talent for drawing, which earned him the school prize (a portrait of himself by Herbert Dicksee, the drawing master, which seems not to have survived). His caricatures of the masters were so successful that he was asked to repeat one of Rushbrooke on the blackboard for the benefit of the whole form.

With all his high spirits, Arthur Rackham was a delicate boy, and at the end of 1883 Dr (later Sir) Samuel Wilks recommended that he should leave school and accompany two family friends, Miss Liggens and Mrs Merryfield, who were emigrating to Australia. Accordingly he sailed with them from Plymouth in the S.S. Chimborazo of the

The five sketches of men in the margins are reproduced from original drawings in one of Rackham’s scrap-books, and are dated 4 December 1892.

Miss Nellie Stewart, the latest Comic Opera Debutante. Pall Mall Budget, 25 February 1892 (from a reproduction).

Sketch at the Palace Theatre: Mlle. Armand ’Ary. Westminster Budget, 24 February 1893 (from a reproduction).

Orient Line on 26th January 1884, passing through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, and arriving at Sydney on 15th March. He spent about three months in Australia, returning in June in the S.S. Iberia. During the outward and homeward voyages, and during his stay in Australia, he painted many creditable water-colours. Vesuvius, Capri and the Suez Canal were among his subjects, but his chef d’œuvre was a ‘Panoramic View of Sydney from Nature’, dated May 1884. He arrived back in London in July with his health entirely re-established.

The long sea voyage, with its ample opportunities for sketching, had quite decided him to be an artist, and in the autumn of 1884 he entered the Lambeth School of Art. His fellow students included Leonard Raven-Hill, Thomas Sturge Moore, and Charles Ricketts; the last-named particularly influenced Rackham. But there was no question of his art-studies occupying the whole of his time; he had to prove his ability and work his way. Thus on 11th November 1884, his old masters Rushbrooke and Abbott both took up their pens on his behalf. Rushbrooke recommended him ‘on the score of intelligence, industry and character’, while his late headmaster Edwin Abbott declared that ‘as regards ability, knowledge, character, and gentlemanly bearing Mr Arthur Rackham would be well suited for the clerkship he is now seeking in the Westminster Fire Office’.

Art School and After

CHAPTER TWO

Art School and After

Throughout the next seven years, from 1885 to 1892, Rackham sat on his stool in the insurance office and brought to his work there the methodical application and accurate accountancy which he showed in business affairs for the rest of his life. From his rooms in Buckingham Street he sent occasional contributions to the cheaper illustrated papers. His first crude published drawings had appeared in Scraps of 4th October 1884, illustrating the thesis: ‘Mothers in Ceylon have a curious way of preventing their children from eating too much. A fine thread is tied round the child before it commences its meal, and when the thread breaks, the child is considered to have had enough.’ Rackham demonstrated this with the minimum of subtlety. Another drawing, in Scraps of 15th November 1884, shows a little boy and a cat both trying to get their feet into their mouths, the cat with more success. His next drawing ‘The Old Year and the New’, published in Illustrated Bits of 3rd January 1885, was much more ambitious and attempted a light vein of prophecy, beginning with a piece of wishful thinking, the ‘Triumphant Return of Wolseley and Gordon’. Rackham was already showing an interest in studies of animals; an egregious frog represented ‘1884 Leap Year’. while lions and kangaroos played a test match Australia v. England. The next published work that he thought worth preserving was a fairly competent series of drawings of the City of London School’s sports at Stamford Bridge in the Daily Graphic in the spring of 1890. But as early as 1887 he was painting water-colours of scenes near Leith Hill and on Wimbledon Common which, though academic and conventional, show an unusually fresh talent and fineness of execution. He painted many other promising water-colour landscapes in the south and west of England during his years in the Westminster Fire Office. A water-colour of Winchelsea was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1888, and sold for two guineas.

We are fortunate in having Rackham’s own reminiscences and his considered opinion of this strenuous period in the office and the school. They are contained in a letter to Mr W. E. Dawe, a young man who found himself in much the same dilemma as Rackham had done, and who wrote to ask Rackham’s advice in 1909, when he was at the height of his fame. The letter is a remarkable example of disinterested generosity from a busy professional to an anxious beginner entirely unknown to him.

‘Dear Mr Dawe,

‘I was much interested by your letter and it will need rather a long letter to answer it satisfactorily. As you say you appear to be in much the same case as myself in having to go out into the world & earn your living at the age of 17; (and for the next seven years or so I worked as hard as I could out of business hours (9–5) to equip my self as an artist – not being able to embark on a professional career till was nearly 25, & then for many years getting the barest living from my profession & having to do much distasteful hack work.)

‘Now above all I do not want to be damping, but you must bear with my putting the case very plainly.

‘The king could not contain himself for joy.’ The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm; a drawing of 1907.

‘To begin with at your age it is absolutely impossible to foretell what degree of talent you are gifted with. You are full of enthusiasm & feel good for anything – that’s the best possible start but it will not be until you are much older & your art very fully developed technically that you can estimate your true powers.

‘You say you send things to “Scraps”, so did I at your age, though with the realisation of more serious artistic intentions I soon gave it up & devoted my time to the severest education. And that is the best advice I can give you.

‘You might perhaps make a precarious living out of such work for Scraps &c – but after a few years of it, you would feel it cramping debasing hack work, killing the art in you, & robbing you of the joy of true art expression which is, after all, the one & only reason for your being an artist at all. The living from art is a poor one – for only a very few is it better. For numbers it is dismal failure – for some perhaps who appeared in youth to be really talented & who started with the utmost enthusiasm. And the outlook appears to get steadily worse. As a profession it is one to which no parent would be justified in putting a son without being able to give him a permanent income as well. Then, of course, if he fail, he will have something to live upon: I know several such, &, believe me, their bitter disappointment at their professional failure is only just prevented from being misery by the possession of an independent income.

‘The fact that you can earn a little money at it now means very little. The standard of work that ensures a successful professional career is now technically very high and nothing but years of determined study can equip you for equal competition with the rest in the field.

‘So this is my advice: – Stick to your business: go as regularly as you can with enthusiasm to a school of art (at New Cross, or Camberwell the schools are excellent) – among other things you will be associating & measuring yourself with the men who will be your

‘They worked themselves up into such a rage that they tore up trees by the roots…’ The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm; a drawing of 1906.

professional companions later on & you will be able to estimate your relative powers – (remembering that if 2 or 3 in the school at any one time are ever heard of as artists in 10 or 20 years time, it is about as much as you can expect). And without a full, general art education you can hardly tell yet in what line you are likely to succeed. For the rest, you must keep yourself fit. You say you find it a strain – well you must do the best you can by sharing your spare time between art study & exercise & other recreations. I myself used to chafe at being able to give comparatively so little time to it while my companions were giving their whole time. But for your comfort I may say that I believe the brain goes on developing on artistic lines in an enthusiastic nature almost as quickly in spite of the shorter time given to actual performance.

‘Then in 5 or 6 years you may find that your proved ability justifies you in joining the ranks of professional artists. And if, as is within the bounds of possibility, it doesn’t, you will be far happier living by your business, and practising art as an enthusiastic amateur than as a disappointed, pot-boiling professional.

‘Is this a very disappointing letter? – you needn’t regard it so – for whether you are a genius or not there is only one way of discovering it – it can’t be done without years of study – in art as in any other profession (only perhaps more in art than in any other profession). If you have ability, in 10 years you’ll have shewn it, & you will be, professionally, a mere youth with the future before you. And you will not have burnt your boats too soon.

‘So stick to your business for the present.

‘Go to the best school of art in your neighbourhood, enjoy your art education, the competition of the schools. Don’t waste time attempting to earn money at it now, it’s not worth it. Wait till you can go into the arena properly trained. Carry a sketch book – at least I did & have never regretted the assiduous thoughtful sketching I did. It is the most splendid training for brain, hand, & eye.

Becket at Windsor. Westminster Budget, 24 March 1893.

‘Show your people this letter & talk it over with them & you have my very best wishes for your happiness & success in my profession.

‘Believe me Sincerely yours Arthur Rackham’

- In the event, Mr Dawe stayed in the City, and he has not regretted that he remained an amateur. ‘Now in retirement I have the more time to practise the art I’ve never ceased to love,’ he wrote in 1958. ‘That it has worked out like this would have pleased Rackham.’

With Rackham, of course, it was otherwise. Throughout 1891 his work proved increasingly acceptable to the Pall Mall Budget. In 1891 and 1892 there were few weeks in which his drawing was not represented in that paper. We may follow through his eyes the day-to-day life of London, most diligently recorded. He sketched in the shops and in the streets of London, in the railway stations, at the theatres, in the churches, at the Zoo, and at Burlington House on ‘sending-in day’. He was ready to make excursions to the country or the seaside, and in July 1891, his drawings of ‘A Little Holiday in Belgium’ with his friend Walter Freeman filled two pages of the P.M.B. The humours of cockney cabmen or ‘Winter Bathing in the Serpentine’ alternated with funeral tributes to the Duke of Clarence or C. H. Spurgeon.

‘Sketches from the Life’ of public personalities became one of his specialities, and these appeared more frequently after he left the insurance office in 1892 and joined the staff of the Westminster Budget. His work, prominently featured in the first number of new paper (2nd February 1893), was published regularly in its for the next three years. The larger format of the Westminster Budget gave him new scope; his drawings of well-known contemporaries became a popular feature, and in retrospect form a remarkable record of life in the ’nineties. Ready to go anywhere and

‘With this ring I thee wed’: The Duke puts on the ring. Westminster Budget, 7 July 1893 (from a reproduction).

The Patient. Westminster Budget, 15 June 1894 (from a reproduction).

anything for his paper, Rackham portrayed many of the leading actresses, sportsmen, writers, and politicians of the day. The Queen and Mr Gladstone were among his most frequent subjects. He was often called upon to celebrate royal occasions (see pages and ).

Some of Rackham’s voluminous journalism is shown in this book. For the most part it is conventional and unimaginative – in striking contrast to the work by which he is best known – but already he was demonstrating his mastery of line. An artist so deft and conscientious was an asset to the Westminster Budget. And there were moments, as with his disquieting full-page fantasy ‘The Influenza Fiend’ (1893), which unmistakably foreshadowed the fanciful and at times weirdly imaginative illustrator that he was to become.

Rackham continued to draw for the Westminster Budget until 1896 but from 1893 onwards became increasingly occupied with book illustrations. His first published book (1893) was a Nord-deutscher Lloyd travel brochure, To The Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, now very scarce, for which he provided black-and-white drawings in the careful rounded style of his early water-colours. The drawings included views of Salt Lake City and San Francisco; of the Sentinel Rock, Yosemite, the Royal Gorge and Pike’s Peak, all based on photographs. Ten of these drawings fetched eighty pounds when they were sold at Sothebys in 1957. Other commercial commissions were for an illustrated guide to Wells-next-the-Sea (1894) and seventy-five drawings in Sunrise-Land: Rambles in Eastern England by Mrs Alfred Berlyn (1894), both books carrying advertisements for the Great Eastern Railway. Some of his journalistic work also reappeared in book form, notably a full page drawing of Irving from the Westminster Budget which was included in Walter Calvert’s Souvenir of Sir Henry Irving (1895), while one of his drawings of Gladstone was used to illustrate In the Evening of his Days: A Study of Mr Gladstone in Retirement by Hulda Friederichs (1896).

The influenza fiend. W.B., 22 December 1893.

More interesting than any of these early efforts were Rackham’s four halftone illustrations and cover design for the first edition in book form of The Dolly Dialogues by Anthony Hope (1894) which had originally appeared without illustrations in the Westminster Gazette. These drawings, stilted as they were – the cover design (see page 41) is the best of them, being in the Beggarstaff manner – served to link Rackham’s name for the first time with a work of literary merit. Soon afterwards came drawings for Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1894), Tales of a Traveller (1895), and Bracebridge Hall (1896); illustrations in Little Folks (1896) for a story by his friend Maggie Browne; charming work for Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1898); capable designs for various gardening and nature books; and conventional romanticism for cloak-and-dagger novels by H. S. Merriman and Stanley Weyman.

Rackham’s work in the ’nineties displayed versatility and experiment. The journalist predominated, it is true, with his large output of factual reportage of high quality. But at the same time a remarkable draughtsman was developing; his pencil studies of old men, dated 1895, in Mrs Harris Rackham’s collection, show him to have learned from Charles Keene (see page ). Beardsley had become another considerable influence (Rackham parodied Beardsley engagingly in the Westminster Budget of 20th July 1894, but Beardsley was nonetheless a serious influence on his style), and with him the whole German school from Dürer to Menzel and Hans Thoma. The fanciful and poetic element gradually supplanted the conventional as Rackham’s technique developed.

Before the ’nineties were out, Rackham had to his credit, besides many drawings for Cassell’s Magazine, Little Folks and other papers, the illustrations for two books published by J. M. Dent which were to prove more important to his career than anything he had hitherto produced. These were The Ingoldsby Legends of 1898 (see page ) and Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1899).

Cover design for the first edition of The Dolly Dialogues.

Title-page sketches for The Vicar of Wakefield.

Neither of these books can be favourably compared with the best of Rackham’s later work, but they show him at an interesting phase of his development. The fiend who blows the horn in ‘The Lay of St Cuthbert’s; or The Devil’s Dinner-Party’ in Ingoldsby is recognizably the same fellow as ‘The Influenza Fiend’ of 1893 and the Caliban from the Lambs’ Tales of 1899, but in his mere ugliness he is a crude precursor of later devils. The artist’s ever-increasing popularity during the next decade led to the publisher’s decision to re-issue Ingoldsby and the Tales from Shakespeare, in 1907 and 1909 respectively, with additional illustrations. In some respects this was regrettable. Rackham provided admirable new frontispieces for both books and worked on many of the old colour plates. The 1907 Ingoldsby, in its vellum-bound limited edition, is valued by collectors, but the book as a whole lacks consistency of vision. Authentic Rackham is to be found in the frontispiece and occasionally elsewhere, but might seem to have been imposed on a medley borrowed from Beardsley, Hugh Thomson and the monkish slapstick of John Hassall. By 1907 Rackham had not only outdistanced his own earlier self but had also outgrown the coarse humours of Barham.

When Rackham was asked by The Bookman (October 1925) to contribute to a symposium on ‘The Worst Time in My Life’, he said that for several years at the beginning of his career he had had ‘far from an easy time’, but added that the Boer War ‘was a very thin time indeed for me, and may be considered the worst time I have ever had’. Rackham had little liking or aptitude for the sort of journalistic work then in demand; he realized, moreover, that the camera would soon largely supplant the artist in illustrated journalism. His financial success as an illustrator, though merited and overdue, was also a matter of practical necessity.

Marriage and Success

CHAPTER THREE

Marriage and Success

Although by the end of the century Rackham had made his mark as an illustrator, and although the responsibilities of marriage which he assumed soon afterwards increased his determination to devote himself to this branch of his art, there are some early sketches in oils, including a self-portrait of 1892 (see ), which show that he was anxious to experiment in that medium, while several interesting and highly deliberate portraits and self-portraits, undertaken at intervals throughout his life, emphasize that portraiture remained one of his unfulfilled ambitions. It is probable that he was never fully satisfied with his portraits and doubted his ability to make a livelihood out of them, with the result – which we cannot regret – that he devoted himself to that kind of work, mostly based on themes provided by literature, which the public came to expect of him and in which he was successful both financially and artistically. But it would be a mistake to suppose that as a young man he was untouched by the appeal of impressionism, for example, or that he fell into his career as an illustrator without any searching of his artistic conscience. In particular, he was well aware that by concentrating on illustration he was limiting his objectives and would be likely to take rank, save for the discriminating few, as a ‘minor artist’.