Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 2

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER TWO

Art School and After

hroughout 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 35 and 37).

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 47). 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 23) 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.