THE IMPACT OF 1914
and the Shot Tower. Another self-portrait (the frontispiece of this book) painted in 1934, may be thought more successful in suggesting the kindly amusing man behind the mask. This again has a London background – St Paul’s Cathedral. Rackham was always proud to call himself a Cockney. Indeed, he took care to make the further distinction that he had been born south of the Thames. The self-portrait of 1934, when exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, bore the explanatory title ‘A Transpontine Cockney.’[1]
Although in 1919 he was preparing to ‘twitch his mantle blue’ and make for new pastures beside the River Arun, he kept a studio in London until almost the end of his life.
- ↑ Rackham was painted by Meredith Frampton, R.A., in 1920, but this portrait was destroyed with a large part of Mr Frampton’s studio in 1940.
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