AMERICAN FRIENDS
Rackham’s work had long had its supporters at the Royal Academy (‘I have a great admiration for it personally,’ Sir Edward Poynter, P.R.A., had told him in 1916 when urging him to contribute to a special exhibition for the Red Cross). In 1922 he allowed Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton to put him down for election as an ‘Associate Engraver’, but, not surprisingly, he lost the ballot to that great engraver H. Macbeth-Raeburn by 26 votes to 11. ‘Draughtsmen’, as such, were not then admissible as Associates of the Academy. Rackham’s candidature may have done something to settle the question of their eligibility for the engraving section, but the rules were not changed until after Rackham’s death, and Edward Bawden is still (1960) the only ‘draughtsman’ so elected.
There is no reason to suppose that Rackham was disturbed by this reverse. Apparently he did retain to the end of his life the lingering remnant of a frustrated youthful ambition to succeed as a painter in oils; but he had realized when he embarked on his career as an illustrator that he would be unlikely to attain the formal honours of the Academy. As compensation he had enjoyed fame, prosperity and the affection of a very wide circle of admirers, young and old.
A more serious cause for disappointment was the increasing difficulty of publishing illustrated books of high quality in England during the ’twenties. The market for fine books was not what it had been in the prosperous decade before 1914. And there was more to it than that. The realities of war had dealt a blow to imaginative craftsmanship in general, and to fairyland in particular. It was a symptom of the changed situation that Rackham’s exhibition of recent work at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1919 was the last that he was to hold there for many years; these exhibitions had been a mutual source of profit to him and to Messrs Ernest Brown and Phillips since 1905, and had played an important part in establishing his reputation.
Fortunately for Rackham, the changed situation in England coincided with a marked display of enthusiasm for his work in the
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