THE LAST YEARS
A letter written to his wife from the Arts Club in 1932 (13th October) gives an impression of Rackham’s daily activity while in London. He was then pre-occupied with the business of the Royal Water-Colour Society; he served on its council many times and for three years was a Vice-President; his work had always been an attraction at the Society’s exhibitions, and the Society welcomed his advice no less on business affairs than on artistic matters. ‘I find I have to be at the R.W.S. on Saturday,’ he writes, ‘so I shall not be able to come home until Sat. evening. … Hanging at the R.W.S. was tiring but I always like doing it and my lecture came off very well.’ The next day ‘a man from Cadbury’s’ was coming to see him (about his one-and-only chocolate box), and in the evening there was ‘the Harrap dinner’. He supposed that he would ‘have to begin settling on next year’s book at once’, though the trade ‘atmosphere’ in general seemed ‘slower than ever’. He wondered what could be inside the two big parcels which had arrived at Limpsfield for him from Harraps (‘sheets to sign, I expect’); he had a word of inquiry for the Limpsfield robins – birds were an increasing interest; and as usual his last thought was for his wife’s health: ‘Good night, dear old Edy. I hope they do your pillows correctly & that you are sleeping.’
Rackham’s portrait of his daughter Barbara – ‘a charming head, in tone, with landscape background,’ said the critic of The Times – hung in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ exhibition in November 1932. When Barbara brought a friend of hers, the writer R. H. Ward, to Stilegate, Limpsfield, in the summer of the following year, he saw the portrait on the wall of Rackham’s studio – ‘a building in the garden’ (so Mr Ward remembers it), ‘separate from the house, separate (one felt) from ordinary affairs, very separate from the136
