THE LAST YEARS
model. As I’ve suggested, it was impossible not to be confused as to which was which, the artist himself or the creatures, human, half-human or non-human, of which he had drawn so many. It wasn’t in the least that he made one diffident in his presence; one simply couldn’t get over seeing so many of his drawings walking about in the shape of one man. It was even surprising that he spoke ordinary English, and not some strange language of fairy-tale or the woods. … One of the strongest impressions he gave me was of a person very much “by himself” in every sense. …’
A casual visitor’s impressions of a stranger will usually bring qualifications or contradictions from those who have known him more intimately – we have seen, for example, that Rackham’s isolation, a synonym perhaps for his artistic integrity, was consistent with a strong loyalty and devotion to his family and friends. Yet Mr Ward is not the only chance observer of Arthur Rackham who has retained a similar impression of him. The artist had indeed lived for many years in a world of fantasy that was consistently and recognizably his own. And the relation between the man and his drawings was made particularly close in Rackham’s case by his practice of using himself as his own model. Rackham well knew that he was part and parcel of his own creation; and it amused him. Active and supple, he was adept at posing and ‘making faces’. His features (or the suggestion of them) are reflected back to us, usually as by a distorting mirror, from the features of innumerable grotesques and from his own personified trees; sometimes they are reflected, as from a clearer mirror, in recognizable self-portraits. Despite his highly developed visual memory for nature and landscape, throughout his life he depended considerably on living models; in addition he kept a large collection of costumes and properties. If a drawing required an attractive woman, no one could satisfy the reader’s imagination more delicately or sympathetically than Rackham. Yet his models were often employed merely as
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