THE LAST YEARS
human lay figures. One of these models, Marita Ross, has testified (Everybody’s Weekly, 27th September 1947) that ‘a young girl might equally well serve him as the Vicar of Wakefield or an evil old witch. I remember one who even acted as a dismembered corpse …’.
Rackham’s external life was as reliable and conforming as might be expected of anyone who keeps his accounts, as he did, with Victorian precision. Within the studio, his intense artistic imagination, his love of beauty and of his craft, his power of assimilating himself to nature in all its forms – especially the smaller creation – made him inevitably a man apart. But the Rackham world was one to be created on his own terms of diligent and thoughtful application. Designing for the films or for the theatre might have brought large returns; but the backstage atmosphere of hustle and improvisation was not for him. It was left to Max Reinhardt and Walt Disney to realize on the stage and screen the fantasy that Rackham had so long anticipated, and his one experience of the professional theatre – his costumes and scenery for Hansel and Gretel at the Cambridge Theatre, 1933–4 – did not fully satisfy him.
Basil Dean’s production of Hansel and Gretel which opened on Boxing Day, 1933, with Ernest Irving’s arrangement of Humperdinck’s score played by members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, nevertheless had considerable merits. Rackham plunged into his task with boyish enthusiasm; and Alick Johnstone, the scene painter, did full justice to his designs. Punch (3rd January 1934) felt that the choice of Rackham as the decorator had been ‘a peculiarly happy if, when you come to think of it, obvious inspiration’, and described Rackham’s forest as ‘a scene of authentic theatrical enchantment’. H. E. Wortham in the Daily Telegraph (27th December 1933) declared his drop curtain ‘a masterpiece with its two impish children so deliciously unselfconscious of being the centre of an elaborate design’ (see page 141). If Rackham himself showed less confidence that he had entirely ‘come off’ in the theatre, this was because he
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