THE LAST YEARS
felt acutely conscious of operating outside his proper artistic milieu. But at his age Hansel and Gretel was an admirably gallant experiment – though one undertaken too late to influence his career.
The hard working day served him a little longer. He still longed to succeed in portraiture, and in 1934 received 250 guineas for a posthumous portrait of his former neighbour Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce. His illustrations for The Pied Piper (1934) were thoroughly happy, and his drawings for Peer Gynt (1936) remarkably fresh and interesting (see page 143). Between them came Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935), one of the few commissions that Rackham did not really enjoy. He contrived a touch or two of his old romantic poetry, but for the most part was concerned to match his illustrations to the macabre quality of the text. He told Marita Ross that he doubted whether he could do it. In the event he almost overdid it, and assured her ‘that his pictures were now so horrible that he was beginning to frighten himself!’ They are a revelation of the concealed power hinted in Comus, but the book is not one with which lovers of Rackham are tempted to linger.
In 1935 he tested the public’s affection by holding another exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, this time chiefly of works from Hans Andersen and The Compleat Angler, but including some ‘straight’ landscapes. It was the first time he had exhibited there since 1919, and he was delighted to find himself welcomed back in the Sunday papers as ‘A Great Illustrator’ and ‘The Goblin Master’. A high proportion of the drawings were sold, two of them to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The exhibition may have solaced him for the marriage of his daughter in the same year, which he celebrated by a wry drawing of himself as a typical ‘Rackham’ tree with two affectionate birds on one of its branches and a nest on another. This drawing is the best answer to those who would invest Rackham’s ‘subjectivity’ with an over-serious psychological significance. It reminds us again that he was
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