EPILOGUE
painters who decorated our country churches and brought a touch of humour to the portrayal of the ‘Harrowings of Hell’ and the Seven Deadly Sins. There is a famous cartoon by Raemakers, of the 1914–18 War, which shows figures representing the Allies cutting down a tree bearing the anguished features of the Kaiser. This political comment would have been too direct for Rackham. His personified trees (e.g. see pages 8 and 99) humorously suggest the mysteries of nature rather than any criticism of humanity. They are conceived in the spirit of T.E. Hulme’s lines:
‘With a courtly bow the bent tree sighed,
May I present you to my friend the sun?’
Rackham was a craftsman through and through. It is significant that a scrapbook that he kept in his last years contains cuttings of an article ‘Back to Workmanship’ by C. E. Montague, and of a report of a lecture by Charles Morgan, ‘A Defence of Story-Telling’. He was a vigorous and perhaps too stubborn advocate of water-colour. But then, as he once wrote in an article,[1] ‘From the first day when I was given, as all little boys are, a shilling paint-box … from that day, when I first put my water-colour brush in my mouth, and was told I mustn’t, this craft has been my constant companion. … Looking back I have one long memory of holidays and never one without my faithful friend.’
Would the application of psychological analysis assist our appreciation of Rackham’s drawings? A correspondent has told the present writer, in an interesting letter, that he believed Rackham’s future standing would be high and that it would be based on the ‘symbolic content’ of his work as well as on its artistic merit. Whether this would be a fruitful approach to the work of a busy illustrator continually employed on commissioned subjects, not all of his own
- ↑ In The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club Eleventh Annual Volume, 1934.
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