Rackham, Arthur

Rackham, Arthur (1867–1939). British illustrator, celebrated for his work in children's books. He was born in London, into a comfortable middle-class family. From 1885 to 1892 he worked as a clerk in an insurance office whilst attending evening classes at Lambeth School of Art, where his fellow students included Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. In 1892 he started working as a pictorial journalist for the Westminster Budget and he began illustrating books the following year. The book that established his reputation was Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published in 1900, and from then until the First World War he had his golden period, when Edmund Dulac was his only serious rival as an illustrator of children's books. They were very different in style. Dulac was much more painterly, using strong expressive colour, whereas Rackham relied on wiry line and subtle, muted colour. He said he believed in ‘the greatest stimulating and educative power of imaginative, fantastic and playful pictures and writings for children in their most impressionable years', and he worked in a striking vein of Nordic fantasy, creating a bizarre world populated by goblins, fairies, and weird creatures (he looked rather like a gnome himself). After the First World War the market for expensive children's books declined, but he continued to prosper from gallery sales of his work. He had a high reputation abroad as well as in Britain, notably in the USA, which he visited in 1927. He also visited Denmark (1931) in preparation for illustrations to an edition of Han's Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (1932). From the 1920s he occasionally painted in oils, and in 1933 he made a solitary venture into stage design for a production of Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel. His last work, finished shortly before his death, was a set of illustrations for an edition of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1940). Rackham's wife, Edyth Starkie (1867–1941), was a portrait painter.