The goblin master

Arthur Rackham:
Masterpieces of Art
by Joseph Simas.
Flame Tree Publishing, 2015.

A treasured book in my childhood – unfortunately no longer in my possession – was The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, a hardback first published in 1933 with “23 favourite tales” and a full-colour dust jacket labelled ‘Hop-o’-my-thumb went up to the Ogre softly and pulled off his seven-league boots.’

That selection of fairytales ranged from traditional English tales through Grimm, Perrault, Andersen, and even Washington Irving, to the Arabian Nights, and featured full-page colour illustrations by Rackham, with some black and white pen and ink vignettes and silhouettes peppered through the text.

Forever nostalgic for a missing childhood gem I therefore pounced on this art book when I spotted it in the library to help ease the ache of loss; and a delightful romp through the range of Rackham’s œuvre it certainly proved.

‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ by Arthur Rackham

Joseph Simas (“Actor, Author, Director, Screenwriter, Translator and Voice Artist”) characterises Rackham (1867–1939) as “clerk, artist, goblin master”. It’s true Arthur trained and practised for many years as a clerk in the Westminster Fire Office, but his first and only true love was art, especially pen and ink drawings and watercolours. Though it’s possible to disparage the man as “merely” a book illustrator I agree with Simas that Rackham’s work is that of an artist, his images worthy to be exhibited in their own right.

Arthur Rackham: illustration for ‘Jack the Giant Killer’

After an introductory essay – in an eye-straining small typeface, regretfully – Simas dedicates the rest of this picture book to the artist’s illustrations under five broad headings: children’s books; fables, legends and works by Shakespeare; operas and poetry; novels and short stories; and, finally, fairy tales. And a generous selection is what we get under each category, typically a score of examples, each full page, full colour (even many of the silhouettes) and annotated, with line drawings reserved for the introductory essay, often two or three to each page.

So, what can we expect? In the first category we have images from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Kipling’s Puck of Pool Hill, the first Alice book, The Wind in the Willows and much else; the second includes The Ingoldsby Legends, incidents in Shakespeare’s plays, Aesop’s Fables and Arthurian legend.

Arthur Rackham’s illustration of ‘Alberich and the dwarves’

The text of Wagner’s operas in translation allowed Rackham to show his intimate knowledge of the music dramas in Götterdämmerung, here shown side by side with scenes from British ballads and Milton’s masque Comus; while collectively Irving, Swift, Dickens and Goldsmith have a section dedicated to depictions of their stories.

Finally, the fairytale section not only demonstrates Rackham’s ability to evoke childhood delights and fears associated with the likes of Jack and the Beanstalk, Bluebeard and other folktales but also his mastery of the different demands of perspective and of two-dimensional silhouette technique.

A scene from Milton’s ‘Comus’ by Arthur Rackham

Simas bestows on Rackham the epithet goblin master; of course the artist was fully alert to the delicious frisson of what has been described as “the intimate stranger” whom we store within our psyches, and the monsters, imps, ogres, and giants that rampage through the books he embellished are all that the youngster in each one of us secretly yearns to confront.¹

But we have to feel that we retain the capacity to defeat or conquer that intimate stranger, so Rackham is careful to offer us, especially in the fairytales, an image of the vanquisher in the form of Jack, Beauty, or Sir Launcelot.

From ‘The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm’

So what is it about Rackham’s work that particularly appeals to me? Is it the tonal palette of subtle muted shades so typical of watercolours, which somehow suggests antiquity and tradition that a more garish modern palette would totally dispel? Is it the mastery of composition which first draws the eye to its true focus, but then allows us to wander at will to gorge on sumptuous details elsewhere in the picture? Could it be the contrast between the deliberately grotesque and the delicately delineated features and shape of the innocent that especially charms?

Of course it is all these and more that bring me back to devouring these pictures, from the witch climbing up Rapunzel’s rope-like tress to Ichabod Crane straining against the wind, from pale pellucid skies to leering coppiced trees, from Cinderella’s sisters in outline to the plethora of rich textures in Bluebeard’s castle or the rose garden of the Beast. “Masterpieces of art” they are indeed, and I’m not the first nor the last to be totally enchanted by Rackham’s visions.

Line illustration for ‘Jack the Giant Killer’

¹ In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Of Giants: Sex, monsters, and the Middle Ages, reviewed here: https://wp.me/s2oNj1-giants

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Note. Only one or two of the illustrations in this review appear in this book: but there are so many examples I could have chosen that I mostly selected those already in my blog gallery.