Fairy tales

11 April 2012

At 35, Arthur Rackham was described by his young nephew with child's-eye cruelty as wizened and wrinkled like a walnut, peering short-sightedly through goggle spectacles.

Seven years later, in 1909, a wonderfully Whistlerian photograph, the focus slightly soft, described him at his drawing-board as a man old for his 42 years, the hair receding far beyond the brow, its thin wisps combed and Macassared to camouflage the naked skull, the ears large and prominent, the line of the long neck running into steeply sloping shoulders, the Adam's apple, sags and furrows of the scrag hidden by a collar tall and stiff enough to be an instrument of torture.

Never a vain man, when illustrating Alice in Wonderland he put much of himself into his image of the Mock Turtle, the lachrymose creature who had, like Rackham himself, had lessons in Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils - though not at the Lambeth School of Art with such distinguished fellow students as Charles Ricketts, "an inspirationî, and Charles Shannon, "a little god".

Rackham, far more remembered for drawing than for sketching and painting in oils (though he did both, throughout his long life), was a minor figure on the fringe of Symbolism, even, very late, of Romanticism, partly in chosen or commissioned subjects that revealed him as something of a poetic visionary, and partly in the style that he developed.

A Symbolist? Surely, some will protest, you cannot mean the man who illustrated children's books, ballads and fairy tales? Well, why not? Peer beyond the pretty whimsies and the dull texts that inspired in him neither poetry nor vision, and we find an imagination released to take flight in fancies that are exquisite and mysterious enough to merit comparison-not with other English illustrators, but with considerable painters of his day in France and Germany and Austria.

When was his day? Shall we pinpoint it to 16 March 1898, the day of Aubrey Beardsley's death? Beardsley, five years younger, was infinitely more celebrated, controversial and notorious, and far more in high-class demand.

Both had begun their working lives as clerks in an insurance office, but Beardsley escaped into immediate success, Rackham into "a very thin time... the worst time I ever had". He had drawn and painted before he could read; at the City of London School he had been highly praised and wildly punished for his caricatures.

But most of what he had done since leaving school - five years of evening classes at Lambeth and a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was only 19, excepted - had been hack work, even journalism, for the Pall Mall Budget, the Westminster Budget and the Westminster Gazette, or illustrations of derringdo in Chums, a wholesome magazine for wholesome boys. Can we imagine what the subversive, morbid and deliberately decadent Beardsley would have done for Chums?

They knew of each other: Rackham praised Beardsley as one of the greatest artists of the 19th century, but even so put a caricature into the Westminster Gazette captioned "Nightmare: Horrible result of contemplating an Aubrey Beardsley after supper"; and Beardsley, knowing nothing of Rackham's subtle abilities with colour, then unrevealed in published work, dismissed all his rival illustrators as "old black-and-white duffers".

Beardsley's early death cleared the way for Rackham, and at just the right moment, too, for in 1898 he had three well-developed strings to his bow: the magazine traditions of Chums and Punch, a deft ability with silhouettes and humorous vignettes with which stories and articles could be topped and tailed, and "the bent towards the fantastic" that he had always exhibited, even as a child.

It was with this last that he made his name and still endears himself to us, for, as The Times critic put it in 1906, writing of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the appeal was "addressed to the drawing room rather than the nursery ... all very subtly contrived to catch the fancy of (self) indulgent elders ...". And inevitable this was, for Rackham's aesthetic vocabulary of tone and line, rhythm and flow, distortion and gesture, contrasts of scale and the devices of light and atmosphere, were all very much the vocabulary of accomplished European artists whose work he may have known, or they his.

A passionate Wagnerian and, even in his "thin time", a confident traveller in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France, it is difficult to believe that he knew nothing of European Symbolism, for the inventions of Giovanni Segantini in the 1890s offer surprising parallels, and Rackham's professional success at important international exhibitions in D¸sseldorf in 1904 (then a major art centre), Milan 1906 (when he was awarded a gold medal), and both Paris and Leipzig in 1914, as well as his election to the Society; Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1912, suggest serious contacts with his Continental peers.

That he was aware of contemporary developments across the Channel is proved by a letter of 1913 to his novelist friend Eleanor Farjeon; "I had rather not publish my views on Cubism" - and as they never were recorded, we have, alas, no idea of what they were.

It is evident that he knew the prints of Durer very well, that Knight Death and the Devil nourished his imagination and that the Large Fortune has lost weight in her reincarnation as a fairy; other fairies are first cousins to those of Atkinson Grimshaw. Rackham's Never So Weary is, for all the world, a classical figure by Bouguereau wandering in a Danubian forest by Altdorfer.

Should we see something of Menzel's history paintings in The Dance in Cupid's Alley? Were his illustrations to Gulliver in 1900 an influence on the Beggarstaff brothers (James Pryde and William Nicholson), or was it the other way about? Were Nicholson's designs for the costumes of Barrie's Peter Pan at the Duke of York's Theatre in December 1904 an inspiration for Rackham's illustrations to the book published exactly two years later? Can we see something of Brangwyn in his more heroic figures? And, can we, when we reach the 1920s, discern something of Orpen, Laboureur, Albert Rutherston and even Russell Flint?

It would be easy to argue that once into his stride with illustrations in colour, Rackham remained the same artist from c.1900 until his death in September 1939. At first glance this seems true, but not at second; in well over 3,000 illustrations over 40 years, he moved at least from Art Nouveau and Viennese Secession into something approaching Art Deco, and only at the very end, with The Wind in the Willows, his last commission, does the hand tremble and the eye falter - and for that, cancer was to blame.

It is clear that he responded willingly and with humility to the influence of other artists, but I suspect that in this his modesty came into play; just as he never abandoned reference to nature and the landscape necessary for a particular commission (his last jaunt was up the Thames in Berkshire in search of willows, the river bank and the wild wood inhabited by Ratty, Mole and Badger) and never abandoned his study of the model, male or female, clothed or nude, so his eyes were constantly open to the work of other artists, gleaning from them, but never as a plagiarist.

All this is clear in an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I must be forgiven if I have worried Rackham's work as a Jack Russell terrier worries rats and rabbits and have neglected to say what is expected of me - delectable, ravishing, enchanting and the perfect show for Christmas-It is, indeed, all these, for here are fairy tale and pantomime, the box of delights that never empties, and the pure origin of Disney at his best.

And yet, I have misgivings: how many pre-pubertal children now have read Alice in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables and The Wind in the Willows? I cannot help feeling that they are more at ease with the Turner Prize's Arsewoman in Wonderland and will snigger smuttily when they meet the Zankiwank.

That old critic was right when he opined that Rackham had in mind his fellow elders rather than the bedtime story, those of us entering our second childhood rather than midway through our first.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21. Tues-Fri 10-5. Sat and Sun 11-5. Closed Mondays unless Bank Holidays. Adult admission £7, children under 17 free. Until 2 March.

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