Arthur Rackham*

A-IARTIN BIRNBAUM

A RTHUR RACKHAM was a typical normal Englishman
/-\\ fond of tennis, skiing and exercises on the trapeze which
_<!_ )V hung in his neat studio. He was devoted to Wagnerian
opera, to his little daughter and to their cat. He seemed to have no
eccentricities or idiosyncrasies, and lived a serene uneventful life
with his wife — a gifted portrait painter — in a tiny building appro¬
priately sittiated off Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill in his native
London. It was one of a series of studios that had been built with
struggling artists in mind. In this peaceful spot, fragrant with the
sweet odors of lilac and laburnum, and far from the more bohe-
mian atmosphere of Chelsea, he worked patiently, like one of
those quaint keen-eyed wrinkled gnomes which he loved to draw
and which he in many ways resembled. The same atmosphere sur¬
rounded him in his country home at Houghton near Arundel in
Sussex. When you walked there with the genial owner through
the rambling enclosures, you soon came upon the great beech and
elm trees familiar to lovers of his illustrations and it was easy for a
visitor to discover the gentle humor and even gentler pathos in the
bright eyes behind Rackham's large tortoise-shell spectacles. It
was difficult however to trace the sources of the wealth of imagina¬
tion on which this unaffected magician could always draw. Even
Punch took Rackham seriously and considered his illustrations
"ideally right," and he delighted young and old for so many years
that present-day critics can merely follow with docility the trails
of praise which earlier writers blazed. His excellencies have be¬
come bywords and there are no amusing myths or romantic leg¬
ends connected with his career to excite the attention of the
 

* Reprinted by permission of the author from liis book Jacovlejf and Other
Artists (New York, Paul A. Struck, 1946).