MARRIAGE AND SUCCESS
To his work in his chosen field Rackham brought the gifts of an unusual visual memory, especially for landscape and natural growth in all its forms (less, perhaps, for architecture), and a fertile imagination guiding a hand of great sensibility and skill in draughtsmanship. He was fond of children and a close observer of their moods and movements; he understood the delight most of them have in fairies, which does not mean that he himself ‘believed in fairies’. He had also a keen eye for the odd and grotesque and for the ironies of incongruous juxtaposition.
Some of his drawings – those for Edgar Allan Poe, for example – could be gruesome, and there was ‘symbolism’, conscious or unconscious, in many of the fairy tales he illustrated. But an analysis of ‘symbolism’ in Rackham’s drawings, or a psychological interpretation of his work – not many of his commissions, be it remembered, were entirely of his own choosing – would be unlikely to reveal interesting repressions or afford valuable insights into Rackham’s character. Gifted with a prolific poetic imagination and fertile invention, he enjoyed a cheerful happy temperament. Methodical and businesslike, he was careful with his money but could be exceedingly generous in presents to others.
If Rackham depended for general inspiration on the pre-Raphaelite tradition and on the Gothic and Italian primitives, more particular influences on his style may be found in Cruikshank, Caldecott, Dicky Doyle, Arthur Boyd Houghton, the artists of Germany and Japan, and the decorative contrasts of Beardsley. There was in Rackham’s work, as in that of Charles Ricketts, his contemporary at the Lambeth School of Art, a flavour of Art Nouveau, which is especially noticeable in some of his cover designs and borders of illustrations, and in the elaborate curves of his foam-topped waves. But this influence, never predominant, was a diminishing one before 1914. By contrast44
