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Fairy Art by Arthur Rackham * Artist Fairy |
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Oil Painting Supplies of 350 Famous Painters
* Oil Painting Supplies of 150 Styles |
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Biography of Arthur Rackham(1867–1939) painter and illustrator as artist fairy Arthur Rackham was born in 1867 into a Victorian age that he perpetuated and documented by way of his fairy art. He was one of twelve children, studied at the City of London School where he won prizes and a reputation for Rackham illustrations. At the age of 18, he became a clerk. It was, after all, a Dickensian world as well, where clerks played a significant role in both fiction and real life. |
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Early Arthur Rackham painting showed facility but little else. The humor and romance and soul that were to make him the premier
illustrator of the early twentieth century had not manifested themselves yet. In 1892, Arthur Rackham left his clerk position at the
Westminster Fire Office for the uncertainty of a career as an illustrator. He landed a regular job at the Westminster Budget, a
weekly magazine, that provided him with regular painting as a reporter as he tackled the burgeoning book market. His first efforts
were decidedly non-fantasy and are very indicative of an artist in search of a style. Thefairy
artwork above right from the 1895
edition of Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveler owes as much to Howard Pyle or E.A. Abbey as to anyone else. Other Arthur Rackham
art (there were five) in the two-volume set are remarkably unlike this one and are stylistically vague. From book
to book and image to image, one would be hard pressed to be certain the painting was by the same artist. Through the teens and twenties Arthur Rackham continued to create wonderful artwork of fairies and books. Many of vellum-bound limited editions of the era are from him. Many of his books were revised and re-released. There was even a Peter Pan portfolio. It seems like every classic was fair game for him. Through 1940 the artist fairy did versions of Aesop's Fables, Mother Goose, A Christmas Carol, The Romance of King Arthur, English Fairy Tales, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Irish Fairy Tales, A Fairy Book, The Allies Fairy Book, Comus, A Wonder Book, The Tempest, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Chimes, The Night Before Christmas, The Compleat Angler, The Arthur Rackham fairies art Book, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, The King of the Golden River, Goblin Market, The Pied Piper, Peer Gynt, The Wind in the Willows and more. Note how many of these same titles were also issued with illustrations by Edmund Dulac. Arthur Rackham illustrations copy of original oils and biography is here. |
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| He never lost the joy and sense of wonderment and he never gave in to the baser styles that fell in and out of favor over the years. From Queen Victoria's death in 1901 to the start of World War I, Rackham illustration preserved a lifestyle and a sensibility that kept the frighteningly modern future at bay. His beautiful drawings were the antithesis of the industrial advances that allowed them to be printed at affordable prices. Even into the twenties and thirties, his fairy art was a constant reminder of those aspects of innocence that had been left behind. Arthur Rackham always kept his gentle humor and his Wind in the Willows (at left), published posthumously in 1940, is as much a children's classic as his Peter Pan. The artist fairy died in 1939. |
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Robert Lawson paid this tribute to the artist in Horn Book in 1940: "The appreciation of Rackham's genius has suffered, I think, by its
complete perfection. All Arthur Rackham drawings appear so polished, so finished, so graceful, that many fail to realize the great strength and
firm knowledge that underlie this seeming ease." And in October, 1967, Ellen Shaffer also said in Horn Book, "It has been nearly
thirty years since the death of Arthur Rackham; a whole new generation has reached maturity in that period and been charmed by
his paintings of fairies, as were their parents and their grandparents before them. Their children,
too, are delighting in the books Arthur Rackham illustrated, and their appreciation of his
fairies art will grow with the years. |
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Fairy ArtistsJohn Atkinson Grimshaw Arthur Rackham Joseph Noel Paton John Anster Fitzgerald Daniel Maclise. |
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