(born Sept. 19, 1867, London, Eng.-died Sept. 6, 1939, Limpsfield, Surrey)
"The most fascinating form of illustration consists of the expression by the artist of an individual sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature." It was for this arousal of delight that Rackham, a prolific artist and illustrator whose works span an almost inconceivably broad range of subjects, is best known. Rackham rarely failed to please his audience with his rich colors, his intricate detail, and his almost obsessive attention to and use of line.
In total, he published more than 3,300 individual images and decorations, including staggeringly beautiful watercolors, signed ink sketches, Christmas cards, caricatures of friends and family members, signatures on menus, designs for book covers and dust jackets, advertising images, bookplates, head- and tail-pieces to chapters in books, endpapers, and of course his innumerable illustrations, in both black-and-white and color, for books.
Perhaps among the most recognizable of Rackham's elements are his depictions of gnomes, goblins, witches, and fairies, as well as his anthropomorphized trees. Indeed, Hamilton notes that it was with Rip Van Winkle that "Trees with human limbs and faces became one of his trademarks," although this trend appears even more strongly in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Rackham's whimsical illustrations are reflected in the fanciful stories he told his nephew, Walter Starkie, about trees: "He would say that under the roots of that tree the little men had their dinner and churned the butter they extracted from the sap of the tree. He would also make me see queer animals and birds in the branches of the tree and a little magic door below the trunk, which was the entrance to Fairyland."
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