Studio: international art (34.1905)

Arthur Rackham

said to have shown him the way to work the was constantly sketching and scribbling, and trying
unusual pictorial vein that is providing him with to give form to the ideas with which even then his
such ample material. Mr. Rackham has found mind was nlled > but he .had no systematic art
for himself the field in which he is now labouring education during his boyhood. His childish essays
with conspicuous success, and has developed with were mostly fantastic creations, or drawings of
delightful ingenuity an absolutely personal style, animals ; but as a lad in his teens he began to take
He owes his position to his special endowment of himself seriously and to have convictions about
quaint imagination, and to a rare understanding of the need for careful study of nature. So at this
the executive devices by which his fancies can be period he started landscape painting assiduously,
made properly credible. seeking in all sincerity to master the problems

He had, indeed, no peculiar advantages in his which nature presented for solution, and searching
youth which were calculated to develop in him an out unaided the facts which he felt would provide
extraordinary inventiveness, and his art training him with a useful foundation on which to build
was neither exceptionally complete nor marked by much later achievement.

unaccustomed features. It is true that from his As he grew towards manhood the opportunity
earliest childhood he loved to amuse himself with came to him to acquire a more disciplined type of
a pencil and paintbox; and that, like many other training, something in which he could be guided
boys, who have in later life excelled as artists, he by the experience of men who had a skilled know-
ledge of the matters with which he
was experimenting. Even then the
best he could do was to attend the
evening classes at the Lambeth School
of Art—where, however, he had the
advantage of being taught by a very
able master, Mr. W. Llewellyn—and
to devote a portion of his time to the
work in which he desired to excel.
That this mixture of self-education and
school training was of value to him, and
that it really helped him to progress in
the right direction, may be judged
from the fact that he was able at this
period to figure as an exhibitor at
the Academy, the Royal Institute of
Painters in Water Colours, and other
galleries, and to rank himself among
the abler craftsmen at a comparatively
early stage of his career.

It was not until 1892 that he finally
gave himself up to art work and made
painting his sole profession. He was
born in 1867, so that by this time he
had reached the age of five-and-twenty,
and was in a position to judge with a
mature mind what were his chances of
success. His confidence in his powers
was certainly not misplaced, for he
found immediately that there was a
demand for his work, and that there
was a place in the art world for him
to fill. At first he was chiefly occupied
,, with drawings for reproduction, with

"snowdrop : illustration by arthur rackham . ... .

for grimm's fairy tales journalistic illustrations for the " Pall

(By permission of Messrs. Archibald Constable 8f Co.) Mall" and "Westminster" Budgets,

190