Volume 37, Number 20 · December 20, 1990
Rackhamland
By Janet Adam Smith
Arthur Rackham: A Biography
by James Hamilton
Arcade Publishing/Little, Brown, 199 pp., $45.00
Some years ago a London Sunday paper had a feature on J.R.R. Tolkien. The photograph, by Lord Snowdon, showed the author of The Lord of the Rings sprawling against a tangle-rooted, gnarled-trunked, wild-branched tree: man and tree seemed to be growing into each other. It was the perfect image for the creator of Treebeard, the benignant giant 'clad in stuff like green and grey bark.' It also looked like an hommage to Arthur Rackham. Surely a memory of his trees lurked behind the concept of Treebeard and the photograph of his creator. We have the witness of Kenneth Clark, Graham Sutherland, Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis, and many others to the impact of Rackham's pictures on childish imaginations. As a child in Aberdeen I was fascinated, and rather frightened, by the trees with faces in his illustrations to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; it was a letdown when on my first visit to London I found these Gardens trees faceless and rather ordinary. But Rackham's nephew Walter Starkie remembered how as a boy he would accompany his uncle when he was working on the Peter Pan illustrations:
Review, 2220 words
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