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The Fairies
Fairies captivated the Victorians, and Arthur Rackham's images of fairyland helped sustain this fascination into the twentieth century. He returned to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream repeatedly, giving the play a variety of treatments at different stages in his life: Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1899) published by J.M. Dent, which was reissued with color in 1909; the 1908 deluxe and trade editions published by Heinemann; an edition created for the New York Public Library in 1929; and finally, the 1939 edition, which was one of the 37 volumes of The Plays of William Shakespeare, each illustrated by a different artist and published for subscribers by The Limited Editions Club in New York.
In Rackham's sketchbooks he attends to Midsummer in greater detail than he gives to any other books and jumps back and forth across the narrative, suggesting a deep interest in and familiarity with the text. The Berol collection contains a number of breathtaking watercolor illustrations for the 1939 edition that display a range of techniques and motifs we have come to associate with Rackham -- an obsessive attention to detail and texture across the composition, reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites; the use of transparent, atmospheric washes; pen strokes that are both confident and delicate; and the presence of gnarled, twisted trees. |