Christmas gift books and the Golden Age of Illustration: The magical worlds of Arthur Rackham

13 December 2022

Arthur Rackham is one of the great figures of Britain's Golden Age of Illustration. His ethereal style featured in the most prestigious Christmas 'gift books' of the period: Rip van Winkle, A Christmas Carol, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Alice in Wonderland, Grimms' Fairy Tales and The Night Before Christmas. Take a tour of Rackham's magical worlds, created when the spirit of the modern festive season was taking shape.

British artist Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) was the pre-eminent illustrator of the early 20th century. His imaginative colour interpretations of fairy tales and fantasy literature featured gossamer fairies, mischievous goblins and gnarled trees that enchanted and petrified readers in equal measure.

Rackham's 1900 illustrations for Grimms' Fairy Tales caused the historian Kenneth Clark, presenter of seminal BBC series Civilisation, to write of his fear at even opening the pages of his copy - such were the "images of terror" within.

Rackham said he believed in “the greatest stimulating and educative power of imaginative, fantastic and playful pictures and writings for children in their most impressionable years”. He worked in a “striking vein of Nordic fantasy, creating a bizarre world populated by goblins, fairies, and weird creatures” - read more at Art UK.

During his years at he top, Rackham devoted months annually to the preparation of a selected Christmas gift book, and these desirable objects would be the top-selling festive items of the day.

Arthur Rackham and J.M. Barrie

Arthur Rackham's 51 colour illustrations for Rip Van Winkle, the first Christmas 'gift book' published in 1905, contributed greatly to the book's success. Rackham began the tradition, and money-spinner, of exhibiting prints from his books at the Leicester Galleries in London. The author J.M. Barrie was invited to the 1905 opening and was “enchanted”, commissioning Rackham to produce 50 colour plates over 18 months for his story featuring the character Peter Pan.

Rackham's work on Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens helped to make it the best-loved Christmas gift book of 1906, and copies of the deluxe edition now sell for many thousands of pounds.

Barrie wrote to Rackham, “I think I like best of all the Serpentine with the fairies, and Peter in his night-gown sitting in the tree... I am always your debtor, and I wish the happiest Christmas, and please, I hope you will shed glory on more of my things.”

Maria Popova, writing in The Marginalia, noted that “Rackham would revolutionize the technology and economics of book art with his Alice in Wonderland illustrations; Peter Pan became the R&D lab for his revolution, working within the limitations of the three-color printing process then available to create worlds of wonder with his meticulous ink lines, populating London’s familiar landscapes and places with otherworldly creatures of haunting tenderness and strangeness.”

A review in The Times of 14 December 1906 noted that Rackham's intricate Peter Pan illustrations would enchant young and old alike: “The appeal again seems to be addressed to the drawing room rather than the nursery. It is all very subtly contrived to catch the fancy of (self) indulgent elders at Christmas time...”

Arthur Rackham and Christmas

Depicting Charles Dickens' Scrooge

Blackened trees of London

Rackham's signature motif is his depiction of bare winter trees with their eerie, inky-black, human-like features. He grew up in the London neighbourhood of Lambeth, next to a mature garden full of diverse tree species.

He accounted for the distinct dark appearance of his hand-drawn trees, pointing to the atmosphere of sooty London at the time:

“You know how fond I am of drawing bare winter trees and drawing them with black ink. Well, it was almost a discovery for me when I found that tree branches were not black in the country.”

A far-reaching influence on art

Rackham's influence on the art world in the decades since he died in 1939 is difficult to measure. But many creatives have acknowledged their debt to his unique interpretation of the world, and his creatures both graceful and grotesque.

Guillermo del Toro cited him as a direct influence on the design of Pan's Labyrinth, the director's 2006 film.

And C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was much taken with the illustrations for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, saying: “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity...”.

• A version of this article was originally published in December 2016.