Margery Darrell
Autor von Once Upon a Time: The Fairy Tale World of Arthur Rackham
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- 3
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- #161,165
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- 4.3
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- 5
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- 2
I've also found with illustrators from the golden age of children's books....around 1900....that the colours always seemed rather dark. And I guess two things are at play here. One is that Rackham's work, anyway, is invariable pen and wash...or just pen. The straight pen drawings seemed to have survived well and reproduced well but the colour's in his coloured illustrations have darkened and maybe just haven't been reproduced all that well.
I was able to compare a few illustrations in this book with those in a recent large format book: "Arthur Rackham: A life with illustration" and could see that the reproduction in the latter are much clearer....the pen work sharp and clear and the colours lighter and brighter. So unfortunately, this current book suffers a lot in comparison. Offsetting that is the fact that the current book has some stories that I have not seen illustrated by Rackham before: Fables from Aesop, The Lady and the Lion. I'm not even sure that have seen the whole of Rip Van Winkle illustrated by Rackham.
The stories, are classics, which I, more or less take as given ....although frequently they vary a bit depending on the editor or story teller. But I bought the book for the illustrations and I'm not disappointed.
According to the text, Rackham himself was a bit gnomish...like many of his characters...and he even drew himself in the role of the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland. But he ran a tight ship domestically, apparently.....always frugal and pretty strict with his kids. Frankly, he doesn't sound like a lot of fun....though I recall reading somewhere else about some of his travel in Europe as a young man and he seemed to be a bit more "fun-loving" there. But what a superb artist. I notice that a number of modern children's book illustrators acknowledge a debt to Rackham (eg. Lizbeth Zwerger...and you can see it in her figures).
Overall, I'm quite happy that I made the purchase and happy to give the book 4 stars.… (mehr)