Books

Original watercolor and pen and ink drawing on paper, mounted onto card (drawing measures 6 3/8 x 7 5/8 inches, paper sheet 8 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches). Verso of card with: "To be returned to A. Rackham | Insurance value 30 pounds" written in pencil. Housed in gilt frame with "Old Church Galleries" sticker on back. Additional four provenance labels underneath the rear brown framing paper. The first reads: "38. Izaak Walton." Second is a sticker of authenticity: "F.R. It is important that this label should never be destroyed. The evidence it bears of the registered stock number has in the past proved to be of very great value for purposes of identification and authenticity. Artist: Arthur Rackham; Title: Isaac Walton; Registered Number D. 13846 6 ½ x 7 1/2" with an additional smudged area, larger sticker from "Ernest Brown & Phillips, Ltd. The Leicester Galleries." A fourth sticker identifies the piece in a December 1935 exhibition of Rackham's work, with the purchaser named as "Captain E. Merry"; additional numerical pencil markings on back. A bust-length portrait of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) in front of landscape background. The black and white ink illustration was used in Rackham's illustrated edition of The Compleat Angler, published 1931 (on page 19). Rackham added the watercolor when offering this piece for sale at Leicester Galleries. Izaak Walton was an English author and biographer, who is remembered for his beloved book The Compleat Angler (1653). The fishing guide mixed practical advice with folklore, and would eventually be illustrated by Arthur Rackham. In that book, "No fewer than six plates have landscape backgrounds, plates which should remind us of Rackham's very serious reputation as a landscape painter, with a fine vision of natural forms" (Gettings). Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrator of the Golden Age of Illustration. A prolific artist even from his youth, Rackham got his start as an illustrator working for the Westminster Budget Newspaper (1892). Over the next few years, he took on more and more commissions for children's books, hitting his career high in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rackham turned his imaginative pen to every classic—from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe. Fine.