London: 1932. Watercolor on paper, image size: 9 x 7 1/2 inches; 228 x 190 mm. Matted and framed. Lettered in blue at the top: “Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales,” and at the bottom: “With a Number of Illustrations by Arthur Rackham.”

This gentle and delightful watercolor depicts a group of four children, with a dog, dancing around a snowman. The group is set before a green picket fence and a full moon against a dark blue sky. The snowman, with a rake for his mouth, wears a red glove on his right hand and a green top hat with a red band. He holds a broom in his left hand. With green holly leaves and red berries on either side at the top and green holly leaves on either side at the bottom. A black and white drawing with a snowman and a dog appears on p. 259 of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, illustrating the story “The Snow Man” (pp. 256-261). “The ideal—even the classic—late Rackham commission was Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Harrap sent him to Denmark for a week in November 1931 to collect Danish atmosphere for the book. [His daughter] Barbara accompanied him, and together they explored Copenhagen, Elsinor, a farm in Zeeland, and visited museums, the cinema…and the theatre…Rackham’s Danish sketchbook contains all the ‘notes & notes’ he took for dear life, studies of cottages, architectural details, courtyards, farm machinery, interiors and so on. The studies appear, as fully dressed drawings, in illustrations such as ‘We went hand in hand up the round tower,’ from The Elder Tree Mother, and ‘Kay and Gerda in the garden high up on the roof,’ from The Snow Queen” (Hamilton). The watercolor comes from the estate of Mrs. Barbara Edwards (the artist’s daughter).

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 (Item #6391)