Washington Irving / Arthur Rackham (ill) - Rip van Winkle - 1905

"Rip van Winkle" by Washington Irving and illustrated by Arthur Rackham

William Heinemann, London - 1905 first Rackham edition - 28cmx20cm - . Quarto (25cmx20cm). viii, 57, [1 blank], [2]pp. Fifty color plates mounted with lettered tissue guards, and colored frontispiece. Publishers green cloth, pictorially stamped in gilt on front cover and lettered in gilt on spine, plain green endpapers - condition: good, original green gilt decorated boards, some rubbing to edges, some page foxing, all plates present. An excellent copy of this seminal Rackham title.

The illustrations, for a story of not more than five thousand words, enables the story to be told twice, once through Irving's words, and once again, image by image, through Rackham's pictures. In his illustrations, Rackham pays homage not only to Dürer, Cruikshank and Dutch seventeenth-century painting, but to contemporary artists, too." (Hamilton). ". But the first work that greatly advanced his fame in the years immediately following his marriage was his edition of Rip Van Winkle. This lovely book decisively established Rackham as the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period