Fairy Fights Bumblebee: Arthur Rackham @ Bees in Art

Fairy Fights Bumblebee by Arthur Rackham

Following an early false start as a clerk, Rackham went on to be one of the best known and loved book illustrators of late Victorian and early 20th Century Britain. Rackham's Victorian sensibility and consummate draughtsmanship produced illustrations of near hallucinatory scenes, which were full of danger yet never dangerous and imbued with childlike wonder.

In 1907 Rackham illustrated the dreamlike Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll, and fittingly went on in 1908 to illustrate Shakespeare's: A Midsummer-Night's Dream. Widely regarded as one of Rackham's masterpieces, A Midsummer-Night's Dream features 40 coloured plates, including our fairy and bumblebee battle. Populated by Shakespeare's protagonists and other fairies and weird peoples, A Midsummer-Night's Dream proved to be an ideal vehicle for Rackham's art and is now a much sought after book.