Aventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles

Illustrated edition with 13 colour plates on brown paper by Arthur Rackham tipped in with captioned tissue guards, together with 14 black-and-white illustrations in the text by Rackham, including a frontispiece portrait of Alice, one of the very rare 20 copies on japon, signed by Arthur Rackham on the limitation page, copy from the deluxe issue. A few name copies on the same paper were also issued.

Publisher’s full vellum binding, flat spine lettered in gilt with a gilt illustration of the Cheshire Cat, upper cover stamped in gilt with the title and an illustration of two fantastic creatures, illustrated endpapers, top edge gilt. Occasional light foxing. A handsome copy of the most sought-after of Rackham’s illustrated works, one of the exceedingly rare copies on japon paper.

Provenance: manuscript ex-libris on the half-title of Maurice Feuillet, celebrated press illustrator, notably for major legal trials, as well as art critic and founder of the 'Figaro artistique'. Feuillet remains renowned for his courtroom sketches during the trials of Émile Zola in 1898 and Alfred Dreyfus in 1899.

"Such is the fantastic tale which Mr. A. Rackham has turned into a living poem for the delight of the eyes. His art, ingenious in its elegance, his drawing refined and picturesque, the fantasy of an imagination that animates trees and gives speech to our humble animal brethren, is without doubt the only one, since that of Gustave Doré, to have created a world. A world at times frightening, dark and tumultuous, at times simple and outlined like a Japanese landscape, yet always vibrant and precise, with a written form and an elegant play of lines.
Amidst the monsters and beasts appears the delicate, astonished, fair-haired figure of Alice, lovely as a Rossetti maiden, the human grace at the heart of the complexity of things." (La Vie heureuse, no. 11, 15 Nov. 1908)

In 1907, Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, entered the public domain. Over the following decades, seven new editions appeared, each bringing fresh illustrations of Alice. The burning question was: could any of them match—or even surpass—John Tenniel’s iconic 1865 illustrations? Of all seven editions, Arthur Rackham’s proved the most successful, earning its place alongside Tenniel’s work as one of the definitive visual interpretations of this beloved classic.

Rackham, who had “the courage to tackle works that were considered sacrosanct”, managed not merely to illustrate Carroll’s tale, but to enrich it with his brushstrokes and boundless imagination, making the story “even more wondrous and entertaining” (Anita Silvey, Children’s Books and their Creators / Auguste Marguillier, March 1912, Art et Décoration).

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a book deeply familiar to the artist, who had read it with his father as a child. As an adult revisiting the work, he was determined to enchant a new generation of young readers. Rackham even hoped his images would enrich children’s visual vocabulary.

Yet if posterity will remember his illustrations, it is above all for their aesthetic brilliance. Frequently likened to Rossetti or Turner, Rackham’s works were anything but spontaneous or effortless; they emerged from meticulous, painstaking—at times agonizing—effort. The artist played a pivotal role in elevating drawing back to its status as a legitimate art form in its own right. In his approach, Arthur Rackham adopted the methods and conventions of history painting: each scene was carefully staged with live models. In Lewis Carroll Observed: A Collection of Unpublished Photographs, Drawings, Poetry and New Essays, Edward Guiliano unveils the artist’s creative process: his cook served as the model for the Duchess. Alice was portrayed by Doris Jane Dommett, who approached the role earnestly, though she balked at posing for the sixth illustration, captioned: “An uncommonly large saucepan flew past, nearly taking the baby’s nose clean off” When she asked whether dishes would really be hurled about, Rackham put her mind at ease—though he admitted he’d already smashed them beforehand to ensure he could faithfully render the motion in his drawing.

Unlike John Tenniel, who concentrated almost solely on his characters when drawing, Rackham’s illustrations plunge us into a richly imagined world, often rendered in “grey, silvery, purplish, or brownish” tones and intricate landscapes (Auguste Marguillier). This profusion of detail gives rise to a striking artistic freedom, which the artist carries through to his characters as well; his Alice bears no trace of Tenniel’s Victorian child:

“The really daring change made by Rackham is in bringing his little heroine down to date. […] the modern little figure does bear one message of its own. It tells us that the gate of Wonderland has never been closed, that it never will be closed, and that to the children of the 20th century, old and young, as to their children and their grandchildren, it is still given to eat now and then of the magic fruit of the Amfalula tree in whose boughs the Dinkey bird sings.” (Philip Loring Allen, The Bookman, February 1908: Dodd, Mead and Company, New York)

Nearly a century later, the vision embodied in Rackham’s Alice would find its fullest expression in the work of American filmmaker Tim Burton, a lifelong devotee of the fantastical. When his cinematic take on Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece hit screens in 2010, Burton had already spent two years living in the English illustrator’s former London residence, his office occupying the very space where Rackham once kept his studio. Burton’s striking visuals would owe much to what Auguste Marguillier dubbed Rackham’s “little marvels”.

The artist’s exquisite watercolours are reproduced here in an exceptional copy of the 1908 Hachette edition, bound in full vellum—a material used only for the finest printings— similar to the white vellum binding of the very first printed copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, presented to young Alice Liddell in 1865. Yet this book’s elegance extends beyond its binding to its technical mastery. As Anita Silvey notes, the work’s publication in 1908 came at a pivotal moment when advances in prepress techniques were allowing printed images to capture the original artwork with unprecedented accuracy.

A superb deluxe edition, one of only 20 copies printed on japon, containing all 27 compositions by the celebrated British artist Arthur Rackham. His “little marvels” have indelibly shaped our perception of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece.