An illustration to J.M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens': 'Away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens'

An original illustration to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1906, and reproduced as pl. 11 in the first edition, slightly cropped at top and bottom. Some later editions omit this plate. The scene is taken from Chapter II, p. 22: 'Peter Pan got out by the window, which had no bars. Standing on the ledge he could see trees far away, which were doubtless the Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew.' Peter flies in his nightgown over a roofscape which the young Rackham must have observed from No. 27 Albert Square in Clapham, where he lived from the age of fifteen to eighteen. Visible are the Palace of Westminster, St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London. Rackham later claimed, 'You can't get the right atmosphere out of London'. The murky tones and forest of smoking chimneys reappear in his illustrations for A Christmas Carol, published in 1915.

Rackham 'could have found no subject more immediately topical, or more fashionably propitious than Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens' (Derek Hudson); It became the Christmas book for 1906. With Peter Pan, his 'particular achievement was to work within the technical limits of the three-colour printing process available to him, and to make a virtue of the necessity of using the kind of spare outline and subdued colouring that could be reproduced faithfully' (Hamilton). It was one of the few English illustrated books of the period to be reprinted in the U.S.A.

Christie's are grateful to Anne Stevenson Hobbs for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.