It shows Alice, wearing her crown and standing alongside a frog in front of an arched doorway, over which, in reverse lettering, are the words ‘Queen Alice’. Below the drawing is the inscription: “With Mr Tenniel’s kind regards, Christmas 1876”.
An ink and watercolour drawing of a frog officiating at ‘Serana’s Wedding’ was made by Australian artist and illustrator Ida Rentoul Outhwaite for one of the colour plates that accompany her story of ‘Serana the Bush Fairy’ in a 1926 anthology called Fairyland.
It was one of two works by Outhwaite to sell for a higher than expected sum of £13,000 apiece at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 14.
A Rackham collection in a June 7 sale held by Bonhams New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) included a 1920, Macmillan edition of James Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales.
This was a work in which he drew on Celtic traditions for his motifs, costumes and settings, and the cataloguer notes that even the Irish were pleasantly impressed with results.
The Dublin Independent reported: “Some of Mr Rackham’s pictures are pure poems – they set you dreaming.”
A copy of the deluxe edition of 520 copies, in half vellum and defective jacket, made $3000 (£2315), while another in a modern Asprey binding of green crushed morocco gilt reached $4200 (£3255). The work is illustrated with 16 tipped-in colour plates. ‘In a forked glen into which he slipped at night-fall he was surrounded by giant toads’, shown above, features in the tale of ‘Becuma of the White Skin’.
