How Sir Lancelot Fought with a Friendly Dragon is featured in The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. (Hopefully you survived reading through those long titles.) It’s an example of Arthur Rackham’s variety of whimsical illustrations for various stories, usually in the fairy-tale genre.
Rackham was born on September 19, 1867 in Lewisham, Kent, England. He provided illustrations for children’s magazines for a time but spent much of his life illustrating British books. From about 1890 to the time of World War I, illustrated books were held up as treasures and often given as Christmas gifts, so his work impacted many people and brought joy to families. This time period was considered to be the Golden Age for British book illustration, and it was also a time of popularity for fantasy and fairy tales. Since Rackham’s death in 1939, his work has also been used for greeting cards.
Rackham was able to achieve the whimsical quality of his drawings by using pen and India ink to form their structures, enhancing them with watercolor. Printing in those days diminished the quality of such colorful illustrations, so he also worked with simpler silhouettes (as seen in the Cinderella image below). Note too how closely his Snow White illustration resembles the Disney production and no doubt was the chief visual influence for the cartoon.
Below are pictured his One Day They Were Overheard by a Fairy (Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), Jack and the Beanstalk Giant, Snow White in the Dark Forest, and Cinderella.
