Page:Arthur Rackham (Hudson).pdf/118

 and the Shot Tower. Another self-portrait (the frontispiece of this book) painted in 1934, may be thought more successful in suggesting the kindly amusing man behind the mask. This again has a London background – St Paul’s Cathedral. Rackham was always proud to call himself a Cockney. Indeed, he took care to make the further distinction that he had been born south of the Thames. The self-portrait of 1934, when exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, bore the explanatory title ‘A Transpontine Cockney.’

Although in 1919 he was preparing to ‘twitch his mantle blue’ and make for new pastures beside the River Arun, he kept a studio in London until almost the end of his life.