The frog prince 1913

This is Arthur Rackham’s vision of “The Frog Prince,” and it feels like it was made with ink and watercolour. Look how lightly Rackham has brushed the trunks of the trees. It’s almost as if they're breathing—or dreaming. I can see a real kinship between the way he’s worked the page, and the way artists like Odilon Redon, or even some of the Symbolists, tried to render dreamscapes. I wonder what Rackham was thinking as he painted this, the way his hand moved to sketch the princess, caught in a moment of decision. Maybe he was trying to capture the moment of change, of metamorphosis, as the princess reaches out to the frog. And beyond that, the moment of the story itself, its own kind of truth. These fairytale images connect us to a longer conversation around the power of suggestion in art. It embraces uncertainty, and lets us interpret it in many ways. It reminds us that, as artists, we’re all frogs, hoping for a kiss.