The Green Dragon (1910): Art, History and Details

The Green Dragon (1910) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

One of the best-known book illustrators of his time, Arthur Rackham worked at the turn of the 20th century in the period now sometimes described as the genre's golden age. His style combined intricate line work with delicate coloring to create scenes that were timeless, mysterious, and sometimes dark. This combination was particularly well suited for fantasy subjects like fairytales, Nordic and Germanic legends, and the dragon in this illustration, first published in his Book of Pictures of 1913. The beast's sinuous body echoes the lines describing the trees' gnarly trunks, roots, and branches, and the ripples of the water in the stream, highlighting its unity with the nature that surrounds it. Rackham evokes a world both similar and different to our own, where nature is both magical and dangerous.

Object facts

• Title: The Green Dragon
• Date: 1910
• Creator attribution: Arthur Rackham (British, 1867–1939)
• Culture: England, 20th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and black ink and watercolor on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 28 x 19 cm (11 x 7 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1954.652

A detail from the museum

The design for the dragon in this illustration derives from one of the black and white vignettes placed over the chapter titles in the 1909 edition of Undine illustrated by Rackham.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Don Hunter

Further reading listed by the museum

• Montañés-lleras, Susana. “Of Technology and Fantasy: fairy tales, fables, and the transformation of illustration in the long 19th century.” Gramarye : The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy 28 (Winter 2025): 51-65.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.