Cadbury Chocolate Box illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1933.
In 1932, illustrator Arthur Rackham wrote a letter to his wife in which he mentioned that “a man from Cadbury’s” had scheduled a visit with him the following day. Though the connection between a popular illustrator and a chocolate company might seem obvious to us today, Cadbury was making a leap of faith by contacting Rackham. During the early part of the twentieth century chocolate manufacturers often used relatively uninteresting commercial artwork on their boxes, even for the higher grades of chocolate. Cadbury, however, suspected that there might be a market for artistically designed boxes, and as an experiment they hired ten contemporary artists to illustrate boxes that would be “strikingly different from any previously seen in the shops” (from an original ad for the boxes in Design Today). Some of the artists, like Rackham and Edmund Dulac, were popular illustrators, and Cadbury also approached studio artists such as Mark Gertler, Laura Knight, and C. R. W. Nevinson.
The box depicted here is one of the few surviving examples of the boxes that debuted during the 1933 Christmas season. It’s a salesman’s dummy, an example used by the Cadbury’s travelling salesman to encourage shop owners to stock the product. Inside is a sample of the attractive wax paper wrapping that would cover the chocolate itself, and a small card explaining the product.
Unfortunately, these ephemeral boxes were not a commercial success, possibly because they didn’t appeal to shopkeepers, or because the subjects of the illustrations were not closely associated with the idea of chocolate in consumers’ minds. They are the only such box that Rackham illustrated during his career and are rare today – we can find no examples at auction, and they are barely touched on in the major Rackham bibliographies and biographies. This beautiful example was owned by Alwin J. Scheuer, a New York bookseller active during the 1920s and 30s, and is stored in a larger box printed with his name.
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