A member of a wealthy merchant family in Liverpool, Rathbone was a painter, designer and poet, but he is probably best known as the founder of the Della Robbia Pottery, which flourished in Birkenhead from 1894 to 1906. His involvement with the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions gained him many contacts in the art world of the day. His portrait was painted by Holman Hunt, whose Triumph of the Innocents he secured for the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 1891, and he was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown when Brown was painting the murals in Manchester Town Hall in the 1880s. He had earlier trained at the Slade and in Paris.

It must have been through Brown that Rathbone met Mathilde Blind, who was a member of Brown's circle. Born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1841, the step-daughter of the revolutionary socialist Karl Blind. Mathilde was brought to London in the 1850s and made a name for herself as a poet, biographer and literary critic. Brown was greatly attracted to her, arousing the jealousy of his family, and did much to promote her career. A firm believer in woman's rights, she left her estate to the recently founded Newnham College, Cambridge, when she died in London on 26 November 1896.