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 stirred him personally. To take one example that could easily be overlooked, his title-page of the Rhine-maidens and Nibelungs supporting the Ring, reproduced on the title-page of this book, is a brilliantly successful and truly inventive design. When some of these drawings were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in a room adjacent to drawings by another distinguished illustrator, Hugh Thomson, the latter appeared remarkably trivial.

Rackham’s determination to maintain and to raise the standard of his work was incessant. As he had written a few years earlier (10th December 1906) to M. H. Spielmann, who had drawn his attention to a favourable criticism: ‘I’ve just seen the Graphic & I blush. Well, I can only do my best to live up to it. But the farther I go (& I do hope I am gaining ground) the harder it becomes & the more impossible the “arrival”.’

The Rackham books published in 1912 and 1913 made a complete contrast to Wagner. In Aesop’s Fables (1912) and Mother Goose (1913) Rackham’s primary intention was to amuse, but his illustrations for the fables of ‘The Moon and her Mother’ and ‘The Gnat and the Lion’ suggest the imaginative refinement that he brought to the task. Rackham was often his own model; there are several self-caricatures to be detected in Aesop’s Fables. He is the man who catches the flea, the pompous gentleman who scolds the drowning boy, the credulous slave-owner who scrubs the black boy (see ).

The Mother Goose drawings, illustrating a collection of the old nursery rhymes, appeared in the American St Nicholas Magazine, 1912–13. Here Rackham laid himself out to please the children, and was completely successful. The initial letters at the beginning of each chapter of this biography are taken from Mother Goose, Rackham himself figuring in the initial I at the opening of. The House that Jack Built, shown on, was a drawing of his own home in Chalcot Gardens.

Aesop’s Fables and Mother Goose are small books that have had a