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 most attractive drawings. The humour of them especially drew me.’ Rackham was achieving a new harmony of colour, his drawings for A Dish of Apples, to quote an American admirer Martin Birnbaum, being ‘light and sparkling with passionate rose, glowing greens and primrose yellow’. Another, more important, publication of Rackham’s in 1921 was a long-delayed edition of Milton’s Comus, the drawings for which, begun before the war, deserve to rank with his best work of that earlier period, though it is an uneven book. Rackham here ran the gamut of his artistic emotions. The ‘rout of Monsters’ provoked him to several disconcerting drawings in what was for him an unusually disturbing vein, exploited again later in his illustrations for Poe. Beardsley’s influence marks several pages of Comus; yet these alternate with passages of pure poetry that recall Rackham’s own work for Peter Pan and the Dream.

In 1922 came Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book; and in 1925 Christopher Morley’s Where the Blue Begins, which brought the artist the friendship of that most warm-hearted of authors. In 1926 an excitingly original edition of The Tempest showed Rackham experimenting in a simplified dramatic technique that was refreshingly and effectively ‘modern’.

During the immediate post-war years several old successes, notably Grimm’s Fairy Tales were revived in separate new editions. Rackham for the first time allowed himself to be tempted into the commercial field by a highly lucrative offer for a series of advertisements from Colgate’s in 1922–23–24. An advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salts (1928), a chocolate-box cover for Cadbury’s (1933), and covers for book catalogues in the ’thirties represented almost his only other incursions into a sphere that little appealed to his sensibility. He appeared more appropriately, in miniature, in Volume I of The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House (1924). And in 1927 Queen Mary bought an illustration of King Arthur, ‘The Holy Grail’, from the R.W.S. Summer Exhibition.