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 told strikingly in Rackham’s favour: ‘When it came to the contemplation of Mr Rackham’s drawings there was never a second’s hesitation. They understood them at once, and entirely.’

Nevertheless, even after 1900, the fanciful element in Rackham, where his true genius lay, did not overcome the temptations of the commercial or conventional without a struggle. During the next few years he contributed many drawings to the sporting and ‘open-air’ books in Dent’s Haddon Hall Library; he also illustrated such diverse publications as Mysteries of Police and Crime (1901) which he had anticipated in drawings for a magazine article several years earlier, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1904), and Gulliver’s Travels, for an edition that was refurbished, like his Grimm, when his reputation had advanced. He was particularly successful with his dramatic contrasts in Gulliver. All this was but a part of a very large miscellaneous output.

He received strong encouragement to follow his natural bent for fantasy from his fellow artist and future wife Edyth Starkie, whom he met about the year 1900 when she and her mother were neighbours of his in Wychcomb Studios, Englands Lane, Hampstead. Her nephew Walter Starkie’s earliest memories of Rackham date from that year. Walter had arrived from Dublin, aged six, on a visit to his grandmother. ‘My first impression of the painter was coloured by the fairy stories my aunt Edyth told me at bedtime,’ he writes. ‘His face was wizened and wrinkled like a ripe walnut, and as he peered short-sightedly at me out of his goggle spectacles I thought he was one of the goblins out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Dressed in his shabby blue suit and hopping about his studio in his carpet slippers, he reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin, but when he was armed with palette and paint brushes he became for me a wizard, who with one touch of his magic wand could people my universe with elves and leprechauns. He would take me out for walks over Primrose Hill or in Kensington Gardens where he would sketch the trees, and as he worked he would