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 less controversial in theme than Alice, and their success was ungrudged, though Rackham’s art was now receiving a measure of that severe scrutiny which comes to every artist who is popular with the general public. Rackham cast his spell over the play; his drawings superseded the work of all his predecessors from Gilbert to Abbey, and for fifty years have enriched the imagination; his conception of Puck and Bottom, Titania and Oberon, Helena and Hermia, his gnarled trees and droves of fairies, have represented the visual reality of the Dream for thousands of readers. Here he excelled especially in landscape, and in reconciling dream and reality, giving himself to the luxury of rich detail a rare generosity. It is scarcely too much to mention him in the same breath as Mendelssohn; but a contemporary and more exact musical comparison might be made, as Eric Blom has suggested, with the delicate fancy of Roger Quilter.

William de Morgan, in a letter to Rackham, described his Midsummer-Night’s Dream as ‘the most splendid illustrated work of the century, so far’. Rackham’s success with books of this kind was now beginning to attract competitors, one of whom was Edmund Dulac whose drawings for The Tempest followed Rackham’s Dream drawings at the Leicester Galleries in 1908. Rackham’s junior by fifteen years, Dulac had no doubt been influenced by him, but his art was in contrast to Rackham’s in several respects. Dulac’s inspiration was primarily oriental, better suited to the Arabian Nights than to Shakespeare, while Rackham belonged to the Western, even the nordic world; Dulac’s emphasis lay in colour harmonies, while Rackham’s was in line, to which he skilfully added colour washes of transparent tints – a method well suited to reproduction and virtually a personal invention of his own. The appearance of two such gifted artists in this special field gave English illustrated books a world-wide reputation in the years before the First World War.

As Johnson said of Shakespeare, so we may say of King Edward VII: ‘Fairies in his time were much in fashion.’ 1909 was the year that