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proof that good old fashioned academic tutelage is the secret of mastery, for nothing else could account for the splendid competency of Rackham’s remarkable output. His advancing years have indeed witnessed an improvement in his art, and the latest drawings for Milton’s Comus are among his most attractive and dreamlike. Furthermore, he has recently begun to forsake the printed page for oil and canvas, and his Undine and the Coming of Spring are surprising first achievements in a new medium. Being primarily a graphic artist, and not a water colourist like Brabazon or Dodge Macknight, his colour hitherto merely enhanced the beauty of his drawings, and his development as a painter in oils will therefore be followed with special interest. We may even hope that he will not always be forced to exercise his incomparable fancy in an effort to bring an author’s word painting before the vision of a reader.
Rackham’s early published works, like the rather hesitating drawings for Gulliver and the Ingoldsby Legends, were just as fresh and original in spirit as the powerful designs for The Ring of the Nibelung and the complete list of his œuvre is a consistent protest against the exploitation of sterile realism. He peoples his green woodlands and meadows
