MARRIAGE AND SUCCESS
By the time that she met Arthur Rackham, who was two months older than herself, Edyth Starkie already knew much of the world. Born on the west coast of Ireland at Westcliff, near Galway, on 27th November 1867, the youngest of six, she had spent most of her youth at Cregane Manor, Rosscarbery, near Cork, a curious mixture of a house, basically old but with considerable Victorian additions, standing stark on a headland overlooking Rosscarbery Bay. Its whitewashed walls, Gothic doorways, and castellations, and its jumble of soft blue-grey slate roofs, are ringed round by a grove of windswept trees; dotted about the grounds are the whitewashed cottages of ‘the tenants’. There Edyth rode to hounds, sailed in the bay and teased her brothers’ tutors. Her father, R. M. Starkie, apparently an attractive but lazy man, is said to have performed his duties as Resident Magistrate in dilatory fashion, but taught himself to play the violin, an accomplishment inherited by his grandson Walter.
When Edyth was sixteen, her mother took her on a tour of Europe. They stayed for a time in Paris, where Edyth studied art, and then went on to Germany, where she became engaged to a Prussian officer at Potsdam, causing a major scandal when she broke off the engagement. After her father’s death, she settled in Hampstead with her mother.
Arthur Rackham admired her not only as a woman but also as an artist, who was then achieving a considerable reputation as a portrait painter. Her pictures are intensely individual and sincere. They are remarkable for their deep sense of character, and with their low tones and sombre lighting recall the early portraits of James Pryde. Like Pryde, she was a member of the International Society; works by her were bought for the National Museum, Barcelona, where she won a gold medal in 1911, and the Luxembourg, Paris.54
