PETER PAN AND ALICE
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 that78