MARRIAGE AND SUCCESS
It will be readily understood, then, how much Rackham owed to his wife, who was married to him at St Mark’s, Hampstead, on 16th July 1903 (she was a lapsed Catholic, the Rackham family were Anglicans turned Unitarians). His alliance with this gay artistic Irishwoman brought out the best in Rackham; for she was always his most stimulating, severest critic, and he had the greatest respect for her opinion. In return he gave her unswerving loyalty and devotion, so that the marriage, despite its temperamental ups-and-downs, proved a very happy one. Walter Starkie shows the nature of it:
‘Aunt Edyth was the romantic one of the family, and my father used to tell my sister Enid and myself anecdotes of her flirtations and her seven engagements, and the story of the duels that had been fought for her when she was an art student in Germany. My uncle was taciturn and observant, and would cock his head and look at my aunt quizzically when my father used to embroider these stories. Uncle Arthur had a strange habit of disappearing and re-appearing suddenly like the Cat in Alice in Wonderland. When my aunt would say: “I wonder where Arthur is,” he would appear a moment later by her side as though he had popped up through a trap door. He was more staid than my aunt, and with his prim precise English manner was an admirable foil and when in company she would always do her best to shock him.’
Rackham had exhibited successfully at the Royal Academy, at the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, at a ‘Loan Exhibition of Modern Illustration’ at South Kensington (1901), and at various provincial exhibitions before he was elected an Associate of The Royal Water-Colour Society in February 1902 (he became a full member in56
