PETER PAN AND ALICE
saw the production of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird with Norman O’Neill’s music at the Haymarket Theatre – there were suggestions that Rackham should illustrate The Blue Bird, but unfortunately he never did – and in this year Constable issued the final edition of Rackham’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Heinemann his illustrated edition of De la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (see pages 91 and 93). Although the waves and eddies of Undine bear the mark of Art Nouveau, the work was still another step forward for Rackham, the unity of conception in the line drawings and the colour plates, the assertion of contrast in the moods of the heroine, rendering it a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding.
Rackham had become a public figure. Writers, well-known and less well-known, continually invited him to illustrate their works; but, as his time was pledged for years ahead, they were usually disappointed. He was now the father of a small daughter, Barbara, born in 1908, and the descendant of schoolmasters spoke out to insist that children deserved only the best in art. The Daily Mirror (24th November 1908) printed photographs of ugly dolls that Rackham had condemned and of pretty dolls that he had approved, and showed a photograph of him and Barbara with a toy rabbit that he thought ‘very good’. Later he gave an American encyclopaedia, The Junior Book of Authors (1934), his credo in the matter of children’s art:
‘I can only say that I firmly believe in the greatest stimulating and educative power of imaginative, fantastic, and playful pictures and writings for children in their most impressionable years – a view that most unfortunately, I consider, has its opponents in these matter of fact days. Children will make no mistakes in the way of confusing the imaginative and symbolic with the actual. Nor are they at all blind to decorative or arbitrarily designed treatment in art, any more than80
