His work is noted for its robust pen and ink drawings, which were combined with the use of watercolour, a technique he developed due to his background as a journalistic illustrator.

[2] At the age of 18, he worked as an insurance clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth School of Art.

His first book of illustrations were published in 1893 in To the Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, but his first serious commission was in 1894 for The Dolly Dialogues, the collected sketches of Anthony Hope, who later went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda.

This was developed further through the austere years of the Boer War with regular contributions to children's periodicals such as Little Folks and Cassell's Magazine.

They also remarked on his decline: "Rackham made his name in a heyday of fairy literature and other fantasy which the First World War brought to an end.

He very soon established himself as one of the foremost Edwardian illustrators and was triumphant in the early 1900s when colour printing first enabled him to use subtle tints and muted tones to represent age and timelessness.

Working with subtle colour and wiry line, he exploited the growing strengths of commercial printing to create imagery and characterizations that reinvigorated children's literature, electrified young readers, and dominated the art of book illustration at the start of a new century.

Rackham gradually perfected his own uniquely expressive line from his background in journalistic illustration, paired with subtle use of watercolour, a technique which he was able to exploit due to technological developments in photographic reproduction.

[13] Rackham would first lightly block in shapes and details of the drawing with a soft pencil, for the more elaborate colour plates often utilising one of a small selection of compositional devices.

[16] He would also go on to expand the use of silhouette cuts in illustration work, particularly in the period after the First World War, as exemplified by his Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

Rackham's work has been described as a fusion of a northern European 'Nordic' style strongly influenced by the Japanese woodblock tradition of the early 19th century.

However, his style is distinctly British and follows a long tradition of Victorian fairy painting and close and often uncomposed studies of understated brier-patch nature in the inclement British climate, as was common in the works of Joseph Noel Paton, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the more nature and fairy-inspired work of John Atkinson Grimshaw.

The evolution in Rackham's work towards strong illustrative line and abstracted representation fuses these elements with British interpretations of the organic and sinuous forms of Art Nouveau and wider Arts & Crafts influences, such as the Glasgow Style or "Spook School", especially evident in the work of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.