Rachel Reckitt was born in St Albans in Hertforshire in 1908. Her family moved to Golsoncott, a rambling Edwardian pile at Roadwater, Somerset in 1922. She remained there all her life and it would in time, become both her home and her studio. The house was vividly described by Reckitt’s niece, the author Penelope Lively, in her book A House Unlocked. Rachel undertook her initial artistic training under the landscape painter Alexander Carruthers Gould (1870-1948), who lived in Porlock. Reckitt hailed from a privileged background, which gave her the financial independence to pursue her own artistic direction. However, one consequence was that she never felt the need to promote her work. She then went on to study at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico in the late 1930’s, under Iain MacNab, learning wood engraving techniques. That establishment was visited by Mark Gertler and Graham Sutherland, who would both influence her artistic development. She also attended Hammersmith School of Building Crafts from 1940 to 1945 and studied lithography at the Central School of Art and Design. During the War, she performed voluntary work in London’s East End, helping families displaced by the Blitz and several Londoners were accommodated at Golsoncott. Reckitt lived an austere existence, was an avid horsewoman and loved to ride to hounds. She raised bullocks and drove a beaten-up old Landrover. She evinced no interest in fashion, or comfortable surroundings and despite her privileged background, remained an ardent Socialist all her life. Apart from her work in printmaking and paint, she demonstrated a keen interest in sculpture, working in steel, stone, aluminium and tin. Initially, her preferred medium was stone and she produced some tombstones for local churches, as well as her figurative work. In the 1960s she painted a series of conversation pieces, which included subjects such as boys on bicycles, a Nigerian student nurse combing a girl’s hair, queues at bakers, women hanging out of washing on washday and women gossiping in the street.  By the late 60’s, her enthusiasm for metal drew her to blacksmiths and their forges, Harry and Jim Horrobin’s smithy in Roadwater in particular. Initially, she had drawn and painted them, but graduated to working with steel on an anvil at Horrobin’s in the period 1970-75. She was a member of the British Artists Blacksmiths’ Association and some of the earliest works she produced were pub signs for local inns. Commissions for local churches were also undertaken: the Chapel of St Bartholomew at Rodhuish has a sculpture depicting Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. St Andrew’s Church in Old Cleeve has a screen by her and the Church of St Nicholas in Withycombe, her statue of St Nicholas. Reckitt illustrated several books with her wood engravings including: Voices on the Green by A R J Wise and R A Smith in 1945, London South of the River by Sam Price Myers, English Country Short Stories by Walter de la Mare in 1949 and People with Six Legs by M Bosanquet in 1953. In 1950 Paul Elek commissioned Reckitt to engrave 16 whole-page illustrations for an edition of Eliot’s book The Mill on the Floss, largely on the strength of her engravings for London South of the River. The blocks turned out to be her finest illustrative work, but Elek went into receivership and they were never published. The images were exhibited for the first time in 1997, from proofs that she had taken, after engraving the blocks. Shortly afterwards, the blocks themselves came to light, when it was realised that the non-appearance of the engravings had been a double tragedy, for on the reverse of the blocks were parts of other much larger engravings she had produced before the war. Due to the wartime shortage of boxwood, she had sawn the blocks down to less than half size. Reckitt exhibited at the Society of Women Artists, the NEAC, the London Group, the Society of Wood Engravers and the Cooling, Westheim and Redfern Galleries in London and the Bridgwater Arts Centre in Somerset. In 2001, the Somerset County Museum held a retrospective, ‘Rachel Reckitt: Where Everything Meets the Eye.’ Titles of exhibited works included: The Farm, Roadwater, Point to Point and Combe Sydenham Agricultural Show. She sponsored the Rachell Reckitt Sculpture Award, was elected a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1950 and became an Honorary Member of the Somerset Guild of Craftsmen. Reckitt died in 1995.