1946 with a profound depression and a belief that a head wound he had sustained had disfigured him on the inside as well as (temporarily) on the outside, and would cause him to turn evil like Dr Jekyll becoming Mr Hyde. He received treatment, was institutionalised for a time, and made a full recovery, but perhaps his sympathetic visual treatment of Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, owes something to this period of his life. He applied for a grant to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic, but was initially turned down, so he read meters for a gas company during the day and took art classes in the evening. He finally got his grant and studied full-time from 1949 to 1952, completing the two-year Intermediate Examination in six months before specialising in illustration and lithography. His teachers included illustrators Stuart Tresilian and Nigel Lambourne, and lithographer Henry Trivick. He also worked as a life model, and on one such occasion in 1949 his demonstration of the functions of the muscles of the back attracted the eye of Renate Meyer, a fellow student who had left Germany with her family in 1933. They married in 1952 and four children. Career Early work Keeping went freelance after graduation, and spent four years drawing a comic strip for the Daily Herald, but did not enjoy the editorial restrictions he had to work under. He also drew cartoons for the Jewish Chronicle, the Middle Eastern Review, and, later, Punch, and his first book commission was a series of cartoon illustrations for a humorous health-promotion book called Why Die of Heart Disease? in 1953. He also did some work in advertising, and illustrated some educational textbooks. Children's books In 1956 he began to work through the artist's agent B. L. Kearley Ltd, whose rep Patsy Lambe referred him to Mabel George, editor of children's books at Oxford University Press. George commissioned him to illustrate Rosemary Sutcliff's historical children's novel The Silver Branch. He was unenthused by the ancient Roman subject matter, but experimented with double page spreads and drawings in the margins, and was quickly assigned more books by Sutcliff and others, including Henry Treece. This began a professional relationship with Oxford University Press, for whom he illustrated more books than for any other publisher. Keeping, along with Victor Ambrus, established a new, exuberant style of illustration for children's historical fiction, refusing to shy