Wednesday, April 13, 2022

558. Decorative Wall Art and Colouring Books

Some artists sell their work through the website Etsy and when I saw some book art by French artists on this platform, I also searched for Ricketts's name. That's how I discovered a dealer who runs the Lithograph Library.

Search results in Etsy, March 2022: 'Charles Ricketts'

As always, this kind of site leads you to commercial producers of all kinds of reproductions. This dealer also appears to be an ordinary internet copyist, but claims to have spent a lot of time on his product that is called:

1889 – Collection of 51 Charles S Ricketts Vintage Illustrations – The Dial – SVG – Instant Digital Download
£ 10,06

The "instant digital download of this art work" is described as a unique offer: there is only one available (mind you, of a digital file!), about which the dealer writes:

I found these wonderful illustrations by Charles S Ricketts while looking through an 1889 book (The Dial). I have taken the time to clean up and vectorize these illustrations and have sized each to fit on a standard 8.5 x 11 page.

What is this all about? - Not a book, at any rate. These are illustrations from the various issues of Ricketts and Shannon's magazine, The Dial that appeared between 1889 and 1897: illustrations by Ricketts, Shannon, Thomas Sturge Moore, Lucien Pissarro, and Reginald Savage - whose names are not mentioned.

They are advertised as "vintage" works from 1889, but what do you really get?

Watermark does not appear on your downloaded images of course. Your purchase includes five zip files containing 51 SVG images (transparent background). These svg images can be scaled to your desired size (larger or smaller) without any resolution loss using inkscape (a free program you can find online) or any other graphics programs that handle svg files

Who is the intended audience? And what is the purpose?

Great for coloring book pages, custom craft ideas, decorative wall art, scrap-booking, greeting cards, iron-on transfers, etc.