702. Orlando

A new version of 'The Orlando Project' was published online two months ago. Hosted by the University of Alberta (Canada) and published online by the Cambridge University Press, it contains profiles of women writers that have been compiled by the collaboration of literary scholars, digital humanists and computing scientists and allows for 'the serendipities of productive browsing' as well as for 'answering precise, complex questions'. 

Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing

The website proudly announces:

This is literary history with a difference. Not a book, though in length the equivalent of more than 80 scholarly books, and not a digital edition of an existing text, it is a richly searchable textbase of born-digital, original writing. It is full of interpretive information on women, literature, and culture, with more than 8 million words of text in documents on the lives and writing of over 1400 authors, together with a great deal of contextual historical material on relevant subjects, such as education, politics, science, the law, and economics.

(See the Alberta pages on The Orlando Project.)

'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing' can be found on the site of Cambridge University Press (see Orlando). A search for Ricketts brings us to articles about Michael Field, Ada Leverson, and other subjects.

Ricketts in 'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing'

Ricketts and Shannon are obviously covered only as an aside in this database, but the writing women they knew, such as Michael Field, are discussed at length.

Michael Field in 'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing'

The database is only partly in open access (such as the queries mentioned above), and is available by annual subscription to libraries, institutions and individuals (prices are not mentioned on the website).

701. A Portrait of the Artist as a Reader

Charles Ricketts was an avid reader who regularly mentioned in his letters which books he was engrossed in or re-reading, as he did in a letter to his old friend the poet and artist Thomas Sturge Moore who received Ricketts's opinion of Marcel Proust:

Do you read Marcel Proust the new idol? I find him curiously interesting & almost intolerable, preoccupied with sex as he is, he gives me the impression of a spinster, there are chance pages of quite admirable analysis of feeling, sensation & emotion & amazing conversations. The Times reviewed his last Vol which is as yet unpublished.

and at the end of the same letter he suggests:

Marie might like Proust better than you since his minute pictures of French ^family life in all phases are singularly vivid, his books it is curious he should have an English vogue.

(Letter dated 18 September 1924: BL Add MS 58086, f 116)

Marie was Marie Appia, of French descendent.

In the early days of The Vale, Ricketts commented instantly on what he was reading. Moore, who  rented a room at Ricketts's home in The Vale, recalled that Ricketts could not enjoy William Morris's poetry:

[...] he came up to my room at the Vale after trying to read the Earthly Paradise and said that it was the kind of poetry to give to boys: that one thanked the lord when a word like 'swared' turned up! for that did remind you that it was poetry

(Letter to Gordon Bottomley, 21 March 1922: BL AA MS 88957/I/68 ff.81-3)

An early drawing exists showing Ricketts reading, and, by chance, the caption indicates which book he is reading: Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [the title is given as The Confessions of an Opium-Eater]. 

Charles Shannon, Portrait of Charles Ricketts (1890s)
[British Museum: 1946,0209.124:
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

According to the website of the British Museum it is an undated self-portrait but I would suggest that the graphite drawing was made by Charles Shannon in the early 1890s. Ricketts is depicted whole-length, seated in a chair to front, holding a book. (Museum number 1946,0209.124, donated by Mrs Constance Rea, born Halford).

700. Ricketts and Cézanne

Searching online for undiscovered Ricketts material, I stumbled across an intriguing title a while ago:

'Ricketts and Cézanne', letter by D.S. MacColl, New State[s]man and Nation

The catalogue description by Trinity College library in Cambridge indicates that this undated clipping is in the ‘Papers of Clive Bell', numbered Bell/5/82 [see here for a link to the catalogue description].

We know that Ricketts stopped writing articles for The Burlington Magazine when Roger Fry became editor in 1909, mainly because the latter was a champion of Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists. Who, therefore, would not be interested in an article by a third art critic and Cézanne aficionado, Clive Bell, on this very subject: ‘Ricketts and Cézanne’?

I, at least, was, but I had to find it first! How do you trace an undated article other than by getting the volumes on your desk and flipping through year after year? (As far as I know, there is no digital version of The New Statesman and Nation.)

I finally found it in the 6 January 1940 issue of The New Statesman and Nation. However, I was disappointed. Firstly, because it turned out not to be a long and thorough article, but a short letter to the editor, and, secondly, because neither Ricketts nor Cézanne are mentioned in it. The note is entirely about yet another art critic, D.S. MacColl (1859-1948).

Clive Bell, 'Ricketts and Cézanne', The New Statesman and Nation, 6 January 1940

The letter turns out to be the conclusion of a short series of publications in the magazine, its title taken from the previous episode: a letter from D.S. MacColl published on 30 December 1939.

Clive Bell responded to a single sentence in a nearly sixty-line piece:

Your vivaciously independent Weekly is in no danger of lacking readers, but in matters of visual art is notoriously a tied house, an estimable family party with its poor dependents, a side-chapel tirelessly tintinnabulated by Mr. Bell.

(D.S. MacColl, 'Ricketts and Cézanne', The New Statesman and Nation, 30 December 1939, p. 959)

Although the magazine's editor had already felt compelled to make it clear that it was truly independent of any art-critical coterie, Bell also felt he had to add that his integrity as an art critic should not have been questioned by MacColl, while, in the same vein, vaunting a few more blows, saying for example that it was unfortunate that MacColl was currently guided by only one emotion: rage.

In his article of 30 December 1939, MacColl indeed took a firm line against Raymond Mortimer (1895-1980), an art and literary critic, who on 16 December 1939 had published a review of Ricketts's posthumously published Self-Portrait, which had prompted a first letter from MacColl in the issue of 23 December which was followed by a short answer by Mortimer  which, again, enraged MacColl whose second letter started with these lines:

Sir, - Yes, Ricketts's negative estimate of Cézanne, quoted by Mr Mortimer, is nearer the mark  than the Meier-[G]raefe, Vollard legend, swallowed whole by Roger Fry and his âmes damnées, and epitomised in Mr. Mortimer's words "one of the greatest artists that the world has ever known." 

(By the way, that phrase does not appear in this series of reviews and responses.)

Paul Cézanne, 'La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Bellevue' (c.1885)
[Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia]

In his review (16 December 1939), Mortimer had written:

While he considered Renoir a vulgar sensualist, Cézanne mentally deficient and Matisse an imposter, he delighted in the insipidity of Puvis.

MacColl remarked (on 23 December 1939):

Ricketts as a critic, became only too "Catholic" in his latter days; like all of us, he had his blind spots [...] and his estimate of Cézanne, and of Renoir, for whom on due occasion he had an enthusiastic but discriminating admiration, are more likely to be those of the future than the exaggerated views which Mr. Mortimer has adopted.

Ricketts had denounced Cézanne's art as experimental and, as he argued in Pages on Art (1913):

All these 'experimentalists' are united in one fault; they are over-confident; they forget that the place for the experiment is the studio; it is not an aim but a means.

[See Pages on Art at Internet Archive.]

In his second letter (30 December 1939), MacColl took an anti-Semitic turn, apparently assuming that Ricketts had Jewish roots:

Ricketts was by no manner of means infallible: he did not appreciate, poor devil, the majesty of Handel, and did adore the tinsel of Gustave Moreau. That touches the nadir of his Jewish strain and taste, whose zenith was a passion for all the gems on Aaron's breastplate and their setting.

These are incomprehensible words that say more about that period in our history than about Ricketts, not least because these phrases were not contradicted by other letter writers in The New Statesman and Nation.

[Thanks are due to Jeroen Vandommele for providing an image of the Bell letter.]

699. The Triumph of Beauty

On last week's blog, I received some comments from readers who thought the drawing of a woman from 1890 was reminiscent of Charles Shannon's first print in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891), a good reason to put them together.

Charles Shannon, silverpoint drawing of a seated woman (1890)
[Collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam]

The portrait is executed in silverpoint and shows a seated woman in a wide gown; her left arm outstretched, her right is held in front of her chest. She might be engaged in needlework, but the image is too vague to say.

Charles Shannon, 'The Triumph of Beauty'
in Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates (1891)

The other plate is an image done on papier Gillot, subsequently an etched relief block was made by the firm of Verdoux, Ducourtioux et Huillard in Paris whose monogram VDH appears in the lower left hand corner.

Here we see a woman at her morning toilet. She is surrounded by four figures. Two women hold her long hair outstretched to both sides; one is also holding up a mirror. To the left in the foreground, a woman is kneeling down, as if in prayer, while to her right a seated woman (or man?) is playing the flute. Between them is an animal, probably a cat.

The plate precedes the first story in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates, illustrating 'The Young King':

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty.
(page 7)

The scene on the tapestries is not described in detail and only plays a symbolic role in the story: that of material wealth that will be abandoned by the young king for the wealth of belief in good.

One commenter suggested that the silverpoint drawing was a preliminary study for the print in Wilde's book, but I don't think this could have been the case. A preliminary study in pencil seems more logical to me, but apart from that, the dating - 1890 - is impossibly early. True, by 1890 Wilde had already met with publisher McIlvaine, who had come to London to set up the new firm Osgood McIlvaine & Co, but he had not written all four stories by then and would continue to make many important changes even in July 1891 after receiving the first proofs for the book that was published in November. I think the similarity between the two works should be called coincidental, guided only by Shannon's personal interests.

698. An Unknown Early Drawing by Charles Shannon

The collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have been rapidly digitised over the past decade, and images and descriptions are still being added to the online database. A recent search resulted in some drawings by Shannon unknown to me, the most interesting being the oldest. [See the Shannon results on the website of the Rijksmuseum Collection.] 

Around 1890, Shannon was still experimenting with different media such as pencil or charcoal drawings, watercolour and silverpoint drawings, although he soon settled for lithographs and oil paintings. 

An early silverpoint drawing has turned up in the collection of the Rijksmuseum. It has never before been reproduced.

Charles Shannon, silverpoint drawing of a seated woman (1890)

The drawing on paper (173 by 244 mm) was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1949 (object no. RP-T-1949-553); the image is described as: 'Seated woman with gown and arms spread'. 

The image recalls early lithographs such as ‘Biondina’ featuring women in evening wear, but it is rare for Shannon to depict a solitary figure frontally (F.H. Neville, Esq. from 1915 being an  exception). Also unusual is that she is not engaged in an activity, like most of the female figures in the early lithographic portraits or idyllic scenes, although she could be engaged in needlework or a similar activity - the vagueness of the image does not allow us to reach a conclusion. However, only her left arm is outstretched, her right arm is held in front of her chest.

[See next week's blog!] 

697. An Unopened Book for the Reader, Collector, Thief and Publisher

In August 2023, I wrote about the phenomenon of 'unopened' copies of private press books, and expensive commercial books. [See blog 627 about A House of Pomegranates]:

This was the fashion of the untouched book, the book as it came from the bindery to the collector who did not cut open the sections, but left them unopened, untouched and thus unread. It was a kind of tribute to the ideal book, where the object had become more important than the text.

We are talking about books whose quires have been folded but not cut. These may be commercially published works up to roughly about the mid-20th century or they may be private press or other types of deluxe publications.

Meanwhile, I wonder if there could be more cases where a book is not cut open.

The Reader / Collector 

As for the collector's behaviour, I see four possibilities: 

1. The reader cuts open the book while reading it;
2. The reader uses a knife to open several sections, but stops because (s)he abandons the book and stops reading;
3. The collector does not cut open the book, and reads what is visible by looking between the unopened sheets;
4. The collector places the book unread on the shelf to keep it in an 'untouched', 'original' condition.

An uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves (Vale Press, 1901)

This creates three versions:

a. A book with all the sections cut open;
b. A partly opened/unopened book;
c. An unopened book.

But the buyer is not the only one who can cause this condition. 

A potential buyer in a bookshop or antiquarian bookshop is unlikely to ask for a knife and start cutting open the sections. In a library, such a thing may happen and then it is the researcher or borrower who turns an unopened book into a (partially) cut open book. In Special Collections Departments (such as that in the National Library of the Netherlands) specific rules try to prevent such behaviour, and the cutting is done (if necessary), after consultation with the curator, by a conservation officer.

The Thief

It may sound unlikely, but after theft, the curious thief may be inclined to cut open the sections of a book. I would like to know of examples of such acts. After all, the thief may be a reader as well.

The Publisher

There may be two situations where the publisher takes care of the persistence of the unopened state: when the publisher places a copy in the publisher's archive and when an unsold stock emerges after the publisher's dissolution. 

Reading an uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves
(Vale Press, 1901)

There may thus exist both archival copies and unsold stock in uncut form. The former does not actually occur with Ricketts and the Vale Press books. The sample copies from the shop, At the Sign of the Dial, were, to my knowledge, all cut open to show the reader all the pages. This does not apply, incidentally, to the copies printed on vellum. The sections of these copies were cut or  trimmed only in the bindery.

But after Ricketts and Shannon passed away, it turned out that several issues of their magazine The Dial had not sold out. There was quite a pile of unsold and unopened copies in their original wrappers, almost a hundred in total. There were ten copies of the third issue (1893), seven copies of number four (1896), and no less than eighty-three copies of the last issue - see Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts […] Valuable Books on the Fine Arts from the Collection of C.H. Shannon, Esq., R.A. and the late Charles Ricketts, Esq., R.A. […] London, Christie, Manson & Woods, December 4, 1933, p. 49, no. 403. 

Unopened copies of the fifth number of The Dial may be less rare than copies that have actually been read without struggling to hold open the pages and look between them to read the text.

696. Silly Mistakes or Peculiar Errors (2)

Sometimes academic publications make you wonder: where do researchers get their information from? 

Inadequate research results in silly mistakes or peculiar errors. I quote last week's words (although not literally) and also promise to let this kind of oddities pass for the time being as they seem to be becoming commonplace.

The American Printing History Association's respectable journal Printing History published an article that puzzled me, not so much with its content and argumentation, but because of curious misspellings and attributions, which could and should have caught the editor's eye.

The young and promising scholar Jacob Romm wrote the essay 'The Marriage of Two Arts: Michael Field, Vale Press, and Queer Print in Victorian England' (Printing History, 35, Summer 2024, pages 48-63).

These two subjects, the Vale Press by Charles Ricketts, and the poems and plays by Michael Field, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, are always worth paying attention to. 

Biography of Michael Field (detail) on Yellow Nineties 2.0

And here, unfortunately, we see two recurring errors. Bradley's name is consistently misspelled, not with an ‘a’ (Katharine) but as Katherine, which was not her name, even though half the Internet pretends it is, while there are accurate sources online to cite, such as The Yellow Nineties.  

The second false assumption that consistently reverberates throughout this article is that Ricketts and Shannon jointly ran the Vale Press, by which, incidentally, is meant not the early period of Vale Publications but rather the later publishing firm Hacon & Ricketts. Shannon was active as a co-publisher from 1889 until about 1895, but right from the start of the real publishing company, funded by Hacon and Ricketts, he concentrated on his painting career and kept away from the publishing programme.

The oversights are related to the desired assumption that Ricketts and Shannon were a homosexual couple all their lives, whereas it is clear from diaries (especially as pages have been torn out) and later letters that Shannon maintained a series of mistresses from the late 1890s  with whom he considered marriage several times - and Ricketts was alone in the relationship as a gay man.

Their cohabitation was enigmatic to the outside world, centred on the art collection, and their household could well be called ‘queer’, but they each operated separately. The only constant in their collaboration was the focus on their art collection.

There are smaller misses, such as the claim that Ricketts designed three ‘uncial-inspired’ types - in fact, there was only one, the other two were inspired by Jenson's Renaissance type.

The essay mentions that the Vale Press issued works by 'Shakespeare, Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, and Gordon Bottomley'. Works by Wilde and Bottomley were designed by Ricketts, but were never issued by Hacon and Ricketts (or issued as Vale Press publications). It is even said that after the closure of the Vale Press Ricketts and Shannon occasionally designed books for friends: Ricketts did so frequently, but Shannon never designed any books after the death of Oscar Wilde in 1900.

A quote from The Times from 1931 stating that Ricketts and Shannon 'shared the same studio' goes uncorrected, while each had his own studio, even in their early days at the Vale Shannon had a private studio.

Ricketts and Shannon are called the 'printers' of the Vale Press books, which they never were, as they did not possess a printing press.

Thomas Campion, Fifty Songs (1896)

It is clear from small details that the Vale Press books, even those illustrated in the article, have not been studied. Thomas Campion's Fifty Sonnets are said to be poems 'about the sea', which they are not.

The decorative paper of the cover of Fifty Sonnets is described as 'green paper patterned with gold ships', while the design is printed in blue on white paper - no gold has been used. Has the author actually handled a copy of this book?

The interpretation of the border design for the first text page of Fair Rosamund is debatable: the author assumes Ricketts showed a drawing of it to Michael Field. He did not. He only imagined that drawing of Pylades as a decadent naked dancer, as he also said in a discussion of the play. But Michael Field's opinion made that ‘vision’ dissipate and instead came the figure of Fortuna. (Incidentally, Romm calls this page a frontispiece, which is factually incorrect).

As a reader, so many inaccuracies can make you despair, especially when one encounters a characterisation of The Yellow Book as ‘Wilde's Yellow Book’, when obviously Wilde had nothing whatsoever to do with it. However, most of all, I feel sorry for the author who is so poorly supervised by an editor of a leading magazine. 

Is it perhaps advisable to stop this - clearly pointless - blog, say, on reaching blog post number 700? One might wonder.

695. Silly Mistakes or Peculiar Errors (1)

Sometimes serious publications make you wonder: where do collectors get their information from?

Inadequate research results in silly mistakes or peculiar errors.

I recently came across the three-volume catalogue of a huge Rubáiyát collection of over 7000 editions: Edward Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Related Materials. The John Roger Paas Collection (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023). The Vale Press edition of Fitzgerald's poems is included as number 4262 (Text, part II, pages 542-543).

The description begins with an introduction about the publisher:

Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) was known in his lifetime as an illustrator, book designer, typographer, and theatrical designer. Although also a painter, his strength was in wood engraving, and after working as a commercial artist he and his lifelong companion, Charles Shannon, set up a small press in Chelsea (London), where Ricketts exercised complete control over all aspects of production. Gaining the financial backing of William Llewellyn Hacon, in 1896 Ricketts and Shannon established The Vale Press, which soon gained a reputation as one of the leading private presses at the time. Following a devastating fire at the printer's in 1904, which destroyed all of Ricketts's woodblocks, the partners decided to close the firm.

Halfway through the second line, the text begins to derail: Ricketts and Shannon did not 'set up a small press in Chelsea'. Although they lived in Chelsea, at The Vale, and used this name in their publications, the press at their home was Shannon's lithographic press, not a typographic press. The texts for their art portfolios, books and their magazine The Dial were printed elsewhere, and since 1890 they preferred to have them printed at the Ballantyne Press in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden).

Although the first books appeared in 1896, the firm was founded two years earlier, in 1894.  Ricketts and Shannon did not establish The Vale Press. Officially the publishing firm was called Hacon & Ricketts, while the papers were signed by Ricketts and Hacon. 

Publisher's mark in Milton's Early Poems (1896)

Milton's Early Poems, the first book printed at the 'private press' (a definition they did not use), was decorated with a publisher's mark that included the first letters of the names Ricketts and Hacon, while earlier they had used one that included the initials 'R' and 'S' (see the colophon of Hero and Leander, 1894). Although it has been said that Shannon was involved in the design of the frontispiece of the Milton edition, it is impossible to say what his contribution consisted of, if any.

Publisher's mark in Hero and Leander (1894)

The last line of the introduction consists only of false claims:

Following a devastating fire at the printer's in 1904, which destroyed all of Ricketts's woodblocks, the partners decided to close the firm.

The fire was in December 1899, it destroyed a part of his blocks (mostly those for a planned 39-volume Shakespeare edition), and it was Ricketts's decision to close The Vale Press, which happened in 1903, after which he privately published the press's bibliography.

From these errors in a 113-word introduction, we can infer that no major study on The Vale Press was consulted, the words must have been cobbled together on the Internet without fact-checking.

694. Stories After Nature

From 1892, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon were thinking about books they wanted to illustrate and publish. Many of those original plans never materialised, such as an edition of Song of Songs announced in 1892 in a prospectus for the second issue of The Dial, or an edition of The Voiage and Travaille of Sir John Maundeville mentioned in a prospectus for Daphnis and Chloe. Other projects were mentioned in letters to publisher John Lane, who distributed their work, or were suggested by Oscar Wilde, even when he was already imprisoned. The longest list comes from an October 1894 letter to American publisher F. Holland Day: it included editions of, among others, Charles Lamb, John Webster, Catullus, Richard Crashaw, Plato, Thomas Gray, Walter Pater and Richard Lovelace.

More than twenty years later, Ricketts sometimes thought back to such plans, referring to ideas he did not mention before. On 30 March 1915, he wrote to Gordon Bottomley:

I remember Wells’ play very dimly, I thought it wordy at the time. His Stories after Nature pleased me. I even contemplated publishing it with woodcuts in the old days of the Vale.

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), cover

Charles Wells's play - published under the name H.L. Howard - was called Joseph and his Brethren. A Scriptural Drama in Two Acts, issued by G. and W.B. Whittaker in 1824. Two years earlier Wells had published (anonymously) his Stories after Nature (London, T. and J. Allman, and C. And J. Ollier, 1822). The play was reprinted in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The stories were reprinted in 1891 by Lawrence and Bullen with a preface by W.J. Linton. 

What was so appealing about these stories that Ricketts wanted to make wood-engravings to accompany them?

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), title page

Some of the stories are set in ancient times, for example in Sparta. The main characters are often dukes, princes, kings or members of their court in France or Italy during the Renaissance. Other stories are set in late-medieval Britain. There are disguises, kidnappings, violence, tyranny, love stories, betrayals, chivalry, grief and desolation:

He was become the silent image of despair, and sat for hours  on the ground without motion, brooding over his misery. But this melancholy pleasure could not last; his mind fell short of the intensity of his passion, and when he had once lost the clue of his thoughts, his affections became a chaos, and he was no longer able to subdue them to the consideration of the beloved object. At last he came to himself, and was quietly resigned to his hard fate; the violence of his grief subsided into a calm, and he bore his affliction patiently. ('Dion, a King of the Olden Time').

Some stories are about love discovered too late or about unconditional friendship between men, such as 'Edmund and Edward', while others describe the lives of brothers 'who lived as happily as two bachelors could do' ('the Plague').

Charles Wells, Stories after Nature (1891), pp. 124-125

Most of the stories are dramatic, with fortunes abruptly lost, love treacherously met with exile - and it seems that those scenes of a sudden reversal of fortune visually appealed to Ricketts. Both the loss of trust and the regaining of a lover or status might have given him an idea for an image, perhaps not unlike those seen in his edition of The Parables.

693. New Publication: Charles Ricketts's Early Drawings

In August 1889 the first issue of The Dial appeared containing original art work and literary texts by the Vale group led by Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts. Up to this date all of Ricketts’s drawings had been commissioned works for several art magazines such as The Magazine of Art and The Universal Review, the weekly comic The Alarum and the journal which Oscar Wilde had given a new life, The Woman’s World. Ricketts also published drawings in Cassell’s History of England and other books. These were cartoons, biblical scenes, historical scenes set in Assyria, Egypt, the Roman Empire or Elizabethan England. Contemporary fashion was illustrated with imaginative elements such as cupids at play.

Charles Ricketts, headpiece for The Latest Fashions
(The Woman's World, July 1889)

These early drawings may not have been free work, but they are never entirely without interest and his decorations – initial letters and head- and tailpieces – are in a fluent and symbolic mode, marking the beginning of his own style, as some commentators have mentioned. In all, there were 45 early drawings, which for the first time have been reproduced together in Charles Ricketts’s Early Drawings. Published from December 1885 to August 1889.

 

They give an insight into Ricketts’s early development as a draftsman and provide examples of initials and borders which he would later design for Vale Press books. These early illustrations catch the eye for their modernity, contrast and dramatic scenery, which differed strikingly from illustrations by other artists in the same publications. Fairly soon Ricketts stopped following the conventions of the time, but sought ways to incorporate the influence of D.G. Rossetti into illustrations which would gradually move towards art nouveau. The drawings attracted attention and brought Ricketts the support from publishers, editors, art editors and authors who gave him opportunities which eventually launched his career as designer of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Intentions, The Sphinx and others, whose covers and title-pages would change British book design.

Charles Ricketts’s Early Drawings, cover 

Paul van Capelleveen

Charles Ricketts’s Early Drawings. Published from December 1885 to August 1889

The Hague, At the Paulton, November 2024

60 pages, 46 illustrations, 24:17 cm

Designed by Huug Schipper (Studio Tint)

Set in Proforma Medium

Printed on Biotop 205 g. by Mostert & Van Onderen, Leiden

Edition limited to seventy-five numbered copies

 

Price: € 25,00

Including packaging and shipping:

Netherlands: £30,00.

European Union: €36,00.

United Kingdom: €36,00.

USA and Canada: €39,00.

 

How to order?

Please send an email to Paul van Capelleveen [see the address in the right-hand bar]. You will receive a Paypal invoice, or we can suggest other ways of payment.  

692. Laurence Irving About Ricketts

Laurence Irving (1897-1988) talked about his work as a stage and film designer for the Art Workers Guild in 1964. [See for his meeting Ricketts as a student, blog 690]. The Art Workers Guild was founded in 1884 by architects and designers in need of a meeting place for the fine arts and the applied arts. A great range of crafts - over forty in 1909, over sixty at present - has been represented in the guild, including type-design and photography. Members included C.R Ashbee, Arthur Gaskin, Emery Walker, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, Eric Gill, David Kindersley and William Morris. Walt Disney was among the honorary members. Men were long in the majority, but in later years women also became members, such as Judith Bluck and Mary Jane Long.

By 1964, when Irving gave his talk, the guild was no longer in the mainstream of artistic thinking, and was preserving values which were unfashionable. (A lot has changed since then.)

The Art Workers Guild at 6 Queen Square, London
[Photo: Art Workers Guild,
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

From 1913, the Guild has been based at 6 Queen Square in Bloomsbury. Laurence Irving is listed as a member in 1933, but apparently only in that year. In his 1964 speech, he said that the secretary of the Guild asked him to deliver a lecture at the time, but he could not remember what he had spoken about. All he remembered was that George Bernard Shaw had sat in the front row - a lifelong enemy of his grandfather the actor Henry Irving. More than thirty years later, he again was asked to give a lecture on his work, which was announced in The Stage of 12 November 1964: 'Laurence Irving on Scene Changes, or, Thirty Years After'. The event was scheduled for the next day, Friday 13 November 1964, at 7 p.m. Admission was free.

'Art Workers Guild', announcement in The Stage, 12 November 1964, p. 13

A typescript of this lecture is preserved in the collection of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection (Ref No BTC30/8/4/13). [See the catalogue description.]

The title partly matches what the announcement in The Stage gave as the subject - 'Changes of Scene', but the date for the lecture is given here as ‘November 18th 1964’.

Irving said that as a young student at the Royal Academy Schools, he wanted to stay as far away from the stage as possible and began his career in the field of graphic art. It was only in 1926, thanks to author A.A. Milne and composer Fraser Simson, that he was persuaded to design scenery and dresses.

I was thrice blessed in being able to assimilate the theoretical and practical teaching of three masters. Charles Ricketts, George Harris and Edward Gordon Craig.

In that order, because he owed the most to Ricketts. Shannon and Ricketts invited him as a student to drop by at one of their Friday night meetings at Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Road, Holland Park.

Ricketts was a master of stagecraft. In him were combined the gifts of scholarship, architectural boldness, a vivid colour sense and a feeling for abstract pattern that revealed itself in the noble simplicity of his settings and the characterisation of his costumes.

His keen intelligence, broad knowledge, playful humour and skillful fingers contributed to him being held in high regard as a designer, although he could not always be patient with actors or authors.

"Men of letters have no taste!" I once heard him cry in exasperation when a poet failed to grasp an effect he was striving for. He meant, I think, that writers have not necessarily the visual imagination that their words imply and yet do not readily accept the illustration of them by another.

Ricketts contributed immensely to the formation of Irving's theatrical convictions. 

In his lecture, Irving said of Gordon Craig that he stripped the stage of irrelevant decorations, greatly influencing all designers after him, but that he could hardly ever put his theories into practice because he was not offered work in the commercial theatre world.

Ricketts, meeting him at the turn of the century, found him "too diffuse".

Irving said a designer should not distinguish between ‘serious and frivolous productions’, between tragedies and comedies, and that it was precisely the variety of genres and subjects that he had found so attractive about his work. Of importance to him was continuity in the collaboration between designer, director and theatre. But by the late 1920s, this was already a rarity.

Only about three Shakespearean productions of note were seen in London during those years and none of them (though two were splendidly designed by Ricketts) had much success.

Irving often saw the artist Rex Whistler at work, admiring his 'imaginative grace and technical mastery'. In his lecture, Irving further elaborated on the form of theatre and its influence on the relationship between actors and audiences. 

Quotes are taken from: Ref No BTC30/8/4/13: Typescript for a lecture given by Laurence Henry Irving to the Art Workers Guild on 18 November 1964 titled 'Changes of Scene' (University of Bristol Theatre Collection).

[Thanks are due to Jill Sullivan, Assistant Keeper (User Services), University of Bristol Theatre Collection].

691 Ricketts & Shannon Discount

Last Saturday, the book website Biblio sent out an advertisement. Until next Sunday, books can be purchased at a discount under the code word Oscar Wilde. 

Biblio.com mail, 26 October 2024

The site gives this kind of discount - as an incentive to purchase used and rare books from antiquarian booksellers - with some regularity. [For the website see Biblio.com.] I usually ignore such messages but this one caught my attention. 

Biblio.com mail, 26 October 2024

The discount code was illustrated with an image from one of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale collections, A House of Pomegranates, with illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, or, as the artists put it on the title page:

THE DESIGN & DECORATION OF THIS BOOK BY C. RICKETTS & C.H. SHANNON

Via Biblio.com, two copies of this first edition are now on sale, one for $731.30 ('partially unopened [...] Covers a bit darkened, corners rubbed, hinges weakened with paper cracked, endpapers slightly darkened, engraved bookplate on the front pastedown with the monogram engraved on the plate of R.E 1899, otherwise interior clean and bright') and one for $3,150.00 ('Very good plus to near fine', 'a beautiful copy', 'Housed in cloth-backed marbled paper custom box. Small bookplate on front pastedown. Hinges neatly repaired. Only light soiling to board edges, with a bit of toning to spine. Text block free from foxing').

So the 10% discount might amount to $73 or even $315. However, the maximum discount per order is $20, making these two copies cost $711.30 or $3,130.00 respectively.

690. Laurence Irving Meets Ricketts

In 1922, the artist, book-illustrator and (later) set-designer for films Laurence Irving came to the Keep at Chilham Castle near Canterbury, as Ricketts wrote in letter to W.B. Yeats. Irving (1897-1988) was called 'a nice sensitive youngster' who sketched peacocks in the garden. Trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art, he met Ricketts and Shannon when he continued his training at the Royal Academy School, specialising in landscape and marine painting.

He once told Ricketts's biographer that he had asked Ricketts who the best landscape-painter was, and immediately got the reply: 'Wagner'.(*)

Charles Ricketts, 'Amfortas', design for Richard Wagner's Parsifal
(Supplement to The Illustrated London News, 19 May 1928)

The BBC archives show that he had previously told that anecdote in a more extended form, as he did on the radio programme The Irving Inheritance (interviewer John Miller):

The great influence on me was Charles Ricketts and I remember one night, as a rather callow student, asking Ricketts who he thought were our greatest landscape painters and in a flash he said, 'Tennyson and Wagner!'

And he added:

To me [the poet] Masefield was, I suppose, the supreme marine painter.

(The Irving Inheritance, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 1 March 1981, 19:30 [see the BBC Genome website])

Irving had published book illustrations for a medieval play, Godefroi and Yolande, published by John Lane, The Bodley Head in 1907, and Masefield's Philip the King, issued by William Heinemann in 1927, a year before he went to Hollywood with Douglas Fairbanks to be his Art Director on The Iron Mask.

Rex Whister and Charles Ricketts,
painted by Laurence Irving (1970)

An Irving oil painting from 1970 (see the collection of V&A) depicts Charles Ricketts next to Rex Whistler in the enormous scenic studio of Alick Johnstone, supervising the realisation for Henry VIII and Victoria Regina.

Other BBC programmes related to Ricketts are: Poverty and Oysters (17 August 1979, BBC 2) and Between Ourselves (22 February 1991, BBC Radio 3).

(*) J.G. Paul Delaney, Charles Ricketts. A Biography. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 214, 312.

689. Ricketts and The Woman's World

A week ago I received a copy of Articles from The Woman's World Edited by Oscar Wilde, a selection of thirty essays with introduction and notes by Eleanor Fitzsimons. Gyles Brandreth [see the website of The Oscar Wilde Society] had this to say about this impressive new book:

Eleanor Fitzsimons has exploded the myth that Oscar Wilde was a lazy editor. She shows how hard he worked to find the best writers and the best illustrators to make his magazine a beacon of progressive thought regarding women in education, the professions, politics and the arts.

Selected Articles from The Woman's World Edited by Oscar Wilde (2024)

Fitzsimons discusses Wilde's editorial episode, which began in April 1887 when he was asked to be the editor of The Lady's World, half a year before the first issue under his editorship would appear. The time was taken to change the title, lay-out, and the contents of the magazine - the emphasis was now more on what women were thinking than on what they were wearing, although fashion remained an important subject. The introduction shows how Wilde, in his literary notes, supported new and democratic ideas, and invited women with sometimes opposing views to make contributions.

The editor covers contributions from different types of sections - poetry, fiction, literature, fashion, education, industry, employment for women, politics and public life. Although most of the authors were women, the illustrators were all men. Wilde became disappointed with the publisher's lack of support for his plans, both financially and in terms of content he faced constraints, leading to him giving up.

The selection follows the format of the original magazine, the text in two columns, and illustrations (for the introduction) embedded in the text, unfortunately leading to ugly gaps in the consequently short lines of text aligned on either side (see for example page 25). The endpapers are after a design by E.W. Godwin: the original bound volumes of The Woman's World had simple blank endleaves and this busy colourful fabric design - not designed for books bur for furniture - is misplaced in this volume.

Zooming in on Charles Ricketts, we unfortunately may detect some flaws. The short biography (pp. 246-7)  states that Ricketts's mother was French, an error that has been corrected by his biographer Paul Delaney who established that she was Italian. Throughout the book we find illustrations by Ricketts that are not attributed to him and about which a somewhat hidden footnote (p. 302, note 26) comments that they may have been his work. The misconception that Wilde was the one who invited Ricketts to produce illustrations - Ricketts had previously worked for the publisher Cassell and would not meet Wilde until 1889 - is reflected in the comment that theirs was one of Wilde's 'collaborative relationships' (p. 30). Eventually they did become close collaborators but not before 1890.

Not all of Ricketts's illustrations are signed by him, especially the headpieces for the fashion section are quite often missing a monogram, leading Fitzsimons to contradict herself. On the one hand, she says he ‘might’ have made these, on the other, she claims with certainty that they are his work: 'Charles Ricketts may have been the artist responsible for the headpieces to Mrs. Johnstone's articles "The Latest Fashions" [...]' (page 302) and 'From 1889, when Charles Ricketts began drawing playful headers for "The Latest Fashions" [...]' (page 243). Apparently, these drawings have not been examined closely.

There is no reason for doubt. Ricketts designed all the headpieces from February 1889 onwards. The first one is not signed, but the second one is (March 1889).

Charles Ricketts, detail of headpiece (The Woman's World, March 1889)

The double-lined square within the wreath is a simplification of Ricketts's monogram which he used to sign a tailpiece in the same instalment.

Charles Ricketts, detail of tailpiece (The Woman's World, March 1889)

For some articles he combined the CR monogram and the simple square, see for example his illustrations for 'Boots and Shoes' in The Woman's World of May 1889. Shortly, a book about the early illustrations by Ricketts reproducing all of them will be published and announced in this series of blogs.

688. Ricketts, Lettering and Ornament in The Printing Art

In 1907, Addison B. LeBoutillier (1872-1951) - an architect, who was famous for his pottery, and also known for his drawings and etchings - published an article in The Printing Art: A Monthly Magazine of the Art of Printing and of the Allied Arts, edited by Henry Lewis Johnson and published by the University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 'Lettering and ornament' (volume 8, no. 6,  February 1907, pp. 385-392). [The Princeton Library copy can be found at Hathi Trust.]

Addison B. LeBoutillier

Addison B. LeBoutillier, 'Lettering and ornament'
(The Printing Art, February 1907, first page)

The article contains six examples of lettering and ornament of which one contains a quote from Charles Ricketts (p. [391]). The text comes from his polemical essay A Defence of the Revival of Printing (1899). The short passage (from pages 10 and 11) deals with the lack of decoration in early Italian printed books, William Morris's ideas about book decoration, and the use of ornamental type.

Addison B. LeBoutillier, 'Lettering and ornament'
(The Printing Art, February 1907, p. [391])

But the illustration is not a simple facsimile of the original edition. The text has been re-set from a letter not designed by Ricketts and placed in a border, with an initial T, which were neither drawn nor published by him.

The border and initial were originally designed for the Boston firm of Copeland and Day for their edition of D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life (1894). Designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, they were later called ‘more cluttered than Morris’s ever were’.(*) They were also much heavier and denser than Ricketts's borders. Goodhue designed 3 borders and 114 initial letters for the Rossetti edition.

D.G. Rossetti, The House of Life (1894),
designed by B.G. Goodhue

The type is not designed by Ricketts nor by Goodhue - it is a copy of Morris's own Troy Type (mentioned by Ricketts in his quote), a version probably made by the American Type Founders, and called Satanick.

Why this text by Ricketts was chosen - he is not mentioned anywhere in the text (Morris, incidentally, is mentioned as an example) - and why it was set in a typeface based on Morris's and why the whole thing was placed in an ornamental border by Goodhue is a mystery. The result hardly qualifies as a typographic unit - at least not in the way Ricketts was striving for.

(*) Quote from William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press. A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1996, p. 302.