Ricketts's death in 1931 set in motion a stream of obituaries, commemorative exhibitions and memoirs, which lasted for twenty years. Friends such as Gordon Bottomley published articles on Ricketts's versatility. Bottomley especially treated Ricketts's career as a theatre designer (in Theatre Arts Monthly, May 1932), but he also dealt with other subjects such as book design; Bottomley was a devotee who retold his fond memories of Ricketts in Durham University Journal (1940). Charles Holmes published his - fascinating and revealing - memories of Ricketts in 1935 (Self & Partners (Mostly Self).
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| Theatre Arts Monthly (1932) |
There was an exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery of works by Orpen, McEvoy and Ricketts (1933), Cassell published the first monograph about Ricketts, introduced by Thomas Sturge Moore (1933), and Ricketts's friend in Germany, Marcus Behmer, wrote a long essay about his book designs in 1935.
After World War II, the first collectors of works by Ricketts came to the fore At Harvard University, A.E. Gallatin showed books from his personal collection (1946). Institutions were aware of their collections as well, especially in the United States, where the Colby Library Quarterly not only published the holdings of American libraries of Vale Press books (1951-1952), but also translations of one of Ricketts's main texts on the principles of the Vale Press, originally published in French in De la typographie et de l'harmonie de la page.
Dissertations about Ricketts started to appear in 1954 when Alan Maxwell Fern finished his The Artistic Theories of Charles Ricketts, and Their Application in His Book Illustration (1954) at The University of Chicago. Book and theatre design remained the main subjects for exhibitions such as the one at the Richmond Public Library in 1956, articles by Carl Weber or Simon Nowell-Smith in academic journals, and a centenary exhibition at Leighton House in 1966.
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| Apollo (February 1966) |
When Denys Sutton published his influential article in the art magazine Apollo (February 1966), a new interest in the artists of the 1890s was imminent, Aubrey Beardsley took the lead, and subjects like art nouveau and decadence prepared new ground for an interest in Ricketts's versatility as an artist.
