379. Designers & Jewellery: Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition

The Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition 'Designers & Jewellery 1850-1940: Jewellery and Metalwork from The Fitzwilliam Museum' is on view until 11 November. (The show opened in July).

Charles Ricketts, pendant with miniature of Edith Cooper (1901)

The catalogue (same title), written by Helen Ritchie, devotes an entire chapter to the jewellery designed by Charles Ricketts (pp. 99-115), with excellent photographs by Amy Jugg. It is the first time that our publication about Ricketts's mother (Charles Ricketts's Mysterious Mother, 2016) is quoted in the first lines of a serious essay about Ricketts: 

Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866-1931) was born in Switzerland to a retired English naval officer and his Italian wife, Cornelia Marsuzi de Aguirre.

The catalogue reproduces sketches alongside new photographs of the jewellery: a brooch, pendants, a painted fan, and a ring, designed by Ricketts in a short time span for a small inner circle of his friends: Michael Field and Maria Sturge Moore. Ricketts kept a drawer full of gemstones, and he arranged selections of them on a piece of paper before sketching a new jewel in pen and water colour. 

Although Ricketts employed Giuliano, a famous firm in London, for all his jewellery, he 'often spotted errors in them over time, and was not always completely satisfied with the goldsmith's work' (as Richie states). That, and Giuliano's invoices, brought his short career as a jewellery designer to an end.