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.

378. Scholarly Attention for Charles Ricketts (4)

Since 2000, the number of articles about Oscar Wilde or Michael Field that mention Charles Ricketts and his designs for their books has increased. Apart from that, Ricketts himself has become a major subject for research, although these publications are usually not written for a large audience.

Everything for Art and Charles Ricketts's Mysterious Mother

Book and Theatre Design 

Since 2000, more scholars have emerged with publications about Ricketts's book design, especially in the United States. Nicholas Frankel (1962) published his Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books in 2000 (The University of Michigan Press), followed by his Masking the Text: Essays on Literature & Mediation in the 1890s in 2009 (The Rivendale Press). David Peters Corbett published 'Symbolism in British "Little magazines". The Dial (1889-[189]7), The Pageant (1896-7), and The Dome (1897-1900)' in: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009). I published several articles on Ricketts, for example on his influence as a book designer on the Dutch debate on modern book illustration in the 1890s (in the Dutch yearbook for book history, 2000), on the printing of A House of Pomegranates (a sequel to this was published by Paul Nash), in The Private Library (2005, and 2007 for the Nash article), and in 2006 The Book Collector contained my article about Rickett's designs for Osgood: 'The Revival of a Publisher's Device. Charles Ricketts and Osgood, McIlvaine & Co.'

In 2004 Oak Knoll Press published Maureen Watry's bibliography of the Vale Press. Vincent Barlow contributed an essay on Ricketts and Shannon as publisher of a formerly untraced edition of Sturge Moore's woodcuts to Studies in Illustration (2014), and I privately published a bibliography of the articles and books written by Ricketts (2015).

A younger generation approached the work of Ricketts with fresh insights. One of them is Jeremiah Mercurio who took as a subject 'Charles Ricketts' illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Poems in prose. An unrealized project' (published online, 2010). Petra Clark is another young scholar who researches Ricketts's illustrations. In 2013 she published an article on 'Bitextuality, Sexuality, and the Male Aesthete in The Dial: "Not Through an Orthodox Channel"' (English Literature in Transition, 1890-1930, 2013), which was followed in 2015 by ‘“Cleverly Drawn”. Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Woman’s World’ (Journal of Victorian Culture, 2015). Another scholar, Koenraad Claes, published long contributions about The Dial and The Pageant in his book The Late-Victorian Little Magazine (2018).

An older generation still played its part. In 2007, Carl Woodring (1919-2009) published an article in Wordsworth Circle: 'Centaurs Unnaturally Fabulous'. It discussed centaurs as a motif in Rickett's paintings and book illustrations. Woodring was 87 at the time.

The other major concern of Ricketts, the theatre, was not forgotten. Scholars such as Margaret Mitchell, Lindsay Catherine Thomas, and Judith P. Shoaf published essays on the stage designs for performances by and for soldiers in France, Ricketts's Shakespeare productions, and the dolls he made for Mabel Beardsley.

Exhibitions were mounted on several occasions. An online exhibition was published in conjunction with the publication of Watry's bibliography (At the Sign of the Dial: Charles Ricketts and the Vale Press 1896-1903, Liverpool University Library). Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery showed Decadence and design. Ricketts, Shannon and their circle in 2007, while Ricketts and Shannon. A Creative Partnership was on display in 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery. Museum Meermanno in The Hague commemorated the 150th anniversary of Ricketts's birth with a show called Charles Ricketts. Between Jesus and Oscar Wilde (2016).

The last decade, some new initiatives and themes came to the fore. A new edition of some of Ricketts's main texts was published by The Rivendale Press in 2014: Everything for Art: Selected Writings, edited by Nicholas Frankel. Paul Delaney and Corine Verney solved the riddle of his mother's identity in Charles Rickett's Mysterious Mother (2016), and this blog on Ricketts and Shannon started in July 2011.

Art Collectors

Ricketts and Shannon as art collectors was the subject of some earlier studies, but since 2007 three more articles haven taken up this issue: Jane Munro wrote about them as collectors of drawings (in L’artiste collectionneur de dessin. II (2007), Caroline Elam published 'Piero di Cosimo and Centaurophilia in Edwardian London' in The Burlington Magazine (2009), filling several pages about them as art advisers and collectors with quotes from their diaries and letters, while Christina Rozeik looked at the fate of the collection they bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum: '"A Maddening Temptation". The Ricketts and Shannon collection of Greek and Roman antiquities' (Journal of the History of Collections, 2012).

A new angle was found by Frederick D. King, who looked at The Pageant and its role in changing concepts of art history: Revising Art History in The Pageant (presentation at the North American Victorian Studies Association's supernumerary conference in Florence,  2017). 

Queer Domesticities

Homosexuality

Homosexuality has become a major theme. David Peters Corbett published his article 'Homosociality and Visual Knowledge in the Circle of Charles Ricketts' in Visual Culture in Britain (2007), and two other writers connected this topic with that of interior design: John Potvin wrote 'The Aesthetics of Community: Queer Interiors and the Desire for Intimacy' for the monograph Rethinking the Interior c. 1867-1896. Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (2010), and Matt Cook devoted a chapter to Ricketts and Shannon in his book Queer Domesticities. Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (2014). This chapter, 'Domestic Passions: Unpacking the Homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts' was previously published in the Journal of British Studies (2012).

What will the future bring?

377. Scholarly Attention for Charles Ricketts (3)

In the 1960s the appreciation for the 1890s, decadence, art nouveau and symbolism grew immensely, partly as a result of the V&A exhibition about Aubrey Beardsley (May-September 1966). The same year John Russell Taylor's The Art Nouveau Book in Britain was published by Methuen - it was profusely illustrated, and an eye-opener for some collectors; it had to be reprinted several times. James G. Nelson wrote another influential book in which Ricketts's work, though not the main subject, was treated extensively: The Early Nineties. A View from the Bodley Head (Harvard University Press, 1971). These two studies were greatly appreciated by curators, collectors, scholars, and book dealers. 

Geoffrey Perkins, A Collection of Books Designed by Charles Ricketts (deluxe copy)

Of course, there were already Ricketts collectors out there. In 1967 the UCLA in California showed books designed by Ricketts from the collections of Albert Sperisen and Charles Gullans. In 1982 Carl Woodring had his collection on display at The Grolier Club of New York. Collections owned by public institutions, such as libraries and museums were discovered or described as well, an example being the Catalogue of the Works of Charles Ricketts, R.A. from the Collection of Gordon Bottomley (1985). Bottomley's collection ended up in Carlisle.

Book design remained the most often explored subject in relation to Ricketts, although new venues were found in this field as well. Giles Barber's significant article 'Rossetti, Ricketts, and Some English Publishers' Bindings of the Nineties' appeared in The Library in 1970, and bookbinding and book design were also the topics of Michael Brooks's article in Criticism (1970): 'Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book'. One study after another was published in the USA, England and elsewhere. In Zurich, for example, the antiquarian book dealer Geoffrey Perkins wrote a catalogue for the firm L'Art Ancien: A Collection of Books Designed by Charles Ricketts. The collection was for sale, and in fact, sold to John Paul Getty Jr. before the distribution of the catalogue - corrigenda and addenda were issued a year later. Scholarly catalogues like this one by Perkins have become exceedingly scarce since then.

Theatre design remained another continuous theme for research. Ifan Kyrle Fletcher wrote about 'Charles Ricketts and the Theatre' in Theatre Notebook (1967), giving a chronological list of Ricketts's productions. Eric A.G. Binnie's dissertation on The Stage Designs of Charles Ricketts was defended at the University of Toronto in 1979. Sybil Rosenfeld published an article about 'Charles Ricketts’s Designs for the Theatre' in Theatre Notebook (1981): an inventory of 111 theatre designs distributed by the National Art Collections Fund. Another article was written by Michael Barclay: ‘More Ricketts designs for the theatre’ (Theatre Notebook, 1982), and he also published an essay in Apollo (1985). However, his dissertation has not been published, or made available in open access. Others wrote about specific performances and costume designs: Carl Woodring discussed John Masefield's The Coming of Christ and Shaw's Saint Joan (in Columbia Library Columns, 1986 and 1988), while Richard Allen Cave compared recent productions of Wilde's plays to performances designed by Ricketts (Modern Drama, 1994).

Charles Ricketts, Pages from a Diary in Greece (1978) (Proof Copy)

Book historical dissertations, such as Richard Harold Quinn's seminal work on Ricketts's and Shannon's magazine The Dial (1977), were followed by those about his work as an artist, such as Simon S.S. Driver's On Charles Ricketts. His Life, Works, and Contributions to the Arts (1977). The latter emphasized a lack of primary sources, and the need for a biography. In London, J.G. Paul Delaney embarked on a long series of articles about Ricketts leading up to his 1990 biography Charles Ricketts, published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford. He published such studies in Country Life (1975), Antiquarian Book Monthly (1978), The Connoisseur (1978), The Pen (1983), and Yeats Annual (1986), while he also acted as editor for Ricketts's diaries and letters issued by The Tragara Press in Edinburgh, starting in 1976 with Ricketts's essay about Michael Field, and followed by selections from the letters and diaries (1978, 1979, and 1981).

Meanwhile, the attention for Ricketts as a designer for the theatre didn't obstruct a growing awareness of his achievements as an art critic. Again, Denys Sutton was the first to devote an article to Ricketts's ideas about Titian: 'Charles Ricketts and Titian' (Apollo, 1978). In 1999, David Peters Corbett published an article on Charles Ricketts’s art criticism in Word & Image. Ricketts came to be seen as a versatile artist and personality, not just as a book and theatre designer. A more general approach of his work was imminent.

Leaflet poster for Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. An Aesthetic Partnership (1979)

The year 1979 was a watershed in the appreciation of Charles Ricketts. Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham hosted an all-round exhibition about Ricketts and Shannon: Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. An Aesthetic Partnership, the exhibition and the catalogue were curated by Paul Delaney and Stephen Calloway. Calloway saw his monograph Charles Ricketts. Subtle and Fantastic Decorator published by Thames and Hudson. Its modest price was directed at a potentially large audience. That same year, 1979, Joseph Darracott organized an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge: All for Art. The Ricketts and Shannon Collection. The catalogue gave a major boost to the recognition of Ricketts and Shannon as art collectors, a new theme, as did his monograph The World of Charles Ricketts in 1980. This subject was related to another one, the art of the interior that was dealt with by Stephen Calloway in an article about the 'arrangement of a collection' (The Journal of The Decorative Arts Society 1890-1940, 1984). Ricketts was an art collector, but also an art adviser. Paul Delaney wrote about his work for the National Gallery of Canada (Museum Management and Curatorship, 1991).

Catalogue Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. An Aesthetic Partnership (1979)

Yet another subject was homosexuality - in the mid 1980s the Gay Times discovered the work, and especially the partnership of Ricketts and Shannon, and devoted a portfolio to their lives. Later, this subject would be connected to the art of the interior when Queer Studies took over (see next week's blog).

Collecting was a new theme, another was jewellery. Diana Scarisbrick opened the field with a beautifully illustrated article about Ricketts's designs for costly gifts to his friends in Apollo (1982).

New themes were explored, but articles about book design and illustration kept appearing regularly, and even more so during the 1980s and 1990s. Richard S. Field devoted a chapter to Ricketts in The Artistic Revival of the Woodcut in France 1850-1900, edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Richard S. Field (1984). Even in Russia, Ricketts's and Shannon's wood engravings for Daphnis and Chloe were appreciated: an article by T.F. Verizhnikova from 1989 is a testimony to that. The Netherlands always reported about the work of Ricketts and Shannon, and did so as early as 1891; the Dutch magazine Maatstaf published a portfolio of illustrations with an introduction by Ton Leenhouts and myself in 1989.

In 1991, in the scholarly series of Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Jonathan Rose and Patricia J. Anderson, volume 112 was published: British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881-1965. It contained a chapter about The Vale Press by Alice H.R.H. Beckwith. The lack of archival material on this subject was more obvious than before, and scholars knew that other venues needed to be explored to penetrate Ricketts's character as a publisher.

A general regard for the works of Shaw, Yeats, and Wilde, always helped to further the case of Ricketts, who designed their books or plays. Of these three, Wilde was the rising star as the 100th commemoration of his death in 2000 came closer. David Peters Corbett's '"Collaborative resistance": Charles Ricketts as illustrator of Oscar Wilde’ was published in Word & Image (1994), the same year as Nicholas Raymond Frankel's dissertation on Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books was accepted at the University of Virginia. Frankel would publish articles in magazines such as Victorian Literature and Culture (1996) and Studies in the Literary Imagination (1997). I published an article on Ricketts's design for The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Private Library (1998, distributed in 2000).

While some of these publications were meant for a large audience, many seemed to be written for a scholarly in-crowd. Exhibitions were on the other end of the spectrum: At the Sign of the Dial. Charles Haslewood Shannon & his Circle (Usher Gallery in Lincoln, 1987), ‘Elegante Engelse Boekkunst, The Vale Press 1oo jaar’ (Elegant English Book Art, The Vale Press at a Hundred) (Museum Meermanno, The Hague, 1996) - this was the occasion for my bibliography A New Checklist of Books designed by Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon - and De vrienden van Charles Ricketts (Charles Ricketts's Friends) (National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, 1997).

The field was considerably widened, opened up to more specialised audiences, Ricketts was a popular subject for scholars. Still more was to come.

376. Scholarly Attention for Charles Ricketts (2)

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).

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.

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.

375. Scholarly Attention for Charles Ricketts (1)

My impression is that the last twenty years scholarly publications about Charles Ricketts have broadened their scope. In order to find out if there is any truth in this assumption, I have looked at all articles and books about Ricketts, and divided them into several sections. We will start with the publications during Ricketts's life. 

What were the subjects of serious essays about the work of this versatile artist, who was a wood engraver, editor, publisher, type designer, graphic designer, painter, sculptor, collector, stage designer, art critic, art adviser, and writer?

During the early years, before 1900, Ricketts was discussed in relation to two subjects only, art and book design. Serious articles were, for the main part, not written by scholars, but by reviewers, art critics, and journalists, such as the influential Dutch artist and critic Jan Veth who was one of the earliest supporters of his work. In June 1894, he published an article on the 'new book art' of the Vale artists ('Nieuwe boek-kunst', in De Amsterdammer of 17 June 1894), a review of Hero and Leander and The Sphinx.

Jan Veth, self-portrait, 1887 (Drents Museum)

The artists of The Vale were introduced to a large audience in Great Britain by The Sketch in 1894 and 1895, a short series of four essays. Charles Shannon was the first one, discussed by 'Theocritus' in January 1895; Ricketts was the second one, in March of the same year. 

The more interesting essays were written by J.W. Gleeson White, one of the founders of the art magazine The Studio, who died in 1898. In December 1895, the first number of The Pageant (for 1896) appeared. It contained his essay about 'The Work of Charles Ricketts'. The Magazine of Art of April 1897 published a second important essay by Gleeson White, 'At the Sign of The Dial, Mr Ricketts as a Book-Builder'. The term 'book-builder' was an early attempt to define 'graphic designer'.

J.W. Gleeson White (photo: Frederick Hollyer)

An interview and a bibliographical study were written by Temple Scott for Bookselling in December 1896, while another list of Ricketts's publications at the Vale Press was written for The Book Buyer in March 1900 by Ernest D. North. Book design was the subject of an essay that placed Ricketts firmly within the William Morris/Kelmscott Press tradition and the 'revival of printing': H.C. Marillier's 'The Vale Press, and the Modern Revival of Printing', published in Pall Mall Magazine (October 1900).

After the closure of the Vale Press in 1904, Ricketts devoted himself to art, painting, art criticism, and stage design. An essay about 'his Activities' was written by C. Lewis Hind for The Studio of January 1910. Ricketts's versatility was its main subject, while his paintings, bronzes, and earlier book designs were commented upon.

Art and theatre design became the main topics for the articles about Ricketts until his death in 1931, and most of these appeared in the 1920s. Between 1910 and 1920 not much of importance was published about his work, although there were many exhibitions, such as the one introduced by Martin Birnbaum at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy in 1914. 

Ricketts's theatre designs were highlighted in articles in Theatre Arts Monthly in 1924, and in Apollo in 1925. However, his illustrations and binding designs were not ignored.

In 1927, The Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art published an article about Ricketts's bookbindings in conjunction with an exhibition of bindings collected by Harold Bell. The same year, The Print Collector's Quarterly published Cecil French's essay about 'The Wood-Engravings of Charles Ricketts', and this attention for Ricketts as a graphic designer (avant-le-mot) was crowned with A.J.A. Symons's long essay in The Fleuron (1930) about 'An Unacknowledged Movement in Fine Printing. The Typography of the Eighteen-Nineties'. Ricketts was his main subject.

Charles Ricketts, illustration for
Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates (1891)

During Ricketts's life, serious essays were written about some of his activities, such as wood-engraving, publishing, graphic design, and stage design, but most of these were not really scholarly articles; their main function was to promote his work. Ricketts's qualities as an editor, publisher, painter, sculptor, collector, art critic, art adviser, and writer were not analysed; this would take another fifty years or so.