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'.(*)
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| 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.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.
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| Rex Whister and Charles Ricketts, painted by Laurence Irving (1970) |
(*) J.G. Paul Delaney, Charles Ricketts. A Biography. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 214, 312.
