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].