704. Charles Shannon's Portrait of a Woman in Highwayman's Garb

At Aubrey's in Guildford, tomorrow, an interesting portrait of a woman will be for sale in the ‘Old Master, British & European’ sale. Lot 9 comprises Charles Shannon's ‘The Lady in a Black Hat – Miss Rachel Castellani’ from 1915. The estimate is £10,000–£15,000. 

Charles Shannon, 'The Lady in a Black Hat - Miss Rachel Castellani' (1915)

The painting has also been described as ‘Lady in a Three-cornered Hat’ or ‘Portrait of a Girl in a Black Hat’. However, the title in the 1916 exhibition catalogue of the Royal Academy gives the name of the sitter.

The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts 1916 (detail of page 21)

The painting was owned by Ralston Mitchell in the early 1920s, disappearing from sight until a 1988 sale, and, in 1992, was used for the cover of an edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Now, almost forty years later it will change hands again.

The auction house has devoted a web page to the portrait (see Aubrey's blog page):

'The Lady in a Black Hat, Portrait of Miss Rachel Castellani' depicts a woman with androgynous charm, dressed in highwayman’s garb — an attire that was briefly fashionable during the First World War. She sits, arms folded, gazing up at the viewer. Amidst the rich, warm orange and brown hues, vibrant highlights of colour draw the viewer’s attention through her blue gemstone ring and the crimson flowers that creep into the frame. This mysterious painting is one of Shannon’s most accomplished works, distinguishing itself from the rest of his paintings with the sitter’s direct gaze yet informal posture. The painting focuses on the psychological depth of the sitter, creating an intimacy between her and viewer, while also exuding an air of regality and reservedness through her body language and ambiguous expression. The painting reflects his interest in portraying his subjects with a blend of realism and a touch of idealisation.

The artist Augustus John also painted a portrait of the sitter, which he exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery from November 1917 for three months. His painting, now at the Tate, was simply called 'Portrait of a Girl'. (See Art UK for an image).

Perhaps, Augustus John used her as a model before this painting was exhibited. The Sketch suggested this in the 3 May 1916 issue (discussing Shannon's portrait): 'a former Augustus John sitter, surely?'

The Western Daily Press (29 April 1916) had judged Shannon's portrait as follows: 'an interesting and provocative study of personality, with the dark costume admirably designed on the grey ground'. Truth (10 May 1916) wrote that this painting was 'perhaps the clou of the exhibition' because of its 'simplicity', 'interest' and 'unconsciousness':

A portrait such as this makes you feel that it is easy to paint, although direct evidence to the contrary offers itself here on every side.

The Connoisseur (May-August 1916), however, gave a warning:

Mr. Charles Shannon is another artist who paints portraits in a beautiful convention. His titles betray his guiding principles. Miss Helen Lawson is styled The Lady with a Coral, Miss Hilda Moore, The Lady with the Amethys, and Miss Rachel Castellani, The Lady in the Black Hat.

Herein is a frank warning that we must not regard these pictures as likenesses of individuals so much as arrangements in colour, in which the dominant note is suggested by the object which furnishes the title to each work.

Apart from her name, the identity of the sitter remains obscure... 

(Hammer price was: £9.000.)

703. Barry Humphries ("Dame Edna")'s Collection

Two years ago, in April 2023, Barry Humphries - aka Dame Edna - died. An amateur painter himself, he was an avid collector of art and books, and the work of the 1890s artists Charles Conder (who lived in Australia from 1884 to 1890) is at the core of the collection that will be auctioned by Christie's in London on 13 February 2025. 

The collection not only includes works written, drawn or painted by the usual 1890s suspects like John Gray, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Marc André Raffalovich, Jan Toorop and, of course, Oscar Wilde, but also by European stars such as Portuguese poet Fernand Pessoa and forgotten artists such as Dutch artist Carel de Nerée tot Babberich, and in between one encounters books by the likes of Mary Shelley, Gustave Doré, Paul Verlaine and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Humphries also owned original drawings by Edward Lear, Edward Burne-Jones, Fernand Khnopff, Duncan Grant and Henri Toulouse de Lautrec.

Charles Ricketts, cover for John Gray,
Silverpoints (Bookplate of Barry Humphries)

The sale includes a deluxe copy (not numbered) of John Gray's Silverpoints, bound in full vellum, designed by Ricketts. Officially there were 25 numbered copies, but at least two unnumbered copies have turned up over the years (possibly more).

The Oscar Wilde section is particularly strong, containing a first state binding of A House of Pomegranates, including two leaves from Wilde's autograph draft for 'The Fisherman and his Soul'; a large-paper copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray (with a letter from Wilde to Ada Leverson), a copy of Poems (1892) - not pristine, but once owned by artist and critic Aymer Vallance - and, of course, signed by Wilde; two dedication copies of the French edition of Salomé; Wilde's autograph draft of seventeen of his epigrams, and several copies of a number of his plays in first edition, notably a presentation copy of The Importance of Being Oscar (one of twelve copies on Japanese vellum, dedicated by Wilde to his publishers Leonard Smithers); and a large-paper edition of The Sphinx of which 25 copies exist in the luxurious binding by Ricketts. 

The collection is complemented by paraphernalia from Barry Humphries's theatrical career, including eyewear and costumes from his persona Dame Edna - a pair of spectacles may amount to £1,000-1,500.

702. Orlando

A new version of 'The Orlando Project' was published online two months ago. Hosted by the University of Alberta (Canada) and published online by the Cambridge University Press, it contains profiles of women writers that have been compiled by the collaboration of literary scholars, digital humanists and computing scientists and allows for 'the serendipities of productive browsing' as well as for 'answering precise, complex questions'. 

Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing

The website proudly announces:

This is literary history with a difference. Not a book, though in length the equivalent of more than 80 scholarly books, and not a digital edition of an existing text, it is a richly searchable textbase of born-digital, original writing. It is full of interpretive information on women, literature, and culture, with more than 8 million words of text in documents on the lives and writing of over 1400 authors, together with a great deal of contextual historical material on relevant subjects, such as education, politics, science, the law, and economics.

(See the Alberta pages on The Orlando Project.)

'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing' can be found on the site of Cambridge University Press (see Orlando). A search for Ricketts brings us to articles about Michael Field, Ada Leverson, and other subjects.

Ricketts in 'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing'

Ricketts and Shannon are obviously covered only as an aside in this database, but the writing women they knew, such as Michael Field, are discussed at length.

Michael Field in 'Orlando. A Feminist Resource for the History of Women's Writing'

The database is only partly in open access (such as the queries mentioned above), and is available by annual subscription to libraries, institutions and individuals (prices are not mentioned on the website).

701. A Portrait of the Artist as a Reader

Charles Ricketts was an avid reader who regularly mentioned in his letters which books he was engrossed in or re-reading, as he did in a letter to his old friend the poet and artist Thomas Sturge Moore who received Ricketts's opinion of Marcel Proust:

Do you read Marcel Proust the new idol? I find him curiously interesting & almost intolerable, preoccupied with sex as he is, he gives me the impression of a spinster, there are chance pages of quite admirable analysis of feeling, sensation & emotion & amazing conversations. The Times reviewed his last Vol which is as yet unpublished.

and at the end of the same letter he suggests:

Marie might like Proust better than you since his minute pictures of French ^family life in all phases are singularly vivid, his books it is curious he should have an English vogue.

(Letter dated 18 September 1924: BL Add MS 58086, f 116)

Marie was Marie Appia, of French descendent.

In the early days of The Vale, Ricketts commented instantly on what he was reading. Moore, who  rented a room at Ricketts's home in The Vale, recalled that Ricketts could not enjoy William Morris's poetry:

[...] he came up to my room at the Vale after trying to read the Earthly Paradise and said that it was the kind of poetry to give to boys: that one thanked the lord when a word like 'swared' turned up! for that did remind you that it was poetry

(Letter to Gordon Bottomley, 21 March 1922: BL AA MS 88957/I/68 ff.81-3)

An early drawing exists showing Ricketts reading, and, by chance, the caption indicates which book he is reading: Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [the title is given as The Confessions of an Opium-Eater]. 

Charles Shannon, Portrait of Charles Ricketts (1890s)
[British Museum: 1946,0209.124:
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

According to the website of the British Museum it is an undated self-portrait but I would suggest that the graphite drawing was made by Charles Shannon in the early 1890s. Ricketts is depicted whole-length, seated in a chair to front, holding a book. (Museum number 1946,0209.124, donated by Mrs Constance Rea, born Halford).

700. Ricketts and Cézanne

Searching online for undiscovered Ricketts material, I stumbled across an intriguing title a while ago:

'Ricketts and Cézanne', letter by D.S. MacColl, New State[s]man and Nation

The catalogue description by Trinity College library in Cambridge indicates that this undated clipping is in the ‘Papers of Clive Bell', numbered Bell/5/82 [see here for a link to the catalogue description].

We know that Ricketts stopped writing articles for The Burlington Magazine when Roger Fry became editor in 1909, mainly because the latter was a champion of Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists. Who, therefore, would not be interested in an article by a third art critic and Cézanne aficionado, Clive Bell, on this very subject: ‘Ricketts and Cézanne’?

I, at least, was, but I had to find it first! How do you trace an undated article other than by getting the volumes on your desk and flipping through year after year? (As far as I know, there is no digital version of The New Statesman and Nation.)

I finally found it in the 6 January 1940 issue of The New Statesman and Nation. However, I was disappointed. Firstly, because it turned out not to be a long and thorough article, but a short letter to the editor, and, secondly, because neither Ricketts nor Cézanne are mentioned in it. The note is entirely about yet another art critic, D.S. MacColl (1859-1948).

Clive Bell, 'Ricketts and Cézanne', The New Statesman and Nation, 6 January 1940

The letter turns out to be the conclusion of a short series of publications in the magazine, its title taken from the previous episode: a letter from D.S. MacColl published on 30 December 1939.

Clive Bell responded to a single sentence in a nearly sixty-line piece:

Your vivaciously independent Weekly is in no danger of lacking readers, but in matters of visual art is notoriously a tied house, an estimable family party with its poor dependents, a side-chapel tirelessly tintinnabulated by Mr. Bell.

(D.S. MacColl, 'Ricketts and Cézanne', The New Statesman and Nation, 30 December 1939, p. 959)

Although the magazine's editor had already felt compelled to make it clear that it was truly independent of any art-critical coterie, Bell also felt he had to add that his integrity as an art critic should not have been questioned by MacColl, while, in the same vein, vaunting a few more blows, saying for example that it was unfortunate that MacColl was currently guided by only one emotion: rage.

In his article of 30 December 1939, MacColl indeed took a firm line against Raymond Mortimer (1895-1980), an art and literary critic, who on 16 December 1939 had published a review of Ricketts's posthumously published Self-Portrait, which had prompted a first letter from MacColl in the issue of 23 December which was followed by a short answer by Mortimer  which, again, enraged MacColl whose second letter started with these lines:

Sir, - Yes, Ricketts's negative estimate of Cézanne, quoted by Mr Mortimer, is nearer the mark  than the Meier-[G]raefe, Vollard legend, swallowed whole by Roger Fry and his âmes damnées, and epitomised in Mr. Mortimer's words "one of the greatest artists that the world has ever known." 

(By the way, that phrase does not appear in this series of reviews and responses.)

Paul Cézanne, 'La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Bellevue' (c.1885)
[Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia]

In his review (16 December 1939), Mortimer had written:

While he considered Renoir a vulgar sensualist, Cézanne mentally deficient and Matisse an imposter, he delighted in the insipidity of Puvis.

MacColl remarked (on 23 December 1939):

Ricketts as a critic, became only too "Catholic" in his latter days; like all of us, he had his blind spots [...] and his estimate of Cézanne, and of Renoir, for whom on due occasion he had an enthusiastic but discriminating admiration, are more likely to be those of the future than the exaggerated views which Mr. Mortimer has adopted.

Ricketts had denounced Cézanne's art as experimental and, as he argued in Pages on Art (1913):

All these 'experimentalists' are united in one fault; they are over-confident; they forget that the place for the experiment is the studio; it is not an aim but a means.

[See Pages on Art at Internet Archive.]

In his second letter (30 December 1939), MacColl took an anti-Semitic turn, apparently assuming that Ricketts had Jewish roots:

Ricketts was by no manner of means infallible: he did not appreciate, poor devil, the majesty of Handel, and did adore the tinsel of Gustave Moreau. That touches the nadir of his Jewish strain and taste, whose zenith was a passion for all the gems on Aaron's breastplate and their setting.

These are incomprehensible words that say more about that period in our history than about Ricketts, not least because these phrases were not contradicted by other letter writers in The New Statesman and Nation.

[Thanks are due to Jeroen Vandommele for providing an image of the Bell letter.]