Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was one of the most important influences on Ricketts's work, he did not write often about this Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter. In a chapter on early Venetian painting in The Prado and Its Masterpieces (1903), Ricketts dedicated a paragraph to Rossetti, comparing his influence to that of the fifteenth-century painter Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco):
I think that if we turn for a moment to Rossetti and his influence in England upon his contemporaries, or upon men slightly his juniors, such as Burne-Jones and Morris, we have something analogous in the wave of luminous thought, caught, refracted, and developed beyond its initial impulse perhaps, and touching other men, those even who were not actually inside the circle or peculiarly apt to understand : and we note in the influence of the founder of the aesthetic movement in England something not unlike the influence of Barbarelli in Venice - an influence of suggestion, an influence making towards the expression of personality and the worship of beauty.
(The Prado and Its Masterpieces, p. 122)
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D.G. Rossetti, ''Golden Water (Princess Parisade)' From the collection of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon [The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
Just before the Prado book was published, Ricketts's friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper ('Michael Field') had compared him to Rossetti, but Ricketts insisted that the comparison was flawed:
[...] Rossetti was a man of action, instinctive, self-centred, or central: a fat man, in fact, whilst I am a spare man, a spectator, not a man of action, outwardly and inwardly a contemplative man.(Self-Portrait, 1939, p. 104)
In 1928, once again, he was likened to Rossetti and objected:
[...] he is one of the most singular & original men in art; even his latest & most undelectable works, done when he was half-blind & mad with chloral, are unlike anything else.
(Letter to Mary Davis, 3 October 1926)
In 1928 Ricketts published a review of Hall Caine's Recollections of Rossetti (London: Cassell & Co., 1928): 'The Tragedy of Rossetti. A Corroding Secret. Genius Amongst Us, Not of Us' (The Observer, 14 October 1928):
The key to most of Rossetti's qualities and limitations is to be found in his Italian atavism. [...] In all the essentials of his mental composition he belonged to another country and perhaps to another time.
[...]
Rossetti never painted grass as Ruskin saw it; to him, as with Dante, it had the hue of new-cleft emeralds.
The designs he executed before 1860 have a directness and conciseness unique even in Italian art; even the relation of the figures to the frame - "la couple" as Dégas [Degas] would say, is new. [...]
[...] his was the gift to enlarge the purposes of art. To-day, because the level of our general culture is less and the War has put a gap in the continuity of our European conscience, Rossetti has become inexplicable at least to some reviewers. His life raises morbid curiosities, and owing to the singular and unique character of his gifts, he seems a man of another epoch, and another place - in brief, not one of us.
In 1924, for Part V of the Second Series of The Vasari Society for the Reproduction of Drawings by Old Masters, Ricketts wrote a short description of Rossetti's 'Sketch Illustrating a Ballad', a drawing from the collection of J.P. Heseltine:
This exquisite drawing has been described as 'The Two Sisters', in all probability it illustrates the ballad of 'Fair Annie'. The racy and mordant penmanship belongs to the artist's practice during the fifties (circa 1855). Rossetti's compact and dramatic designs of this type are without precedent in the art of the past, they count amongst the most individual achievements of this profoundly original and significant artist.
The drawing was later reproduced in Virginia Surtees' The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). A Catalogue Raisonné (1971) - the catalogue entry does not mention or quote Ricketts's short piece about the drawing or The Vasari Society's reproduction.
Shannon and Ricketts owned eleven or more drawings by Rossetti, one of which was rediscovered by Ricketts before 1890: 'Mary Magdelene at the Door of Simeon the Pharisee'. All are now in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum. (See, for example 'Mary Magdelene'.)
