Several sketches have been preserved for the cover of the short story collection Unrecorded Histories (which would be published two years after Charles Ricketts had died), but of the six illustrations, only rudimentary sketches remain—and not even for all of them. The one on page 106 with an elephant, a servant with a fan and a naked female figure has no preliminary study that we know of. [See the remaining sketches in the collection of the British Museum].
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| Charles Ricketts, sheet with several sketches for book covers and illustrations [Collection British Museum: 1946,0209.122] [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license] [© With permission of the executors of the Charles Ricketts estate, Leonie Sturge-Moore and the heirs of Charmain O'Neil] |
The five sketches – the final drawings appear to have been lost – are on a sheet with other sketches for book covers, one of which must be much older: a sketch (left row, second from top) is for the collected works of W.B. Yeats, which were published from 1922 onwards. From a letter to the poet Gordon Bottomley, we know that Ricketts worked on the illustrations for his stories in December 1930:
I have also designed silhouette illustrations to 5 short tales or dialogues by J P Raymond, which I hope to engrave & publish later.
(Letter from Charles Ricketts to Gordon Bottomley, 26 December 1930: BL Add MS 88957/1/76, f 132)
The five sketches (a sixth appears to have been erased) are approximately 7 cm in height, while the book illustrations, including the frames, measure 15 cm. Ricketts's original scheme for making wood-engravings differs greatly from the final silhouette drawings printed in terracotta.
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| Charles Ricketts, two sketches for Unrecorded Histories [Collection British Museum: 1946,0209.122] [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license] [© With permission of the executors of the Charles Ricketts estate, Leonie Sturge-Moore and the heirs of Charmain O'Neil] |
The two drawings at the top right are sketches for the illustrations on page 44 (left) and page 10 (right). The latter is the first illustration in the book accompanying the story “The Transit of the Gods”. The first story takes place in Rome in the late 1920s, where Greek gods gather in a private room at Bar Gréco (the Antico Caffè Greco): Hermes and Apollo arrive first, followed by Aphrodite and Zeus. Given the stifling atmosphere, they move to the café's small courtyard where they sit among orange trees in boxes and 'an unhappy palm', which figures in the illustration.
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| Charles Ricketts, 'The Transit of the Gods' |
Aphrodite is standing to the left of the tree, Zeus on the right behind a smoking Apollo and Hermes, who is perched on a small table and also holds a cigarette. After the café closes, Hermes leaves them, and they retire to Apollo's house where his help Hyacinthus announces the unexpected arrival of 'a Jewish deity'. However, his name is not Christ or God, but Mephistopheles:
I will not detain you on my share in the creation of the world; to a rudimentary vegetation I have added choicer flowers, richer fruit. I invented pleasure instead of lust, the arts instead of morals; but these are details.
His proposal entails that monotheism must come to an end - 'these are the days of adventure and change'. Like Beyond the Threshold, this story gives Ricketts the opportunity to reflect on love, art, beauty and the times in which he lived.
