759. Apollo and Marsyas

In a musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, it was the latter who lost and was subsequently flayed alive by Apollo. Such mythological stories have often been depicted by artists, and this story is usually, but not always, illustrated with the scene in which Marsyas is tortured, as in a drawing by Luca Giordano.

Luca Giordano (attributed to) 
'Apollo slaying Marsyas'
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1923

For their illustrations, Ricketts and Shannon choose another moment, Apollo and Marsyas playing their instruments. Shannon made two different drawings that were pasted into an album (now at the British Museum). They look like magazine illustrations, possibly head- or tailpieces, and must have been done early in his career.

Charles Shannon, 'Apollo, Marsyas' (undated drawing)
[British Museum: 1946,0209.50]
[© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

The first pen drawing (5.7 x 16.o cm) is described as follows: 'Apollo and Marsyas; a faun on right playing pipes, a seated male figure on left holding a harp, surrounded by decorative foliage'. The second one (6.0 x 16.4 cm) depicts 'a faun on right playing pipes, a seated male figure on left holding a violin, surrounded by decorative foliage'. The names 'Apollo' and 'Marsyas' are part of the drawing.

Charles Shannon, 'Apollo, Marsyas' (undated drawing)
[British Museum: 1946,0209.51]
[© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

Ricketts, like Shannon, depicted the musicians (not the winner and loser). The image came up for auction in the John Russell Taylor sale at Olympia Auctions on 11 February. 

Charles Ricketts, 'Apollo and Marsyas' (undated)

It was described as: 'signed, titled and dedicated Apollo and Marsyas / Charles Ricketts / A Madame Mascabesi upper left; signed Charles Ricketts lower centre on the edge of the mount; lithograph with watercolour additions; 28 x 20 cm'.

The dedication is consistent with the subject of the image, music. The name 'Mascabesi' is wrong, the musical friend who was given this sheet was Blanche Marchesi (1863-1940), a mezzo-soprano. From 1905 onwards, Ricketts went to her recitals and met her several times; one of his letters to her has survived (to be published in the forthcoming edition of the complete letters). Though described as a lithograph, this is obviously a watercolour or an original drawing, heightened in watercolour. Ricketts's monogram 'CR' is in the lower right hand corner. The name underneath the image is probably not from his hand, but the dedication at the top certainly is.

758. The Friendly Distance between Some Vale Artists

Only a handful of authors and artists created the contributions for the first issue of the magazine The Dial, issued by Shannon and Ricketts in 1889: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, John Gray and Reginald Savage. Gray's contribution consisted of an essay and a story.

Although Thomas Sturge Moore had already met Shannon in 1885 and Ricketts two years later, he had not yet joined the Dial circle of writers and artists. He would not make his debut as a poet and essayist until 1892, in the second number of The Dial, when he immediately provided a striking number of contributions: one essay, nine poems (including a translation) and a story. The issue also contained three poems (including a translation) by Gray and introduced Lucien Pissarro and Herbert Horne as contributors.

Charles Shannon, Portrait of John Gray, lithograph (1896)
[British Library: museum number: 1896,1028.25]
[© The Trustees of the British Museum]
[Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

However, the Vale coterie was not a closed circle of collaborators, consisting mainly of the core members, Ricketts and Shannon, surrounded by the others in varying formations. Based on their biographies and correspondence, we must conclude that Sturge Moore and Gray played almost no role in each other's lives.

This is confirmed by a late letter from Sturge Moore to Gordon Bottomley. On 20 November 1934, he wrote:

I hardly knew John Gray. I met him once at Christies just after the first Dial with poems by me came out and he was very flattering to me who felt very shabby by such a smart young man. And once I think he called for something at Holland Park but hardly stayed at all and then on my Scotch tour for a few minutes after his evening mass in his vicarage. We corresponded also very rarely.

The first meeting may have taken place shortly after February 1892 and the second one at the house of Ricketts and Shannon in Holland park (between 1902 and 1923). The last encounter must have been during Moore's tour of Scotland in March 1926, lecturing on the invitation of the  Scottish Verse-Speaking Association.

Perhaps the cause of the distance between the two lay more with Gray than with Moore – even Ricketts wrote to publisher John Lane in the early 1890s that he saw Gray 'only very occasionally'.

757. Fan-Shaped Shannon Works Collected by John Russell Taylor

The critic John Russell Taylor - whose groundbreaking study, The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966) contains an important chapter on Ricketts - died, aged ninety, in October last year, and his collection of prints, paintings and art books will come up for auction this month.

The collection (part of it) is shown on the website of Olympia Auctions as 'The Estate of John Russell Taylor: Author, Critic, Collector'. [See the website of Olympia Auctions.] It contains no less than three fan-shaped paintings and a lithograph by Charles Shannon. The fan-shape appealed to Shannon, an oil painting in this form, 'Girl Bathers in a Boat’, is in the collection of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (Cecil French Bequest, 1954).

Charles Shannon, 'The Snow - Winter' (1907): lithograph

The lithograph is listed as number 73 in Paul Delaney's The Lithographs of Charles Shannon 1863-1937 (1978) - it is called 'The Snow - Winter' and dates from 1907. It is one of seven fan-shaped lithographs by Shannon. 

There are also two fan-shaped paintings on silk depicting two female nudes (lot 224) and a nude woman, a small child and another woman (lot 226), as well as a watercolour on paper showing a group of four people bending over, lying down or sitting down with a young child at the centre (lot 225).

Charles Shannon, 'First Steps' (undated), watercolour.

The watercolour was sold in the 1939 auction following the death of Shannon in 1937: Catalogue of Fine Paintings by Old Masters and Modern Drawings. London, Sotheby's, 14 June 1939, p. 6, no. 31. The description identifies it as 'Fan Design : "First Steps"[,] Water-colour'. 

Charles Shannon, a naked woman, a child and a second woman,
fan-shaped painting on silk (undated)

The other two paintings on silk are not easily identified. Lot 226 shows a naked woman kneeling down, drying herself, handing a towel to a naked young child who is being encouraged by a second woman sitting down. The setting is a beach (unlike the garden in a woodcut called 'Hot August' which has a somewhat similar image). 

Charles Shannon, two naked women at the beach,
fan-shaped painting on silk (undated)

The other silk painting (lot 224) depicts two naked women, also at the beach; the background has obviously darkened, like in many Shannon paintings.

Many of these studies by Shannon are undocumented; it is pleasing to have these images.

John Russell Taylor also possessed fan-shaped works by the artists Alan Odle and George Sheringham.