777. The Toilette of Venus

In March 1914, Martin Birnbaum, manager of the Berlin Photographic Company in New York, organised an exhibition of paintings, bronzes and graphic works by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. The exhibition was not as successful as expected and few works were sold, even though Birnbaum moved the exhibition to two other venues: after New York, the works were on display in Providence, Rhode Island (April-May), and in Buffalo, New York (September).

The catalogues for New York and Providence are almost identical, and were printed by The De Vinne Press. However, the third catalogue for the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy does not bear their printer’s mark. It was re-set after a different design and contains several newly included drawings (possibly replacing sold items) and one more painting by Shannon, which is number 29 in the catalogue: ‘The Toilette of Venus’. The painting was on loan from ‘William Macbeth, Esq’, who lived in Southampton (Long Island).

Douglas Volk, 'William Macbeth', oil on canvas, 1917
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of a group of American artists and amateurs, 18.38
[Photo: Brooklyn Museum]

William Macbeth (1851-1917) was an art dealer form Scottish-Irish descent, who arrived in the USA in 1871 and began his career with Frederick Keppel and Co. In 1892, he established the Macbeth Gallery in New York. His records are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian: Macbeth Gallery Records. The records do not mention the names of Ricketts and Shannon, the additional painting does not occur in the files (as far as I could see, not all have been digitised).

'Birnbaum, Martin' card,
Macbeth Gallery Records
[Smithsonian, Washington]

The files contain an address card of Martin Birnbaum that seems to be of later date and does not mention the Shannon painting that Birnbaum lent from the gallery. Possibly this painting was from Macbeth's private collection.

The toilet was one of Shannon’s favourite subjects, and the titles of various paintings on this theme differ very little from one another (apart from the fact that they always use the British rather than the American spelling), and the paintings depict women, sometimes with a child or a servant nearby, washing or combing their hair.

The exhibition contained two of these 'Toilet' paintings, numbered 'I' and 'II'. These are probably the paintings knowns as ‘Toilet Scene I’ and ‘Toilet Scene II’, which have been in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery since 1948.

Other 'Toilet' paintings are in the Watts Gallery, Compton, the Usher Gallery, Lincoln, and the Carlisle City and Art Gallery, Carlisle. 

'The Toilette of Venus' is an early (Americanised) title for an early painting by Shannon, first exhibited in 1904 as 'The Toilet of Venus', apparently also known as 'The Green Marble Bath', and eventually called 'The Bath of Venus' that was acquired by the the Tate in 1940. Former owners were: Francis Howard (acquired in 1940), Jeremiah Colman (bought in 1918), the Viscount and Viscountess Northcliffe (sold in 1918), and now we can add the name of an earlier owner: William Macbeth (1914), and the date of the exhibition in Buffalo. 

Charles Shannon, 'The Bath of Venus'
[Tate Gallery London]

776. Published: Four Fugitive Letters

On 13 June, a festive edition of several letters by Charles Ricketts was published in The Hague under the title Four Fugitive Letters. To Cecil French, Martin Birnbaum, Helen Travers Smith & Isabelle Augusta Gregory. 

Copies of Charles Ricketts, Four Fugitive Letters (June 2026)

Whilst working on the publication of The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, John Aplin and I realised that once the manuscript would be finalised, previously unknown letters from the artist might come to light. Shortly before that moment, we were able to include a few more letters (these have ‘i’ added after the letter number), but even after the final sequence was established, followed by several rounds of proofreading, some more emerged.

One letter appeared at the auction of the Jeremy Maas collection of Oscar Wilde (Bonhams, 18 February 2026) and another at an auction held by Forum Books (26 March 2026). We also received photographs of a letter in a private collection (thanks are due to Paul Durham) and discovered via the Internet that another one had been auctioned a quarter of a century earlier. 

To celebrate the publication of the collected letters by Brill in Leiden and Boston, we decided to edit these four freshly discovered letters. 

As a special service to the reader, every copy of this booklet contains each of the letters on a separate loose sheet, so that they can be kept in the correct place within the collected edition.

Unassembled copies of Charles Ricketts, Four Fugitive Letters, fresh from the printers
[Photo: Huug Schipper, June 2026]

Charles Ricketts
Four Fugitive Letters. To Cecil French, Martin Birnbaum, Helen Travers Smith & Isabelle Augusta Gregory

The Hague, At the Paulton, June 2026
12 [and 8] pages, 3 illustrations (2 on the covers), 21 x 12 cm
Designed by Huug Schipper | Studio Tint
Set in Petr van Blokland's Presti Display Medium
Printed on Biotop by Van Deventer Printers, 's-Gravezande
Edition limited to 34 numbered copies

Price: €12,50.

Packaging and shipping:
European Union: €5,00; [with track and trace: €13,50].
United Kingdom: €7,00; [with track and trace: €16,00]
USA and Canada: €7,00; [with track and trace: €25,00].

Orders
You can express your interest by sending an email to Paul van Capelleveen [see the address in the right-hand bar]. You will receive a Paypal invoice.

775. Not To Be Taken Away (3)

The two editions published by the Eragny Press bearing the inscription ‘File Copy Not To Be Taken Away’ came from the collection of Antonio Cippico. We can trace their history back a little further.

In 2006, the two editions recently offered by Sophie Schneideman – Flaubert’s La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier (1900) and Un Coeur simple (1901) – were listed on the website of the antiquarian bookshop Maggs Rare Books in London. The third volume of Flaubert’s Hérodias (1901) was not included, but there is indeed a copy bearing that inscription. We know this from an earlier antiquarian bookshop catalogue.

The Gentle Art
(Zurich: L'Art Ancien S.A., 1974)

The Gentle Art of Lucien Pissarro was the cover title of a catalogue issued by L'Art Ancien in Zurich: The Gentle Art. A Collection of Books and Wood Engravings by Lucien Pissarro. Compiled by Geoffrey Perkins with the assistance of Heidi Seger, the catalogue listed 47 journal publications, portfolios, single prints, and books. The intention was to sell the collection as a whole, but apparently this did not happen. 

The Gentle Art (Zurich: L'Art Ancien S.A., 1974)

A 'Note' in the catalogue mentions: 

A few of the following Eragny Press books come from a collection formed in the period 1910-1925 by a close friend of Charles Ricketts. These items were Ricketts's former file copies and still bear a short handwritten notice to that effect on the upper cover. This is denoted by an asterisk before the title.

(p. 26)

These seven books are:

16. Gustave Flaubert, La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier (1900) 

17. Les Ballades de Maistre François Villon (1900)

18. Gustave Flaubert, Un Coeur simple (1901) 

19. Gustave Flaubert, Hérodias (1901)

20. Autres poésies de Maistre François Villon et son école (1901)

22. Francis Bacon, Of Gardens (1902)

23. Choix de sonnets de P. de Ronsard (1902)

All these have the 'prospectus on front inside cover' and a bookplate, except no. 20 which lacks the bookplate.

Bookplate of Antonio Cippico

The bookplate, of course, is that of Ricketts's Italian friend Antonio Francisco Niccolo Cippico (1877-1935). His books were probably left to his wife Margaret Howard McCallum Webster (c.1879-1953). 

Their two sons - Tristram Alvise (1904-1979) and Aldo Marino (1905-1985) - may have sold the books at any date before 1974.

The Gentle Art (Zurich: L'Art Ancien S.A., 1974)

774. Not To Be Taken Away (2)

In Warwick Street (later Craven Street), at Hacon & Ricketts’s shop, ‘At the Sign of the Dial’, visitors could view small exhibitions, examine prints by The Dial group and browse the books published under the name the Vale Press. Charles Ricketts had made his typeface, The Vale, available to Lucien Pissarro, and originally the books published by the Eragny Press were partly distributed through the shop. From 1899 onwards, Hacon & Ricketts bought the complete edition of Eragny Press books, becoming Pissarro's publishers. On a single copy of the print run – the copy shown to visitors as an example – the words ‘File copy Not to be taken away’ were written, as we saw two weeks ago (see blog 772 Not To Be Taken Away).

The catalogues of the exhibitions were no exception, such as that of the Boyd Houghton show held from 25 June to 2 July 1896.

Catalogue: An Exhibition of Forty Designs by A. Boyd Houghton
including original drawings and proofs retouched by the artist
(The Sign of the Dial, 1896)
File copy 'Not to be taken away'.

Sophie Schneideman offered two file copies from the Eragny Press, both titles by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1900 and 1901. On closer inspection, there is something peculiar about one of them, Un Coeur simple.

Gustave Flaubert, Un Coeur simple
(Eragny Press, 1901)

Most copies have a label that gives the author's full name: Gustave Flaubert. This is separated from the title by two acorn leaf ornaments, which came with the Vale Type and were designed by Ricketts for the Vale Press.

However, the label on the upper board of the file copy gives the name as G. Flaubert. There is one acorn leaf ornament that now precedes the title. Name and title have been separated by a row of seven triangles of asterisks placed alternately upright and upside down. Ricketts had used this ornament for The Sonnets of Sir Philips Sidney (1898), and he used them to make longer rows, but placed them upright only. Pissarro had used them in that way as a separating line in La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier (1900), pages 27, 58, 85 and 93.

Marcella D. Genz's A History of the Eragny Press 1894-1914 does not mention this alternative label, nor does the bibliography contain any information about the ornaments used.

Since the entire print run was sold to Hacon & Ricketts in one go, no unbound copies remained in stock and no additional labels were subsequently printed. It seems that Leighton, Son, and Hodge needed a week to bind all copies (Genz, p. 56). The same procedure was not followed for Vale Press books, were unbound copies were shelved at the printing firm (Ballantyne) and these copies were bound when the demand for more copies had grown. Several Vale Press books show a (small) variety of  labels.

It seems that some Eragny Press books were bound before they were delivered at the Vale shop, while others were bound after the quires had been delivered at the shop (Genz, p. 56). 

Had there been several binding issues, we must assume that the file copies were among the earlier copies.

There are two possible explanations for this non-standard label:

1. 

There were indeed at least two occasions on which loose quires were sent to the bindery. This does not explain why the label was designed differently, nor does it explain why copies bearing this different label have not turned up more frequently.

2.

A second explanation may lie in the slow production of copies. Perhaps Hacon & Ricketts grew impatient and sent the first sets of loose quires ahead to the binder. In that case, the label may have been printed by Ballantyne rather than by Pissarro himself. That would explain the rarity of this label and the different layout.

There is no certainty. 

On 10 June 1901, 210 copies were sent to Hacon and Ricketts (Genz, p. 167), but the bibliography does not mention whether the copies had already been bound or not. As the edition size was 226, it is possible that 16 copies were sent earlier, and bound with a similar label as the file copy. On the other hand, these may have been Pissarro's own copies that he presented to friends. Yet, why would 210 copies be sent to Hacon and Ricketts when only 200 copies were for sale (as the colophon and the prospectus both mention)?

Bibliography and reality: ships passing in the night....