786. Headpiece for Walks in the West End (1891)

Last week's blog was about Charles Ricketts's headpiece for 'The Art World', a signed illustration for the magazine Black and White that had started to appear in February of that year, displaying a masthead drawn by Ricketts. Both, Shannon and Ricketts, would contribute to the magazine. Some of the illustrations in this magazine were signed, some articles mentioned the name of the illustrators with the name of the author or in the captions, and in some cases the names of the artists were listed in the table of contents.

The drawing for the fashion articles 'Walks on the West End' in the four-page supplement for the issue of 16 May 1891 goes without a signature or name. The four larger drawings illustrating dresses were done in a different style altogether. These were the work of several artists: those by 'Dorien' and 'Nemo' are signed and their names are mentioned in the caption underneath, the one by F.H. Townsend is unsigned but equally mentions the artists's name in the caption. 

'Walks on the west End' (Black and White, 16 May 1891)

The headpiece shows a shield bearing the title in an artistic script, surrounded by roses and fashion articles, such as a mirror, a parasol and a fan, objects that we recognize from other headpieces in this sketchy style that Charles Ricketts made for Oscar Wilde's The Woman's World in 1889.

On stylistic grounds alone, we cannot assume that this drawing was also produced by Ricketts, although it bears a strong resemblance to other drawings that he did sign and differs markedly from similar illustrations by other artists in this magazine. His are subtle, even somewhat fairy-tale-like illustrations. However, this particular drawing for the fashion section may, in fact, have been created by another artist, such as his close friend Reginald Savage, with whom he also collaborated on illustrations for Black and White. Their styles are very similar when it comes to this kind of assignment.

Nevertheless, I think that in this case we can attribute the drawing to Ricketts. Firstly, because he produced several such headpieces in the first half-year volume. Secondly, because Savage seemed to specialise in full-page, somewhat romantic illustrations for the magazine, which are always signed – in this volume there were four (14 February 1891, page 62, 7 March 1891, page 141, 14 March 1891, page 193, 9 May 1891, page [429]).

785. Headpiece for The Art World

The weekly magazine Black and White, published from 6 February 1891 onwards, originally displayed a headmast designed by Charles Ricketts. He made quite a few other drawings for the magazine, some of which, oddly, were only published in the late 1890s. Among the earlier ones are eight illustrations done together with Reginald Savage (difficult to determine which artist was responsible for which drawing), a full-page drawing accompanying a poem by John Gray, and there is a headpiece for a series of notices about art written by M.H. Spielmann.

At first, I had marked that last drawing with a question mark because I wasn’t sure whether Ricketts was the artist, until I took another close look at it through a magnifying glass and spotted a tiny monogram.

Charles Ricketts, 'The Art World'
in Black and White, Vol. I, No. 3 (21 February 1891), p. 91

The monogram 'cR' is in the upper right-hand corner, near the head that adorns the ear of the bench that seats three muses holding a scroll. They represent (as the texts indicate) 'Color', 'Poesia' and 'Form'.

Charles Ricketts, monogram for 'The Art World'
in Black and White, Vol. I, No. 3 (21 February 1891), p. 91

The first instalment of 'The Art World' went without a headpiece, and after after it was introduced in the second one, it wasn’t used consistently (perhaps due to lack of space). In the first half of 1891, it decorated six out of seventeen of Spielmann's texts.

See earlier blogs about Black and White:
No. 45. Lux, Arts, Spes and Night (6 June 2012)
No. 579. Black and White Stall in 1892 (7 September 2022)

784. About 'The Man Who Was Herod'

The recent number of The Wildean (No. 69, July 2026), to which I referred in earlier blogs, contains an article by Darren J. Sheppard about 'The Man Who Was Herod: Robert de la Condamine ('Robert Farquharson') who lived from 1877 to 1966. Ricketts admired him and did not call him Robin (as he was known to his friends) but Herod.

Cover of The Wildean (No. 69, July 2026)
Detail with image of Robin de la Condamine (Robert Farquharson)
[image edited by Paul Collicutt]

He played Herod in Oscar Wilde's Salome in 1905 and in 1906 (and in 1931). For the 1906 performance Ricketts designed the costumes and set which were greatly appreciated. Roger Fry wrote: 'Charles Ricketts did the staging with ideas of colours that surpassed belief. I've never seen anything so beautiful on the stage'. Ricketts had dressed the cast in every possible shade of blue. 

Farquharson's Herod was, Ricketts said, 'the greatest piece of male acting' he had seen in his lifetime. He told the writers 'Michael Field' that the actor was 'a handsome boy of nineteen with a turned-up nose' (but the actor was 26), and he respected him 'as an artist to the finger-tips with the great gift of abstraction that is the mark of the great artist'. Later, he changed his opinion slightly, and feared that 'he may not have range of genius' . However, he still enjoyed 'his mannered fancy in speech', although he sensed that 'he is false in taste'. 

In 1919, Ricketts wrote to Bottomley that he was 'a remarkable, if unreliable, actor capable of fine things which dont come his way and gifted with imagination of a kind, which does not always tell, doubtless through lack of practice'.

Robin de la Condamine (Robert Farquharson)
in the cast of 'The Story of Cupid and Psyche' (1904)
[Photo edited by Paul Collicutt]

Only one letter from Ricketts to Farquharson seems to have survived and can now be found as number 536 in The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts (volume I, page 565). It was written to thank him for a gift of grapes and contained some gossip.

Sheppard's article provides a welcome insight into the life of the actor, who, thanks to his family’s wealth, did not actually need to work and therefore only took on roles when he felt like it. He often spent the rest of the year in Florence, where his homosexuality was no secret.

Sheppard discusses the three productions in which the actor played Herod, as well as his other roles, his radio performances and his life as a bohemian and a remnant of the spirit of the 1890s.

783. A Salomé Drawing by Charles Ricketts or Max Beerbohm? (a Sequel)

The edition of Oscar Wilde's Salomé with illustrations by Beerbohm, from the collection of Robert Ross, which I previously discussed because of an illustration attributed to Ricketts, continues to harbour secrets. Of course, a certain degree of scepticism is always necessary when examining rare copies of books with handwritten dedications – there are too many forgeries of Oscar Wilde’s works in circulation to remain naive. (See blog 780.) 

I didn’t get any further than the question of whether the drawing with the caption by Ricketts was actually by Ricketts. I said no, but I have to go back on that to some extent. I found it implausible that Beerbohm would first have added numerous drawings, that Ricketts would then have added the final one, and that Beerbohm would subsequently have ‘amended’ that drawing. It’s all too complex to believe. And in reality, the sequence may well have been different and more logical.

Blog 780: 'A Salomé Drawing by Charles Ricketts of Max Beerbohm?' (15 July 2026)

Meanwhile, there are others whose doubts go even further. The Beerbohm expert Mark Samuels Lasner wonders whether the dedication to Robert Ross written by Wilde on the frontispiece is genuine – he thinks not, and has seen a great many dedication copies over the years. Also, he has examined so many inscriptions imitated by Beerbohm that he does not believe the line at the top of the last page is actually in Ricketts’s handwriting, but rather that of Beerbohm himself. In short: in his view, the book contains only original drawings by Beerbohm and no handwritten dedications by Wilde or Ricketts.

Mark Samuels Lasner’s suspicion is also based on the late ‘discovery’ of this copy, which first appeared in a catalogue of The Scribner Book Store in New York in 1941 and was not purchased by two prominent and wealthy Beerbohm collectors, A.E. Gallatin and Robert H. Taylor, but by Edith Eyre, who, for unclear reasons, sold the book on again six years later. There is no long and continuous provenance history, which is always a cause for hesitation.

English Literature. New York, The Scribner Book Store, 1941, No. 225.

Simon Wilson, following the publication of 'The Wilde-Beerbohm-Salomé' in The Wildean (July 2026), decided to have another look at Ricketts’s biography by J.G. Paul Delaney, which I, of course, should have done as well. In it, he found the following passage:

Ricketts did not always admire Beerbohm's caricatures, but roared with laughter at Rossetti and his Circle; he himself did a caricature of Beerbohm scratching his name on the tombs of the great in a book belonging to Robbie Ross, opposite a caricature of Wilde by Beerbohm.

(J.G.P Paul Delaney, Charles Ricketts. A Biography, 1990, p. 49)

Although there are minor discrepancies ('opposite a caricature') and the title Salomé is not mentioned, this seems indeed to refer to the copy under discussion.

Problematic is that this is not a direct quotation from Ricketts, but a paraphrase of an extract from a letter from Ricketts to Thomas Lowinsky. The recent edition of The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts does not include this letter. This is because the Estate of Thomas Lowinsky did not respond to the editors’ requests for access to the original letters, and one had to make do with the typed transcriptions held at the British Library. This letter is not among them.

Delaney's footnote reads: 'CR to TEL, 3 Dec 1917 and [Dec. 1917-Jan. 1918]'. This refers to the original letters in the collection of 'Mr Justin Lowinsky and Mrs Lance Thirkill'.

Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1893)
With original drawings by Max Beerbohm
Caricature of Beerbohm, probably by Charles Ricketts

If we assume that Delaney's paraphrase refers to the Wilde-Beerbohm Salomé, the story of the last drawing in the book takes an unexpected turn. The large drawing on this page, which imitates Ricketts’s Sphinx drawings and incorporates a portrait of Wilde, is indeed the work of Beerbohm.

However, what was previously taken to be a self-portrait of Beerbohm scratching his name into the rocks is in fact Ricketts’s contribution, added with a humorous inscription in 1906, when Ross showed him the book during the production of the English version of Salome, for which Ricketts had designed the costumes.

Frankly, Ricketts keeps amazing me.