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 Sricner 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.