One of the later, prestigious commissions Charles Ricketts received as a book artist was the design for the binding of the hundred deluxe copies of The Legion Book, which was published in 1929. (See blog 12, 'The Legion Book', 5 October 2011).
The assignment was not entirely unrestricted; for example, the format had already been decided, but the purpose of the publication also influenced the design. The book helped to raise funds for the Royal British Legion, of which Edward, Prince of Wales, acted as a patron - the special edition was not for sale, but held in the gift of the prince.
The client wanted the Legion’s mascot to be featured on the front of the binding, which meant that Ricketts had to adapt the design. The artist had not thought of using that mascot – a goat chosen from the royal herd. |
| Charles Ricketts, image of the British Legion mascot |
Ricketts had apparently assumed that a reference to the prince would be appropriate and originally drew a crown and the fleur-de-lis, three French lilies. The sketch of that earlier design is kept in the British Museum’s collection: a drawing in pen and ink with graphite, touched with white bodycolour, on tracing paper, 34,7 x 24,5 cm. The design is slightly larger than the image on the book's cover: 33 x 23,5 cm.
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| Charles Ricketts, design for the binding of The Legion Book, c. 1929 [British Museum 1962,0809.1.30] (© 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 drawing was given to the museum in 1962 by Riette Sturge Moore (1907-1995), theatre designer, teacher, and interior decorator, daughter of Ricketts's friend Thomas Sturge Moore.
We can see that Ricketts removed the crown and lilies from the dotted circle and inserted a somewhat maliciously looking goat, which, whilst certainly representing a goat’s head, also seems to bear a resemblance to the ‘Cheshire Cat’.
