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Charles S. Ricketts

Geneva, 1866 - 1931, London

BiographyRicketts, Charles S. (English painter, designer, and writer, 1866-1931)

Biography:
Ricketts, Charles de Sousy (1866–1931), artist and art collector, was born on 2 October 1866 at Maison Turretine, Grand Quai, Geneva, Switzerland, the only son of Charles Robert Ricketts (1838–1883), a retired English naval officer, and Hélène Cornélie de Soucy (1833/4–1880), daughter of Louis, marquis de Soucy. His mother was musical; his father, a painter of marine subjects. Ricketts spent his infancy in Lausanne and London, and his youth at Boulogne and Amiens in France, and was educated by governesses, except for a year at a French boarding-school near Tours. After his mother's death at Genoa in 1880, Ricketts, hardly able to speak English, returned to London with his father and his younger sister Blanche (1868–1903). Too delicate to attend school, he spent the next two years reading voraciously and ‘basking’ (DNB) in museums; he thus escaped being moulded along conventional lines. In 1882 he entered the City and Guilds Art School in Kennington, London, where he was apprenticed to Charles Roberts, a prominent wood-engraver. A year later his father died, and Ricketts lived on a quarterly allowance of £25 from his grandfather, Edmund Woodville Ricketts (1808–1895). On his sixteenth birthday he met his lifelong partner, the painter and lithographer Charles Haslewood Shannon (1863–1937).

Ricketts and Shannon founded an occasional art journal, The Dial (1889–1897), which promoted a blend of English Pre-Raphaelitism and French symbolism, reflecting Ricketts's origins. The two artists also began designing and illustrating books, including Daphnis and Chloe (1893) and Hero and Leander (1894), which were unique in that the designs were cut by the artists who drew them, rather than by a professional engraver. Ricketts also worked for commercial publishers, designing books in an art nouveau style: his most famous were John Gray's Silverpoints (1893) and Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx (1895).

Meeting a wealthy barrister, Llewellyn Hacon, enabled Ricketts to realize his dream of being a publisher and he set up the Vale Press in 1894. An inheritance of £500 from his grandfather in 1895 was invested in it. For over eighty volumes, mostly reprints of English poetic classics, he designed three fonts and numerous decorations and illustrations. Although influenced by the aesthetic movement and by William Morris, whom he admired, his books are more classical than medieval in style. After a fire destroyed his stock and decorative material in 1899, he lost interest in publishing and closed the press with his Bibliography of the Vale Press (1904). Afterwards he designed books for friends such as Katherine Harris and Emma Cooper (who collaborated under the pseudonym Michael Field), and Gordon Bottomley.

Ricketts had already taken up painting and sculpture. Thomas Lowinsky points out how ‘his books expressed in their pre-Raphaelitism the English side of his character, whilst his pictures, with their debt to Delacroix and Gustave Moreau, the French’ (DNB). In the Symbolist tradition, his themes are tragic and romantic, and they focused on key moments in the destiny of his subjects, such as Salome, Cleopatra, Don Juan, Montezuma, and (though Ricketts was a non-believer) Christ, figures he admired for the way they courageously met their fates. Among his best paintings are The Betrayal of Christ (1904, Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery), Don Juan and the Statue (1905), The Death of Don Juan (1911, Tate collection), Bacchus in India (c.1913, Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, Cheshire), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (c.1913, priv. coll.), The Death of Montezuma (c.1915, priv. coll.), The Return of Judith (1919), and Jepthah's Daughter (1924, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). His great scholarship often inhibited his painting, before which he was often hesitant, and some paintings are overworked. His twenty or so sculptures, one of which, Silence, was a memorial to Oscar Wilde, are indebted to Rodin's smaller works. Bronzes such as Orpheus and Eurydice (Tate collection) and Paolo and Francesca (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) are powerful interpretations of their themes. In 1922 he was elected ARA and in 1928 RA.

In his lifetime Ricketts was probably best-known for his theatre designs. Here, his spontaneity, his sense of design and colour, and his understanding of the theatre united in harmony. His gift for linear arabesque, evident in his book illustrations, is also shown in the finished watercolours he drew from his designs. Among his most important productions were the first English production of Wilde's Salomé (1906), which was boycotted by the press; Shakespeare's King Lear (1909); W. B. Yeats's The King's Threshold (1914); Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell (1907) and Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1909); John Masefield's Philip the King (1914) and The Coming of Christ (1928), the success of which initiated the Canterbury festival plays; the D'Oyly Carte Company's production of The Mikado (1926); the first production of Shaw's Saint Joan (1924), probably his greatest achievement; and Shakespeare's Henry VIII (1925). He did theatre work with gusto, often staying up all night to do the designs. The largest public collection of his designs is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Ricketts's great connoisseurship led to his being offered the directorship of the National Gallery in London, which he refused (and regretted later), to his acting as art adviser to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (1924–31), and to his forming with Shannon a fine collection of French, English, and old master drawings and paintings, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, Persian miniatures, and Japanese prints and drawings. Never well off, they had in the early days made sacrifices to build their collection, which was left to museums, mainly the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. Ricketts wrote The Prado and its Masterpieces (1903) and Titian (1910) which, though superseded by modern scholarship, remain among the most evocative books on art in English, and Pages on Art (1913), a selection of his articles. He also wrote and designed two collections of short stories, Beyond the Threshold (1928) and Unrecorded Histories (1933), as well as Recollections of Oscar Wilde (1932), his memoir of the man he considered the most remarkable he had met.

Ricketts's last years were overshadowed by the illness and hostility of Shannon, whose brain was damaged in a fall in 1929. For once, his aesthetic values took second place, and to pay for Shannon's care he sold the Persian drawings for £4000. The strain of the situation and of overwork to escape it contributed to his death from angina pectoris at his home, Townshend House, Albert Road, Regent's Park, London, on 7 October 1931, six years before his partner. A memorial service was held at St James's, Piccadilly, on 12 October, after which he was cremated; his ashes were scattered in Richmond Park, London, and the remainder buried at Arolo, Lake Maggiore, Italy. His estate was valued for probate at £36,283.

Small in stature, Ricketts was ‘a man of masterful personality’ (DNB) and loved to influence people. He could be touchy and belligerent, and was implacably opposed to ‘modern art’ and especially to the influence of Cézanne. He was witty and a brilliant conversationalist. Although his quick mind and vivacity seemed more French than English, he resided in London. He lived entirely for art, not only for creating, collecting, or writing about it, but also for music and literature, which he read in five languages. When he travelled in Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia, the USA, Canada, and other countries, it was to study or promote art. Shaw described him as ‘the noble and generous Ricketts, who always dealt en grand seigneur, a natural aristocrat as well as a loyal and devoted artist’ (ibid.).

There is a drawing (1899) and an oil painting (1898) of Ricketts by Shannon in the National Portrait Gallery, London, as well as a head (c.1920s) by Laura Anning Bell. A bust (1902) by Reginald Wells is a good likeness. In 1979 his work was exhibited in ‘Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon: an Aesthetic Partnership’ at the Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, London.

J. G. P. Delaney
Sources BL, Ricketts and Shannon MSS, Add. MSS 58086–58109 · C. Lewis, ed., Self-portrait: taken from the letters and journals of Charles Ricketts, R.A. (1939) · J. G. P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: a biography (1990) · J. Darracott, The world of Charles Ricketts (1980) · J. Darracott, ed., All for art: the Ricketts and Shannon collection (1979) [exhibition catalogue, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 9 Oct – 3 Dec 1979] · T. S. Moore, Charles Ricketts, R.A.: sixty-five illustrations (1935) · E. Binnie, The theatrical designs of Charles Ricketts (1985) · S. Calloway, Charles Ricketts: subtle and fantastic decorator (1979) · J. G. P. Delaney, ‘Ricketts, Shannon and his circle’, The last Romantics: the Romantic tradition in British art, ed. J. Christian (1989), 39–45 [exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 9 Feb – 9 April 1989] · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1931) · DNB · b. cert. · d. cert. [Hélène Cornélie Ricketts] · m. cert. [Charles Robert Ricketts and Hélène Cornélie de Soucy] · letters to ‘Michael Field’, BL, Add. MSS 58086–58089
Archives BL, Ricketts and Shannon MSS, Add. MSS 58085–58109 · FM Cam., Ricketts and Shannon collection · NRA, corresp. and papers · U. Durham L., letters · V&A, theatre collections, letters :: AM Oxf., Pissarro MSS · BL, letters to Gordon Bottomley · BL, letters to Sir Sydney Cockerell, Add. MS 52746 · BL, letters to Mary, Lady Davis · BL, letters to George Bernhard Shaw, Add. MS 50548 · National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Brown MSS · U. Glas. L., letters to D. S. MacColl · V&A NAL, letters to H. Carter FILM BFINA, documentary footage
Likenesses C. H. Shannon, lithograph, 1894, Carlisle City Art Gallery, V&A · A. Legros, silverpoint drawing, 1895, FM Cam. · W. Rothenstein, double portrait, lithograph, 1897 (with Shannon), NPG · C. H. Shannon, oils, 1898, NPG [see illus.] · C. Ricketts, self-portrait, chiaroscuro woodcut, c.1899, FM Cam. · C. H. Shannon, chalk drawing, 1899, NPG · R. Wells, bust, 1902, priv. coll. · G. C. Beresford, photograph, 1903 (with Shannon), NPG · C. Ricketts, self-portrait in group, oils?, c.1903, Carlisle City Art Gallery · J. E. Blanche, double portrait, oils, 1904 (with Shannon), Tate collection · F. Dodd, chalk drawing, 1905, BM · M. Beerbohm, caricature, watercolour and pen, 1907, FM Cam. · M. Beerbohm, double portrait, caricature, 1911 (with Shannon), Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa · E. Dulac, double portrait, caricature, watercolour and pen, 1914? (with Shannon), FM Cam. · C. H. Shannon, portrait, 1917, Art Gallery and Museum, Leamington Spa · L. A. Bell, pencil drawing, c.1920, NPG · E. Dulac, double portrait, caricature, 1920 (with Shannon), FM Cam. · G. C. Beresford, two photographs, NPG · K. Kennet, bronze statuette, Leeds City Art Gallery
Wealth at death £36,283 17s. 6d.: probate, 16 Dec 1931, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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J. G. P. Delaney, ‘Ricketts, Charles de Sousy (1866–1931)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/35746, accessed 27 Oct 2015]

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Last Updated8/7/24

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