Charles Ricketts

Ricketts was born in Geneva to an English father and a French mother and brought up mainly in France. Ricketts first made his mark in book production, first as an illustrator, and then as the founder and driving force of the Vale Press (1896–1904), one of the leading private presses of the day, for which he designed the type and illustrations. A disastrous fire at the printers led to the closure of the press, and Ricketts turned increasingly to painting and sculpture over the following two decades. In 1906 he also began a career as a theatre designer, first for works by his friend Oscar Wilde and later for plays by writers including Aeschylus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, William Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, and W. His most enduring theatre designs, which remained in use for more than 50 years, were for Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. He established a reputation as an art connoisseur, and in 1915 turned down the offer of the directorship of the National Gallery. He later regretted that decision, but served as adviser to the National Gallery of Canada from 1924 until his death. He wrote three books of art criticism, two volumes of short stories and a memoir of Wilde. Selections from his letters and diaries were posthumously published.

Charles Ricketts studied at City and Guilds of London Art School. The recorded working language is English. Residence is recorded at Lansdowne House. Work by Charles Ricketts is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Auckland Art Gallery, Tate, National Gallery of Canada and National Collection of War Art.

Ricketts was born in Geneva, the only son of Charles Robert Ricketts (1838–1883) and Hélène Cornélie de Soucy (1833 or 1834–1880), daughter of Louis, Marquis de Soucy. He had a sister, Blanche (1868–1903). His father had served as a First Lieutenant in the Royal Navy before being invalided out at age 25 due to wounds. It was an artistic household: his father was an amateur painter of marine subjects, and his mother was musical. Ricketts spent his early childhood in Lausanne and London, and his early teens in Boulogne and Amiens. Except for a year at a boarding-school near Tours he was educated by governesses. Hélène Ricketts died in 1880 and her widower moved to London with his two children. Ricketts was at that stage hardly able to speak English. His biographer Paul Delaney writes that the boy was considered "too delicate to attend school", and consequently was largely self-educated, "reading voraciously and 'basking' in museums; he thus escaped being moulded along conventional lines". • Illustration — Charles Haslewood Shannon and Ricketts by George Charles Beresford In 1882 Ricketts entered the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Kennington, London, where he was apprenticed to Charles Roberts, a prominent wood-engraver. The following year Ricketts's father died, and Ricketts became dependent on his paternal grandfather, who supported him with a modest allowance. On his sixteenth birthday he met the painter and lithographer Charles Haslewood Shannon, with whom he formed a lifelong personal and professional partnership. The Times described their relationship:... a lifelong friendship of so close a nature that from that time onwards the two shared the same studio and lived together in a state of celibate commensalism as remarkable as any of the great historic friendships, or the finest Darby and Joan examples of wedded felicity. It was seldom "I think" or "I do" in the Ricketts and Shannon ménage, but almost invariably "We think" and "We do."

After concluding their studies at Kennington, the two men considered going to live and work in Paris, as several of their contemporaries had done. They consulted Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, an artist they revered, who advised them against it, considering the current trends of French art to be excessively naturalistic – "photographic drawing". Shannon, three years the senior, took a teaching post at the Croydon School of Art, and Ricketts earned money from commercial and magazine illustrations. • Illustration — Frontispiece for A House of Pomegranates, 1891 In 1888 Ricketts took over James Abbott Whistler's former house, No 1, The Vale, in Chelsea, which became the focus of contemporary artists. They produced The Dial, a magazine devoted to art, that had five issues from 1889 to 1897. Among their circle was Oscar Wilde, for whom Ricketts illustrated his books A House of Pomegranates (1891) and The Sphinx (1894), and painted, in the style of François Clouet, the hero of Wilde's short story, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." used as the frontispiece of the book. Ricketts and Shannon worked together on editions of "Daphnis and Chloe" (1893) and "Hero and Leander" (1894). Reviewing the former, The Times singled out the "beautiful type [and] the very charming woodcuts and initial letters with which it is enriched by two accomplished artists, Mr. Charles Ricketts and Mr. Charles Shannon, who are jointly responsible for the designs, while the actual woodcut execution is the work of Mr. Ricketts." Inspired by the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and William Morris's Kelmscott Press, Ricketts and Shannon set up a small press over which, according to the critic Emmanuel Cooper, Ricketts exercised complete control of design and production. He told Lucien Pissarro that he intended "to do for the book something in the line of what William Morris did for furniture". Cooper writes that Ricketts designed founts, initials, borders and illustrations for the press, "blending medieval, Renaissance and contemporary imagery". His woodcut illustrations "often incorporated the swirling lines of Art Nouveau and androgynous figures". The Vale Press, which existed between 1896 and 1904, published more than eighty volumes, mostly reprints of English poetic classics, and earned a reputation as "one of the big six amongst modern presses". Initially, Ricketts financed the Vale publications by inviting subscriptions, but in 1894 its finances were put on a more secure footing when he was introduced to a rich barrister, William Llewellyn Hacon, who invested £1,000 and became Ricketts's business partner in the firm. A fire at the printers in 1904 destroyed the press's woodcuts, and Ricketts and Shannon decided to abandon publishing and turn to other work. They closed the Vale Press and threw the type into the river. Ricketts marked the demise of the press by publishing a complete bibliography of its publications. Thereafter, he occasionally designed books for friends such as Michael Field (the joint pen name of Katherine Harris and Emma Cooper) and Gordon Bottomley.

Ricketts became a celebrated designer for the stage. "Mr Ricketts is infallible in his ideas on costume" observed The Times. His career as a theatre designer lasted from 1906 to 1931. He began by working on a double bill of Wilde plays – Salome and A Florentine Tragedy – at the King's Hall, Covent Garden, given as a private production because Wilde's biblical drama was refused a licence for public performance. For the same company Ricketts designed Aeschylus's The Persians in 1907, for which his costumes and scenery received considerably better notices than the play. For the commercial theatre during the 1900s Ricketts designed Laurence Binyon's Attila (with Oscar Asche at His Majesty's Theatre), Electra by Hofmannsthal (with Mrs Patrick Campbell at the New Theatre, 1908), and King Lear (with Norman McKinnel, at the Haymarket, 1909). During the 1910s he designed Bernard Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910), Arnold Bennett's Judith (1916), and Shaw's Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (1918). After the First World War Ricketts resumed his theatrical activity, and designed The Betrothal, by Maurice Maeterlinck (with Gladys Cooper) at the Gaiety Theatre (1921), Shaw's Saint Joan (with Sybil Thorndike) at the New Theatre (1924), Henry VIII (with Lewis Casson and Thorndike) at the Empire Theatre (1925) and Macbeth (with Henry Ainley, Thorndyke and Casson) at the Princes Theatre (1926). In the same year he designed costumes and scenery for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's production of The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre, and did the same in 1929 for their The Gondoliers at the same theatre. Most of Ricketts's costume designs for The Mikado were retained by subsequent designers of the D'Oyly Carte productions for more than 50 years. Outside London, Ricketts worked for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1912 on plays by W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge, and designed John Masefield's The Coming of Christ, staged in Canterbury Cathedral in 1928. His final theatre designs were for Ferdinand Bruckner's Elizabeth of England (with Phyllis Neilson-Terry at the Cambridge Theatre, London (1931) and Donald Tovey's opera The Bride of Dionysus, which was staged in Edinburgh after Ricketts's death. After Ricketts's death the National Art Collections Fund bought a collection of his drawings for theatrical costumes and scenery, and arranged for them to be exhibited at galleries in London and throughout Britain. Twelve of the drawings were shown in the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and a selection of eighty from the remainder of the drawings was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

• Illustration — Cover design for Saint Joan • Illustration — Drop-curtain for Saint Joan (1924) • Illustration — Joan and the Executioner • Illustration — Don Juan (1911) • Illustration — Cover to Michael Field's Poems of Adoration, 1912 • Illustration — Deposition from the Cross (1915) • Illustration — Frontispiece of Milton's Early poems • Illustration — The Holy Women and the Angel of the Resurrection