Charles Ricketts
In 1882 he began studying wood engraving in London, where he met a fellow student, Charles Shannon, who became his lifelong companion and artistic collaborator.
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. B. Yeats.
[3] 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".
[3] 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.
[3] On his sixteenth birthday he met the painter and lithographer Charles Haslewood Shannon, with whom he formed a lifelong personal and professional partnership.
They consulted Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, an artist they revered,[n 1] who advised them against it, considering the current trends of French art to be excessively naturalistic – "photographic drawing".
[7] Shannon, three years the senior, took a teaching post at the Croydon School of Art, and Ricketts earned money from commercial and magazine illustrations.
[11] Cooper writes that Ricketts designed founts, initials, borders and illustrations for the press, "blending medieval, Renaissance and contemporary imagery".
[13] Thereafter, he occasionally designed books for friends such as Michael Field (the joint pen name of Katherine Harris and Emma Cooper) and Gordon Bottomley.
Delaney finds more power in Ricketts's bronzes, citing Orpheus and Eurydice (Tate collection) and Paolo and Francesca (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) as striking interpretations of their subjects.
[3] A contemporary critic remarked that despite their "unusually beautiful colour" and "curious but definite, half-literary, half-pictorial appeal", Rickett's paintings were "probably the least important and satisfactory part of the output of a man who was undoubtedly one of the most gifted, versatile, and outstanding in the world of art of his day".
[22][n 11] Outside London, Ricketts worked for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1912 on plays by W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge,[25] and designed John Masefield's The Coming of Christ, staged in Canterbury Cathedral in 1928.
[3] Pages on Art, a selection of Ricketts's essays and articles for publications including The Burlington Magazine and The Morning Post, was published in 1913.
It covered an eclectic range of subjects including Charles Conder, Shannon, post-impressionism, Puvis de Chavannes, G. F. Watts, Chinese and Japanese art, and stage design.
[29][n 12] Under the pen-name Jean Paul Raymond, Ricketts wrote and designed two collections of short stories, Beyond the Threshold (1928) and Unrecorded Histories (1933).
Under the same pseudonym he wrote Recollections of Oscar Wilde (1932), a highly personal memoir, published after his death; it was described by The Observer as "a loyal and sensitive commemoration" of the man Ricketts regarded as the most remarkable he had met.
A memorial service was held at St James's, Piccadilly, on 12 October, attended by many from the art world including Robert Anning Bell, Alfred Drury, Gerald Kelly, Sir John Lavery, Henry Macbeth-Raeburn and Julius Olsson.
He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium;[33] his ashes were partly scattered in Richmond Park, London, and the remainder buried at Arolo, Lake Maggiore, Italy.
