Early years 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.
The Times described their relationship:
The Vale Press 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. 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". 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. In Delaney's view, Ricketts's considerable scholarship was a mixed blessing as his deep knowledge of earlier painters sometimes inhibited his work, both as a painter and as a sculptor. The influence of
Rodin is seen in Ricketts's sculptures, which number about twenty and include
Silence, a memorial to Wilde. 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. In 1915 Ricketts was offered the directorship of the
National Gallery, but having controversial views on how the gallery's paintings ought to be shown he turned down the post, which he later regretted. In 1929 he was appointed a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. and served as art adviser to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from 1924 to 1931. 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). 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) 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. Delaney comments that although superseded by modern scholarship, they remain "among the most evocative books on art in English". 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. After Ricketts's death
Cecil Lewis edited selections from the artist's letters and diaries, which were published as
Self-Portrait in 1939. To pay for Shannon's care Ricketts sold some of their collection. Delaney writes that the strain of the situation, compounded by overwork, contributed to Ricketts's death. his ashes were partly scattered in
Richmond Park, London, and the remainder buried at Arolo,
Lake Maggiore, Italy. Shannon outlived him by six years. and a
BBC Radio 3 programme,
Between Ourselves (1991), with reminiscences by Lewis (by then a nonagenarian) and featuring
John Gielgud as Ricketts and
T. P. McKenna as Bernard Shaw. Ricketts is portrayed in
Michael MacLennan's 2003 play
Last Romantics, based on the life of Ricketts, Shannon and their circle, including Wilde and
Aubrey Beardsley. ==Gallery==