Ricketts, Charles

Ricketts, Charles (1866–1931). British painter, designer, sculptor, collector, and writer on art. He was born in Geneva to an English father and a French mother and brought up mainly in France and Italy. In 1882 he began studying wood engraving at Lambeth School of Art and there met fellow student Charles Shannon, who became his lifelong companion. They lived first in Kensington and Chelsea (at this time a cheap area of London) and moved to Richmond (1898), Holland Park (1902), and finally St John's Wood (1923) as their fortunes improved. Ricketts initially made his mark in book production, first as an illustrator, then as the driving force behind the Vale Press (1896–1904), one of the finest private presses of the day, for which he designed founts, initials, borders, and illustrations. After the closure of the press (following a disastrous fire), Ricketts turned to painting and occasional sculpture, and in 1906 he began to make designs for the theatre. His paintings—typically rather melodramatic, heavy-handed figure subjects—have not worn well, but his colourful stage designs are still much admired, and the Oxford Companion to the Theatre comments that ‘Even before the appearance of Diaghilev, Ricketts was already a pioneer in the protest against an unimaginative realism'. He had a great reputation as an art connoisseur and in 1915 turned down the offer of the directorship of the National Gallery. Later he regretted this decision, but he served on various committees and put much energy into trying to combat modernism in art. Most of the highly varied collection he made with Shannon was bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, although the gem of the collection— Piero di Cosimo's Fight Between Lapiths and Centaurs—went to the National Gallery. By the standards of other noteworthy collectors, they were never very rich (Ricketts calculated that their combined income rarely exceeded £1,000 a year), but they bought with flair and discrimination, the Old Master drawings they acquired being particularly outstanding. Ricketts's main books were The Prado and its Masterpieces (1903), Titian (1910), and Pages on Art (1913); Self-Portrait (taken from his letters and journals) was posthumously published in 1939.