The World of Charles Ricketts by Joseph Darracott is a comprehensive monograph that illuminates the life and multifaceted career of one of the most versatile figures in British art. Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) was a man of remarkable talents, and this 200-page volume, richly illustrated with black-and-white and color images, systematically explores his major areas of artistic commitment.
Darracott positions Ricketts within the context of his famous contemporaries, revealing a figure who ranked with Aubrey Beardsley as a powerful influence on book illustrators in the 1890s and whose work for the theatre rivalled that of Edward Gordon Craig . The book traces Ricketts’s journey through his collaborative aesthetic partnership with Charles Shannon, his founding of the Vale Press, and his work as a painter, jewelry and theatre designer, and art critic—a critic whose insights were compared to Roger Fry and who could challenge the views of Bernard Berenson”.
The narrative highlights Ricketts’s significant, yet often underappreciated, achievements: his direct and striking illustrations for The Vale Press, his unequalled book on Titian, and his celebrated stage designs, including the sets and costumes for the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and a 1920s revival of The Mikado . It also delves into his role as a prescient connoisseur of Oriental, particularly Japanese, art, a collection largely bequeathed to the British Museum . Ricketts’s immense reputation was such that he was offered the directorship of the National Gallery in London in 1915, a position he declined, later becoming an advisor to the National Gallery of Canada . Through Darracott’s exploration, the reader encounters a key figure in the London art world whose circle of friends included Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and Walter Sickert, and who was memorably described by William Rothenstein as “the artistic Warwick of the age”.
