Чарльз Рикеттс: Суретші, иллюстратор және театр суретшісінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

British artist, illustrator, author and printer
the Australian rules footballer

Charles de Sousy Ricketts (2 October 1866 – 7 October 1931) was a British artist, illustrator, author and printer, known for his work as a book designer and typographer and for his costume and scenery designs for plays and operas. Ricketts was born in Geneva to an English father and a French mother and brought up mainly in France. 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. 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. B. Yeats. His most enduring theatre designs, which remained in use for more than 50 years, were for Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. With Shannon, Ricketts built up a substantial collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture. 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.

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:

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.|group=n 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. 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.