Chimeras (Chacun porte sa Chimère) signed with monogram (lower centre) and further signed with monogram (on the reverse) oil on canvas 43 7/8 x 28 1/4 in. (111.5 x 71.7 cm.)
London, Royal Academy, 1923, no.11. Venice, Biennale, International Art Exhibition, 1930.
Literature
The Royal Academy Illustrated, London, 1923, p.62, illustrated. J.G.P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: A Biography, Oxford, 1990, pp.216-7, illustrated.
Provenance
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 23 May 1984, lot 46.
Notes
PROPERTY OF AN OVERSEAS COLLECTOR
Charles Ricketts is one of the most fascinating of the so-called 'Last Romantics', those British artists who continued to paint literary subjects well into the twentieth century, fighting a rearguard action against Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and subsequent manifestations of the modern movement. His appeal lies in his versatility, his magnetic personality and wide range of contacts, and the wit and intellectual acumen with which he made his case. He may not be the world's greatest draughtsman, but he stilll inspires enormous interest, not to say affection, for what he represents.
Ricketts was born in Geneva, the son of a retired naval afficer. After receiving his formal education privately in England and France, he attended the South London Technical (now City and Guilds) Art School. There he studied wood-engraving and met his lifelong companion, the painter Charles Shannon, a more retiring personality but in fact Ricketts's senior by three years. Ricketts began his artistic career by doing commercial illustrations for magazines, and this brought him into contact with Oscar Wilde, who remained a great influence on his views and tastes. Between 1891 and 1894 he illustrated three of Wilde's books, A House of Pomegranates, Poems, and The Sphinx. In 1889 he and Shannon founded The Dial, an occasional magazine that ran until 1897. Meanwhile in 1896 he had launched the Vale Press, one of the great expressions of the private press movement. For this he designed three founts and many woodcut illustrations, publishing in all about a hundred books.
Ricketts took up painting in 1900, and showed the results for the first time at the Wolverhampton Industrial Exhibition in 1902. In 1906 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Dutch Gallery in London, and the same year he showed sculpture, another new departure, at the Carfax Gallery, then run by Wilde's old friend Robert Ross. He also exhibited for many years with the International Society and later at the Royal Academy, of which he became an associate in 1922 and a full member six years later.
Nor were these by any means his only activities. In 1906 he made his debut in theatre design, a field in which he was involved until his death, being responsible for over forty productions and establishing a reputation comparable to that of his rival Gordon Craig. He also wrote books on art history, including an introduction to the Prado (1903) and a study of Titian (1910), as well as publishing his recollections of Wilde and collections of 'decadent' stories in the Wilde manner. In later life he became deeply involved with art politics and was greatly admired as a connoisseur, advising the National Gallery of Canada on its purchases and helping to organise such major exhibitions as the landmark show of Italian art mounted by the Royal Academy in 1930. Tragedy struck early in 1929, when Shannon fell while hanging a picture, damaging his brain. He never fully recovered his senses and turned bitterly against Ricketts, who died of a broken heart two years later. Shannon lived on until 1937, bequeathing the magnificent collection they had formed together to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Ricketts launched himself as a painter by taking lessons from Shannon, but estentially he was self-taught. His work shows the influence of many artists he admired, including the Venetians, Delacroix, Daumier, Rossetti, Gustave Moreau and G.F. Watts. But his style is instantly recognisable and he had a very definite range of subject matter, favouring themes that lent themselves to his strong sense of passion, tragedy and fate. They included many scenes from the life of Christ, as well as illustrations to the stories of Cleopatra, Salome, Montezuma, Don Juan and Faust.
The present example seems to have been started in 1917, but was not exhibited at the Royal Academy until 1923, the year after Ricketts became an ARA. Paul Delaney discusses the picture at some length in his biography of the artist, describing it as 'one of his most obviously Symbolist paintings...It was inspired by a phrase he had read in Baudelaire: chacun porte sa chimère, and was sometimes given this title. It referred to classical art and involved one of the hybrid creatures (like the sphinx, centaur and even minotaur) in his fabulous menagerie. Classical chimeras usually had a dragon's tail, a she-goat's body, and a lion's head, together with the head of a goat and sometimes even of a dragon. His version has the goat's legs but also wings, and a human female torso with the curious cat-like face that he gave to so many of his figures. He described it as "a sort of Dantesque scene of nude men with chimeras perched on their shoulders with their claws fixed in their head, and shoulders and backsides". It is a grim and disturbing picture. Though on a general level an image of the human psyche as a prey to guilt and terror, it evidently had a personal significance for Ricketts, haunted as he was by fears and anxiety. Nearly all his paintings had some personal significance for him, and deliberately sought to convey particular emotions'.
Delaney adds in footnotes that Ricketts's description of the picture is taken from a letter written in 1917 to T.E. Lowinsky, his younger friend who was also a painter and illustrator of bizarre imagination, and that the phrase 'chacun porte sa chimère' comes from Baudelaire's Poémes en Prose (Le Spleen du Paris). This was a typical source for Ricketts, who was steeped in French culture.
As for Ricketts's 'fabulous menagerie', this is a reminder that he shared the passion for hybrids that was so central to the Symbolist imagination. The sphinx is the example of these monsters with which he was most closely associated. In a well-known early drawing of 1891 (Carlisle Art Gallery) he had shown her being consulted by Oedipus, and in 1894, as we have seen, he illustrated Wilde's poem on the subject, published by John Lane and Elkin Matthews at the Bodley Head. He returned to the theme in a late set of drawings produced not long before his death.
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