Charles Ricketts – { feuilleton }

Weirdsly Daubery and friends

You think you’ve seen all of the Aubrey Beardsley parodies then another one turns up… This poster by James Hearn dates from 1894, the year that Beardsley’s art became a succès de scandale thanks to his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome and his covers for The Yellow Book. Beardsley’s art was so original that the parodies arrived swiftly and continued into the following year, until the downfall of Oscar Wilde affected the artist’s position at The Yellow Book and rendered his person, as well as his drawings, even less palatable to the general public. Hearn’s piece is rather poor in comparison to the jibes in Punch magazine, and unusual for being part of a functional design rather than a satirical item.

The Punch parodies, several of which worked their own transformations of the artist’s name, used to be available for viewing on a university website, but as I was saying in the previous post, these places have a tendency to vanish when you go to revisit them. The Hearn poster is part of the V&A’s collection but everything else here is from scans of Punch at the Internet Archive. Back issues of the magazine, even those from the 19th century, haven’t always been easy to find online. Punch only gave up the ghost in 2002, and it seems that the restriction on publishing its more recent contents has affected even the older issues, so that the copies at the University of Heidelberg, for example, can only be seen by visiting the university library. It was worth looking for all of these, however. In addition to the drawings you can also see whatever text came with them, while one of the volumes for 1894 also includes a parody of Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, together with an illustration that lampoons the poem’s illustrations by Charles Ricketts. The Beardsley parodies are by ET Reed and Linley Sambourne for the most part, although none are credited as such.

Continue reading “Weirdsly Daubery and friends”

Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen)

I don’t use bookplates, and don’t know anyone who does, but the conjunction between art and literature is a fascinating one. Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen) (1909) by Walter von Zur Westen explores the history of the bookplate, and would no doubt answer some of my questions about the form if it wasn’t in German throughout, and also typeset in the semi-legible Fraktur style that used to be de rigueur for all German texts.

We still have the illustrations, however, and these range from woodcut engravings to contemporary works in pencil and ink, with many of the later contributions being from established artists whose names are familiar today; among the examples below are works by Symbolists Max Klinger, Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops. There’s also an especially fine example by Charles Ricketts. The latter are a reminder that bookplate commissions were a common thing for 19th-century artists, although their efforts are seldom seen outside collections such as this. Much of Zur Westen’s history is devoted to the German regions but later chapters cover other European countries and the United States.

Continue reading “Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen)”

The Dial

Yet another fin de siècle journal which we can now see in its entirety, The Dial was a short-lived British publication which expired at a time when more prominent titles were being launched. The publishers were Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a couple who were partners in life as well as art and publishing, and members of Oscar Wilde’s small circle of circumspect gay and lesbian friends. Ricketts and Shannon published some of Wilde’s poetry—notably a beautiful edition of The Sphinx—and followed the William Morris ideal of using traditional techniques for art and printing rather than relying on the line block. Most of the illustrations in The Dial are woodcuts although Ricketts and Shannon also produced etchings and the occasional painting, as with Ricketts’ Moreau-like piece below. Many of the Dial pieces have been reprinted in books about the pair but these never show you everything so the journals contain a number of smaller works I hadn’t seen before. The Dial ran for five issues from 1889 to 1897. The Internet Archive has a couple of sets of which these are the better copies:

• Issue 1 | Issue 2 | Issue 3 |Issue 4 | Issue 5

Continue reading “The Dial”

Form and Austin Osman Spare

The University of Heidelberg‘s scanning programme continues to be a source of delight for those of us without professional or financial access to rare book collections. Having recently made the entire run of Der Ochideengarten available, they’ve added scans of another journal that was on my list of magazines I’d been hoping would eventually turn up online. Form was the first of two short-lived publications edited by Austin Osman Spare from 1916 to 1924, the second being The Golden Hind. Spare and co-editor “Francis Marsden” (Frederick Carter) published two issues of Form before Spare was conscripted in 1917. After the war, publication resumed with two further issues. Spare aficionados have long been familiar with the drawings in these publications, many of which have been reprinted over and over in collections of Spare’s art but often with no indication of their original context.

Seeing the drawings in situ like this not only restores the context but also sets them beside the accompanying work by Spare’s fellow writers and artists. Some of the other contributors need no introduction—WB Yeats, Robert Graves—while others have been neglected or even forgotten. Most descriptions of Form mention its following in the lineage of The Yellow Book, publisher John Lane having been responsible for both publications. But looking through the first two issues I’d say the model is as much The Savoy, the magazine that Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons put together after The Yellow Book kicked out Beardsley in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial. Yeats was a contributor to The Savoy, and two other artists present in Form—Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon—were friends and publishers of Wilde.

The samples here are mostly Spare’s work, and only a small selection at that. Enthusiasts are encouraged to download the PDFs for themselves. I had seen one of these issues before (Alan Moore has an enviable collection of Spare publications) but the rest were magazines I’d been waiting decades to see in full. I’m hoping now that the excellent staff at Heidelberg may have copies of The Golden Hind waiting for similar treatment.

Continue reading “Form and Austin Osman Spare”

The art of Edmond van Offel, 1871–1959

Edmond van Offel was a Belgian artist who Philippe Jullian features in two of his books about Symbolist art but whose work I’d not seen anywhere else—at least until now. All the pictures here are from a collection published in Paris in 1902 which may be the one Jullian used for his selections. The book contains both Jullian drawings together with a great deal of other work comprising illustrations, vignettes, bookplates and also some of the artist’s writings. Offel’s combination of detailed line-work and attenuated figures is reminiscent of Charles Ricketts who may have been an influence.

Continue reading “The art of Edmond van Offel, 1871–1959”