page_title: Charles Ricketts
section_title: The Vale Press
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Ricketts / Life and career / The Vale Press
caption_attribution_description: Book illustration
context_page_description: Charles de Sousy Ricketts RA 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, 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  In 1888 Ricketts took over James Abbott Whistler's former house, No 1, The Vale, in Chelsea, which became the focus of contemporary artists. 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. Ricketts and Shannon worked together on editions of "Daphnis and Chloe" (1893) and "Hero and Leander" (1894). Reviewing the former, The Times singled out the "beautiful type [and] the very charming woodcuts and initial letters with which it is enriched by two accomplished artists, Mr. Charles Ricketts and Mr. Charles Shannon, who are jointly responsible for the designs, while the actual woodcut execution is the work of Mr. Ricketts."
  Inspired by the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and William Morris, 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". The Vale Press, which existed between 1896 and 1904, published more than eighty volumes, mostly reprints of English poetic classics, and earned a reputation as "one of the big six amongst modern presses". Initially, Ricketts financed the Vale publications by inviting subscriptions, but in 1894 its finances were put on a more secure footing when he was introduced to a rich barrister, William Llewellyn Hacon, who invested £1,000 and became Ricketts's business partner in the firm. A fire at the printers in 1904 destroyed the press's woodcuts, and Ricketts and Shannon decided to abandon publishing and turn to other work. They closed the Vale Press and threw the type into the river. 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.
caption: Frontispiece for A House of Pomegranates, 1891
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