• Faithful Infidelity: Charles Ricketts's Illustrations for Two of Oscar Wilde's Poems in Prose

    Author(s):
    Jeremiah Mercurio (see profile)
    Date:
    2011
    Group(s):
    LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English, MS Visual Culture
    Subject(s):
    Illustration of books--Study and teaching, Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Charles Ricketts, Illustration studies, Fin-de-siècle literature and culture, Oscar Wilde, Illustration
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6DN3ZV9P
    Abstract:
    The artist, collector, and critic Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) has often been characterised as a reactionary voice in early-twentieth-century debates about modern art. Although he responded conservatively to modern-art developments such as those embodied by the term 'Post-Impressionism', his work in book design and illustration exemplifies progressive strategies of decoration that reconfigure the relationship between author and illustrator as one of collaborative authorship. Ricketts's illustrations are autonomous narratives that not only reproduce the meanings of the texts they represent, but also parody and elaborate on them. Moreover, Ricketts' book designs and illustrations represent a complex resistance to and working out of Oscar Wilde's views on art, language, and orality. Ricketts' progressive strategies of design are epitomized by his unpublished illustrations for Wilde's Poems in Prose (1894), a text which dramatises the centrality of voice to Wilde's poetic endeavour and allows Ricketts directly to challenge Wilde's denigration of the visual arts. By focusing on two representative examples, Ricketts' drawings for 'The Disciple' and 'The House of Judgment', and by providing close readings of both image and text, this piece traces Ricketts' illustrational methods and reveals their debts to Wilde's own theories of orality, language, and visual arts, charting Ricketts' divergences from Wilde's texts and highlighting the critical dialogue implicit in the illustrations. Ricketts' drawings for the Poems in Prose, currently held at the Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, have never been published together as a set, and the juxtaposition of the two drawings here is a preliminary attempt to set these illustrations in conversation with each other.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. Date:
    2011
    Journal:
    Victorian Network
    Volume:
    3
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    3 - 21
    ISSN:
    2042-616X
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
    Share this:

    Downloads

    Item Name: pdf 17-21-3-pb.pdf
      Download View in browser
    Activity: Downloads: 181

    Back to Deposits