Charles S. Ricketts

Sculpture was only one of the many art forms mastered by Charles de Sousy Ricketts. He could work on a large scale - he is lauded as a set designer of vision and originality - and he was equally adept on an intimate scale - he was both a gifted illustrator, writer and publisher. Ricketts was also an eclectic collector and art historian, authoring a book on Titian in 1910, and was offered the directorship of the National Gallery, which he declined. The collection he built with his partner Charles Shannon was bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

His artistic style was informed by his cosmopolitan heritage. He was raised in Switzerland, the son of an English naval officer and noble French mother, and educated mostly in France until 1880. Two years later he became a student at the City and Guilds Art School in Kennington. His art is a personal interpretation of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement combined with French symbolism. The latter in particular informed his choice of tragic and emotionally charged subject matter. These pervade his paintings, such as The Betrayal of Christ, The Death of Don Juan or Jepthah’s Daughter, as much as his sculptural oeuvre of around twenty models. The present collection of three bronzes of dramatic mythological subjects - Orpheus and Eurydice, Herodias and Salome and Nessus and Deianeira - epitomise Ricketts’s favoured themes.

Ricketts chooses to depict the key moment in this tragic love story when Orpheus, unable to control his passion, turns around to look at Eurydice knowing that he risked loosing his love forever. The protagonists are shown embracing in an arching movement turning back on themselves. Orpheus holds Eurydice’s head in both hands in a futile effort to keep her from returning to Hades. Together their bodies form an unbroken circle. The composition reveals the influence of Rodin and recalls a similar bronze of doomed lovers, Paola and Francesca, a cast of which is in the Fitzwilliam Museum.