Charles de Sousy Ricketts

Charles Ricketts was a major practitioner of the Arts and Crafts concept “The Book Beautiful,” following the precepts of William Morris in designing type, bindings, and wood engravings from his own designs. The artist collaborated closely with Oscar Wilde on illustrations for his texts, which culminated in Ricketts’s masterpiece of illustration for Wilde’s “The Sphinx.” This drawing, for Wilde’s 1894 “The Teacher of Wisdom” demonstrates the attenuated austerity of Rickett’s linear style, offering a contrast to the sensual use of shape and pattern exhibited in works by Beardsley, hanging {direction}.

The poem is a fable about a man born with the “perfect knowledge of God” who shares his knowledge with others but in the process, loses his own closeness to God. He finally becomes a hermit in the desert, after proclaiming: “I will talk to you about all other things that are in heaven and earth, but about God I will not talk to you. Neither now, nor at any other time, will I talk to you about God.”