0.4 Second series of sphinx illustrations (1923)

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In 1923, Ricketts was asked by his American dealer, Martin Birnbaum, to produce a second series of illustrations to The Sphinx , as well as a separate set of illustrations to Wilde’s “Poems in Prose,” for sale on the art collector’s market in America. As with the “Poems in Prose” illustrations, it is doubtful that this second series was ever intended to be published; and while individual pictures have appeared in books about Ricketts published in the late twentieth century, the second series has never before been published as an integral element of Wilde’s work. But that Ricketts took the new series as seriously as he took his original illustrations, in 1894, can be inferred from the care with which he prepared preparatory sketches and finished line drawings. Soon after Ricketts finished them, Birnbaum quickly disposed of the finished drawings for the second series to the American collector Grenville Winthrop. These were later integrated into Winthrop’s bequests to Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, where they can be seen today. With the exception of one drawing housed at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, Ricketts’s preparatory drawings for both the second series of Sphinx illustrations and for "Poems in Prose" survive in an album of “scrawls and scraps” given to his good friend Gordon Bottomley, now housed at the Tully House Museum in Carlisle (CALMG 1971.85.35).All images are reproduced by kind permission of Leonie Sturge-Moore and Charmian O’Neil, heirs to the Charles Ricketts estate.

Preliminary sketches

Finished drawings