Silence

Painter, typographer, illustrator, collector, writer, and sculptor, the multi-talented British artist Charles Ricketts was part of a group that built on the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts & Crafts movement well into the first decades of the twentieth century. Although best remembered as the illustrator of Oscar Wilde’s poems, Ricketts was part of the art establishment, in 1915 he turned down the directorship of Britain’s National Gallery, in 1922 he was made an Associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1928 a full Academician. This professional success was achieved by carefully negotiating the legal and social restrictions of his day, as he maintained a life-long partnership with the painter Charles Shannon, and both moved in queer circles in London.

Ricketts first exhibited Silence in 1905 (only two versions in bronze are known to have been produced - the other is located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA). It is one of a limited number of sculptures, around twenty in total, completed by the artist; all are small scale bronzes. Unlike Ricketts’s other sculptures, which depict Rodin-esque nudes, Silence is directly inspired by ancient Greek Tanagra figures made of terracotta. Ricketts and Shannon had several such sculptures in their extensive art collection, which was bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, on Shannon’s death in 1937. Silence also likely references the bronze head of Hypnos (a Roman coy of a Greek original) with wings sprouting from its temples in the British Museum, which dates from the 1st or 2nd century. As a representation of sleep many associations with dreams, death, and altered or liminal states are implied in Ricketts’s bronze. Silence quickly became linked for a memorial to Wilde, who died in 1900. A diary entry records that Ricketts had discussed Wilde’s tomb with his executer, Robert Ross, in January 1905 – Silence was completed later that year. Further diary entries show that Wilde was very much in Ricketts’s thoughts, and dreams, during the modeling of this work. It is also notable that the same figure of Hypnos appears in the illustrations that Ricketts made to accompany the publication of Wilde’s poem, The Sphinx, in 1894. In these illustrations the figure may represent the poem’s narrator, who encounters, or dreams an encounter, with a sensual sphinx, and therefore can be identified with Wilde as author of the poem. Given this context, the hushing gesture of the figure is both telling and poignant. It could be read as the silencing of a poet by death but could also be seen as representing the necessity of remaining silent about relationships that did not conform to the sexual norms of the day.

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Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object. Learn more about provenance at the Walters.

Private collection, UK [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Simon Edsor, London, after 1968, by purchase; Mary Edsor, London, 2023, by inheritance; sale through Eros Gallery, London, 2025; Walters Art Museum, 2025, by purchase.