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Domestic Passions: Unpacking the Homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Abstract

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Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2012

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References

1 Hussey, Christopher, “The Keep, Chilham Castle, Kent: A Residence of Mr Charles Shannon, R.A. and Mr Charles Ricketts, A.R.A.,Country Life, 1924, 10001006Google Scholar.

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3 Hussey, “The Keep,” 1000.

4 Ricketts to Thomas Lowinsky, 18 November 1918, in Ricketts, Charles S., Self-Portrait: Taken from the Letters and Journals (London, 1939), 306Google Scholar.

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9 Walkley, Giles gives an account of the artistic reputations of these areas in his Artists’ Houses in London, 1764–1914 (Aldershot, 1994), espGoogle Scholar. chaps. 4 and 5. See also Dakers, Caroline, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven, CT, 1999), 2Google Scholar.

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14 Ibid., 24–25.

15 Edwards and Hart, “The Victorian Interior,” 5. See also John Potvin, “The Aesthetics of Community: Queer Interiors and the Desire for Intimacy,” in Edwards and Hart, Rethinking, 181.

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20 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 389 and 22.

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27 See esp. Gere, Charlotte, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

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30 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 22; for comparative values, see the Economic History Association website at http://eh.net/hmit/ (last accessed 20 August 2011).

31 Walkley, Artists’ Houses, 158.

32 Letter to William Pye, May 1906, in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 134.

33 Cook, Matt, London and the Culture of Homosexuality: 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), chapGoogle Scholar. 4. See also Potvin’s comments on Aesthetic commingling of “sights, touch and smell” in “Collecting,” 200; and Jason Edwards, “The Lessons of Leighton House: Aesthetics, Politics, Erotics,” in Edwards and Hart, Rethinking.

34 Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (London, 1992), 180Google Scholar. See also Potvin, “Aesthetics.”

35 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 97.

36 Ibid., 2.

37 See, e.g., Blanche, Jacques-Emile, Portraits of a Lifetime: The Late Victorian Era; the Edwardian Pageant, 1870–1914 (London, 1937), 128–35Google Scholar; Lewis, “Preface,” in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, v–xv. For recent analysis of Shannon, Ricketts, and Lord Leighton in this respect, see Potvin. “Collecting,” 196; and Edwards, “Lessons.”

38 Lewis, “Preface,” ix.

39 Cohen, Household, 156.

40 Potvin, “Collecting,” 197.

41 Lewis, “Preface,” ix.

42 Blanche, Portraits, 131. On the Victorian trend for eclecticism, see Cohen, Household, 84; on the need for a more nuanced readings of eclecticism, see Edwards and Hart, “Victorian Interior,” 12–14.

43 Cohen, Household, chap. 7.

44 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, ix.

45 Ibid., vii.

46 Ricketts, Oscar Wilde, 40.

47 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, vii; Potvin, “Collecting,” 203.

48 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, vii.

49 Blanche, Portraits, 130. The depiction of Leighton’s bedroom was somewhat erroneous, Jason Edwards suggests. See Edwards, “Lessons.”

50 Potvin, “Askesis,” 73 and 86.

51 Marcus, “At Home,” 120 and 138.

52 Ibid., 138; Potvin, “Collecting,” 182.

53 Edwards, “Lessons,” esp. 97 and 105.

54 Tosh, Man’s Place, 4; Potvin, “Collecting,” 193 and 206. See also Potvin, “Aesthetics,” 182.

55 See Kalter, Barrett, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in the Long Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA, 2011), chapGoogle Scholar. 6.

56 Cohen, Household, 160.

57 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 165.

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59 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 32.

60 Cook, London, chap. 5

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63 See Cook, London, chap. 5.

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69 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 12.

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73 Cohen, Household, chap. 5.

74 Ricketts, Wilde, 45.

75 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 33.

76 Cited in Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 177.

77 Cited in Ibid., 179.

78 Cook, “Families”; Potvin, “Askesis.”

79 Cited in Potvin, “Askesis,” 84.

80 See Cook, Matt, “Queer Domesticities,” in The Domestic Space Reader, ed. Briganti, Chiara and Mezei, Kathy (Toronto, 2011)Google Scholar.

81 Potvin, “Aesthetics,” 171.

82 Ricketts, Wilde, 33.

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88 Cited in Calloway, Stephen, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon: An Aesthetic Partnership: Catalogue (Richmond upon Thames, 1979), 5Google Scholar.

89 Blanche, Portraits, 166.

90 Delaney, Charles Ricketts,160.

91 Ibid., 220.

92 On this point, see also Potvin, “Collecting,” 195.

93 Potvin, “Askesis,” 75.

94 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 155.

95 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 96.

96 Ibid., 65–66.

97 Cited in Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 305.

98 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 22.

99 See, e.g., “Diary,” 23 May 1902, in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 78. Freud to Jung, 2 November 1911, in The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull (London, 1974), 453–54.

100 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 123.

101 Ibid., 334.

102 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 107.

103 On this point, see Edwards and Hart, “The Victorian Interior,” 9.

104 Lewis, “Preface,” v–vi. On this point, see Potvin, “Collecting,” 201–2.

105 Walkley, Artists’ Houses, 218; Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 49.

106 Potvin, “Aesthetics,” 174.

107 Ricketts, Wilde, 44.

108 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 58.

109 Ibid., 55.

110 Ricketts, Wilde, 36–37.

111 Dakers, Holland Park Circle, 2. Martha Droth suggests that this was a way for artists to determine some of the meaning of their work. See Martha Droth, “Sculpture and Aesthetic Intent in the Late-Victorian Interior,” in Edwards and Hart, Rethinking, 226.

112 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 258–61.

113 On the link between Hallward and Shannon, see Ibid., 49.

114 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 314.

115 Emphasis mine. Lewis in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, viii. On the queer significance of uncles, see Sedgwick, “Tales”; and Eileen Cleere, Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Stanford, CA, 2004)Google Scholar.

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117 Cited in Marcus, “At Home,” 139.

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119 “Diary,” 5 December 1900, in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 49–50.

120 Ricketts, Letters, 5; Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 88.

121 Ricketts, Letters, 5.

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126 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 12.

127 Ibid., 411.

128 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 417.

129 Ibid., 249.

130 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 415.

131 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 383.

132 Ricketts to Gordon Bottomley, 16 September 1922, in Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 342.

133 Ricketts to John Gray, cited in Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 389.

134 Ricketts, Self-Portrait, 343.

135 Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 310–12.

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137 Rather poetically, the collection had its own queer trajectory as it passed from the bachelor Leighton to Shannon and Ricketts and then on to the care of Cockerell at the Fitzwilliam Museum and to his successor Carl Winter, one of only a handful of overtly homosexual witnesses to give evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s.

138 Cook, “Families.”

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