0.1 Afterword  (Page 4/25)

This elevation of design to the status of art owes something to the personal determination of Charles Ricketts,designer/illlustrator of The Sphinx , to be understood as an artist in his own right. Ricketts shared this determinationwith other Bodley Head designers such as Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Crane and Laurence Housman, and it is not irrelevant here to note that Ricketts wouldlater be elected to the Royal Academy, his paintings and sculptures collected by the Tate, the Ashmolean, the Carlisle City Museum, the Manchester Art Gallery,and the Fitzwilliam, among other major English galleries. As telling, Ricketts would later become an important authority on art in his own right, composingbooks on Titian and The Prado, and serving as advisor to the Canadian National Gallery after previously declining to direct the National Gallery in London.

But the elevation of the book’s design to the status of art also owes much to Wilde, whose personal and intellectual interest in designhad been longstanding by 1892. In January 1889, for instance, he had written that “our aim should be to discover some mode of illustration that willharmonise with the shapes of our letters” (“Some Literary Notes I,” 392). Two months earlier, he had written that “no ornament or illustration should be usedin a book which cannot be printed in the same way as the type” while pleading for “harmony” between a book’s “type and the decoration” (“Printing andPrinters,” 100-1). These remarks had been made in the course of reviewing a lecture on “Printing” that Emery Walker delivered to the Arts and Crafts Societyon November 15, 1888—the third of five lectures on the arts of design delivered to members of the Arts and Crafts Society, which Wilde reviewed enthusiasticallyfor the Pall Mall Gazette in November 1888. (This lecture series is now generally regarded by scholars as constitutingan epochal moment in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Emery Walker’s lecture on printing, for instance, was attended by William Morris, as well as by OscarWilde, and it led directly to Walker’s informal partnership in Morris’s Kelmscott Press.) Wilde’s five reviews made it clear that he had attendedclosely to such luminaries of design as Walker, William Morris, T. J. Cobden- Sanderson, and Walter Crane; and in his review of Crane’s closing lecture Wildehad enthusiastically endorsed Crane’s elevation of design over representational art on the grounds of its “ideal beauty,” its “loveliness” and its subordinationof “appearance” to “decorative motive” (“The Close of the Arts and Crafts,” 106- 7). For Wilde’s evolving response to T. J. Cobden- Sanderson’s lecture on bookbinding, see Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books , 114- 16.

As important, in 1890 Wilde had written the following:

The art that is franklydecorative is the art to live with.... The marvels of design stir the imagination. In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latentelements of culture. Nor is this all. By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary painter,decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the basis ofcreative no less than of critical achievement. (“The Critic As Artist,”398)