Inondation (or: "Deluge","Interior") - from L'Estampe Originale Album VII

Charles de Sousy Ricketts

Charles Ricketts created this image for the French publication L'Estampe Originale (ed. Andre Marty, Paris), Album VII, no.7, in 1894. The album, published with the aim of promoting printmaking as a fine art, contained eleven works by eleven different artists working in different printmaking mediums.

In Ricketts' nocturnal woodengraving, a sea serpent drapes its body over the wooden shelter of a helm on an ocean vessel, peering through an window onto what appears to the ship's crew preparing for their supper. The viewer is invited to imagine the story behind the image, and what sinister plan the creature has plotted.

"Deluge" is illustrated on page 105, figure 62, of The Artistic Revival of the Woodcut in France 1850-1900 (1983. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art). The authors commented about this work: 'For the most part "The Deluge" is a white-line drawing that reveals little of the nature of the wood or of the cutting tool' and 'Except for the mysterious (perhaps oriental) ceremony at the lower left and the impending doom embodied in the serpentlike monster that slithers over the rooftops, the surface of this print is filled with an assortment of meaningless structures."

Despite this rather unfavorable observation, this small format work reflects Ricketts' creative imagination, one honed by his years as a theater and opera set designer with a keen eye for the fantastic.