Ricketts was interested in and equally able to engage with artists as diverse as Dalou, Pisanello, Conder, Meunier and Velazquez. A successful painter himself who collected and studied ancient art, Ricketts’s passion for old-masters paintings and his preference for a style of art which still followed the ancient figurative canon has been so far interpreted as a late product of a Victorian Aestheticism – Ricketts himself described his works as by ‘an undiscovered master of the nineteenth century’.[1]