Private collection, UK.

2011-2012: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
2011: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
2011: The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, de Young Museum, San Francisco.
1968: The Fine Arts Society, London.
1909: Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Water-Colour Drawings, Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts, Sculpture and Jewellery by Charles Shannon, Charles Ricketts, William Strang, ARA, C. J. Holmes and H. Wilson, Manchester City Art Gallery.
1906: Sixth Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, London, ref. no. 52.
1906: New Gallery, London.
1905-1906: Carfax Gallery, London.

Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (eds.), The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 (London: V & A Publishing, 2011), p. 230.
Nikolaus Pevsner (foreword), British Sculpture 1850-1914 [A Loan Exhibition of Sculpture and Medals Sponsored by The Victorian Society - 30th September - 30th October, 1968] (London: Fine Arts Society, 1968), p. 30.
Anon, Catalogue of the Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Water-Colour Drawings, Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts, Sculpture and Jewellery by Charles Shannon, Charles Ricketts, William Strang, A.R.A., C.J. Holmes and H. Wilson, exh. cat. (Manchester: John Heywood Ltd, 1909), p. 22.
Anon, A Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Prints and Sculptures at the Sixth Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers (London: Ballantyne & Co, 1906), p. 14.
Anon, The Athenæum, 4081 (1906), p. 56.

Charles de Sousy Ricketts (1866–1931) was a Swiss-born sculptor, painter and printmaker, whose creative outlets also extended to book illustration, jewellery, theatre costumes and set design. HIs influences included artistic idealism, Romantic literature, and the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. He became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1922, achieving Royal Academician status in 1928.

Ricketts enjoyed a life-long companionship, co-residence, and artistic collaboration with Charles Haselwood Shannon (1863-1937), with whom he was also thought to have had a romantic relationship for a time although neither men defined it as such within their circle of friends. A 1924 copy of Country Life magazine included a feature on the domestic interiors of Ricketts's and Shannon's country home in Chilham Keep on the estate of Chilham Castle, Kent. This feature, according to the historian Matt Cook, legitimised their queerness on the grounds of late nineteenth-century Wildean aestheticism, also rendering them respectable by locating them in an ancient setting focussed on popular romanticised notions of medieval and Jacobean heritage. Moreover, the two men's companionship was framed around a definition of friendship that was originally established by the sixteenth-century philosopher, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), central to which was the bond of souls.

Ricketts and Shannon articulated the strength of this bond through not only their co-residence, but also in their emotional, aesthetic, and practical investment in their property at Chilham Castle as well as across their London residences. Indeed, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) described their homes as 'the one place in London you'll never be bored' due to their extraordinary art collection, which was a veritable treasure trove of Japanese woodcuts and prints, Old Master's paintings and drawings, Persian paintings, and works from their contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites, alongside which was a cornucopia of Mediterranean antiquities. In their aesthetic choices and collecting practices they sustained their coupledom and animated one another, protecting themselves from criticism in what has been defined as their' intensely domestic existence' which was underscored by a visible and highly cultured rendition of home.

Silence is one of only twenty or so sculptures Ricketts produced and is also one of his only clothed bronze figures, since the majority of his statuettes were nudes. It is indebted to the style and workmanship of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), and inspired by the fourth-century Greek Tanagra terracotta figurines which served as funerary objects. The figure is thought to be a memorial to Wilde, in whose queer circle Ricketts was a part of and with whom he was great friends. There are only two bronze casts of this statuette known to have survived, with the other figure and their plaster maquette held in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. In January 1905, Ricketts's journal recorded a conversation about Wilde's tomb with the executor of his estate, Robert Ross (1869-1918), which provides tantalising evidence that Ricketts had at one point been a contender for the commission. Indeed, it was in the September of the same year that Ricketts completed a small bronze statuette entitled Silence, and in the few times this piece has been exhibited or catalogued over the course of a century or so it has been identified as a rejected design for Wilde's tomb. Further links can be made between Ricketts's Silence and Wilde's memorial. Ross, for example, curated two exhibitions of Ricketts's bronzes in the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905 and 1906, in which Silence was exhibited on both occasions. Ricketts's journals also suggest he was consumed for a time by Wilde's death, and was tortured by nightmares in his grief. Yet according to several entries these dreams provided him with an unusually lengthy focus during the sculpture's composition, as he recorded in early September 1905 how he had worked all day on the '[f]igure of "Silence" (a statuette)'. A day later we find another entry concerned with 'nine hours on figure of "Silence"'. By the end of the month, Ricketts reflected how he 'continued tinkering. Of this there is no end'. Whilst these examples are not definitive evidence that this figure was designed specifically for Wilde's monument, they are indicative of the connection between the two men and serve as a testament to Ricketts's queer memorialisation of his enduring friendship with the poet.

Their friendship resulted in Ricketts illustrating a number of Wilde's works, including the lyrical poem, 'The Sphinx' (1894), and a collection of fairy tales entitled a House of Pomegranates (1891). He also painted the frontispiece of Wilde's novel, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889). The fellowship they formed was a lasting one, with Ricketts publishing a personal memoir of his friend in 1932 under the title Recollections of Oscar Wilde. His reflections on Wilde shortly after the poet's untimely death were captured in an emotional diary entry in which he recalled that 'I viewed him as the most genial, kindly, and civilized of men, but it never entered my head that his personality was the most remarkable one that I should ever meet'. Ricketts's memorials to Wilde did not stop at Silence. Prior to the sculpture's completion he illustrated the cover design of the expurgated version of the letter De Profundis on its posthumous publication early in 1905 - this monologue Wilde composed to his lover John Douglas (1844-1900), whose accusations of sodomy resulted in the trial that changed the course of Wilde's life. Ricketts's design was simple but thoughtful in its depiction of a gilt bird escaping its confinement from behind prison bars, and thus evocative of Ricketts's feelings on the tragedy he felt surrounded the poet's life and death.

Silence was exhibited at the New Gallery, London, in 1906 in an exhibition of the work by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. In a corresponding review in the Athenæum Ricketts was described as 'the most varied and accomplished technician in England'. The critics hailed Silence as exemplary in form, with 'great beauty and unity of silhouette' whilst 'the drapery is disposed with Mr. Ricketts's intense and instinctive feeling for rhythm'. Such an enthusiastic review is particularly striking when we consider that Ricketts's preferred medium had not, until then, been sculpture. It was only a couple of years before this exhibition that the artist had started to experiment with clay and had crafted several small figures, when in his own words he remarked how he had 'turned sculptor'. Together with his book illustrations of Wilde's work, this figure evokes a sense of introspection and privacy. Yet with its subject matter intricately tied to Wilde's memorial the sculpture also speaks to a shared secret history, one which was underpinned by anxieties around exposure and public judgement.