Walter Ritchie: Sculpture

4to. Softcover. Pp. 96. Inscribed by Walter Ritchie on the first clean page 'To Rita'. In very good condition, with slight shelf-wear to the cover including wear along the top and bottom of the spine, and along the edges. A mark on the front cover, top right corner, and minor creasing at the bottom left corner of the back cover. Pages themselves are clean and fresh. Illustrated with b/w photographs with an introduction written by the artist. Walter Ritchie was a British sculptor, one of the last living pupils of Eric Gill at Pigotts near High Wycombe before the Second World War. Many of his public works were in stone, wood, metal and brick relief, as many of his commissions were for public buildings. Ritchie never had assistants. His mistakes, he used to say, were his own. He never mixed in social circles and refused offers to help him set up in London. A very private person, he lived alone for 57 years in the house where his family was evacuated after the Coventry Blitz, rarely taking holidays. His obituary in The Independent in 1997 claimed that The career of the sculptor Walter Ritchie provides the best 20th century example of the artist as his own worst enemy because he only ever had two exhibitions, one in the 1960s and one in the 1990s.…