Tag Archives: William Bruce Ellis Ranken

What William Bruce Ellis Ranken Never Said

1 Reply
Self Portrait by William Ranken, 1902.

“Dare I suggest that we are both infatuated with the same beautiful young man?” said John Singer Sargent.

“I fear that this is the case,” replied Baron Adolph de Meyer.

“Then it is true that we will both do our best to win his affections?”

“Yes,” said de Meyer. “You will teach him the skills required of an artist. I shall dazzle him from behind the camera.”

“May the best man capture his heart,” Sargent laughed.

The conversation is entirely fabricated.

We shall never know whether John Singer Sargent, the American portraitist, or the pioneering French photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer, was tempted to seduce William Bruce Ellis Ranken, the extraordinarily handsome young artist who had studied at the Slade School of Art.

But it is an irresistible possibility.

The two older men had witnessed the disgrace of Oscar Wilde, and if such thoughts existed, they would have had to remain unspoken. Desire was one thing; admitting to it was quite another.

But suppose, for a moment, that they were both captivated by Ranken. Might he have replied, in that soft Scottish accent:

“I am flattered by your attention. I am happy to be seduced by either of you. If it advances my career, I shall willingly sacrifice my innocence. But you must understand that I already belong to someone else.”

That someone was Ernest Thesiger, Ranken’s fellow student at the Slade, who would go on to become an actor.

Perhaps Thesiger, with his taste for theatricality and his instinct for the deliciously ambiguous, might even have prophesied what I am suggesting here. The title of his 1927 autobiography seems almost to wink at us from across the decades:

Practically Correct.

“I knew that one day somebody would understand,” Thesiger might have said. “That we had to hide our forbidden passion.”

“But there were wicked tongues,” Ranken might have added. “The spiteful and the jealous, always watching, always waiting to discover something that was never meant to be discovered.”

According to the story, Ernest and Ranken’s sister, Janette, devised a solution. They would become brothers-in-law as well as lovers.

“I did not like the idea,” Ranken might have confessed. “But there was no choice. I shaved off my hair — an act of protest, shock and grief. And yet the three of us lived together in harmony, protected, at least for a while, from the prying eyes and insinuations of others.”

Whether any of this is true is another matter.

Perhaps that is precisely the problem with Ranken. There is so much about him that sounds invented even when it is not.

William Bruce Ellis Ranken was an extraordinarily handsome Edwardian aesthete: flamboyant, charming, fiercely dramatic and devoted to beauty. He inhabited a world of visual splendour, yet apparently possessed a warmth that made him unusually free of the snobbery one might expect from his surroundings.

He seems, in retrospect, almost too perfectly cast for the role.

And perhaps that is why the temptation to invent a little around him is so difficult to resist.

Ranken photographed by Baron Adolph de Meyer in 1902.

Hot Boys, Great Art

Leave a reply

Hibiscus Flower: William Bruce Ellis Ranken (1922)

Ranken, William Bruce Ellis; Hibiscus Flower; Nottingham City Museums and Galleries; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/hibiscus-flower-46866

“A half nude youth of splendid beauty faces the spectator, wearing Oriental breeches of green, with a sash of gold, and a drapery of magenta — all this splendour relieved against a figured background of dark red and gold. The scarlet hibiscus flower, held ever so languidly by the golden youth, is intended to constitute the climax of all this Oriental glory.”

That was how The Scarlet Hibiscus was described when it was exhibited at the Modern Society of Portrait Painters exhibition at the Royal Institute, Piccadilly, in 1922. The artist was Edinburgh-born William Bruce Ellis Ranken.

The painting remained in Ranken’s private collection until his death in 1941, when his collection was dispersed among public museums and galleries across Britain.

Standing almost two metres tall in its frame, The Scarlet Hibiscus was eventually donated to Nottingham Castle Museum by Ranken’s sister, Janette. It has been known there ever since as Hibiscus Flower.

The identity of the sitter remains something of a mystery. Ranken’s sister suggested that he might have been the British ballet dancer Anton Dolin. The sitter’s darker complexion would seem to argue against that identification, although Ranken was hardly above exercising a little artistic licence.

Whatever his identity, the young man is unmistakably the star of the picture. This is male beauty turned into spectacle: highly stylised, intensely decorative and with a sensual concentration on the male form. It is precisely the kind of work that makes Ranken so fascinating today, particularly as questions surrounding his sexuality have become increasingly part of the discussion of his art.

Much of Ranken’s work was destroyed during the Second World War, while the fashionable world that had once embraced his particular brand of glamour had already begun to move on. By the time he died, his social and financial fortunes had considerably diminished.

Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about Ranken is how differently we see him now. Once regarded largely as a society portraitist whose moment had passed, he is increasingly being recognised as a pioneering queer British artist — and as a painter who was quite prepared to celebrate the beauty of the male body.

See also What William Bruce Ellis Ranken Never Said