Ricketts exercised complete control of design and production. He told Lucien Pissarro that he intended "to do for the book something in the line of what William Morris did for furniture". Cooper writes that Ricketts designed founts, initials, borders and illustrations for the press, "blending medieval, Renaissance and contemporary imagery". His woodcut illustrations "often incorporated the swirling lines of Art Nouveau and androgynous figures". The Vale Press, which existed between 1896 and 1904, published more than eighty volumes, mostly reprints of English poetic classics, and earned a reputation as "one of the big six amongst modern presses". Initially, Ricketts financed the Vale publications by inviting subscriptions, but in 1894 its finances were put on a more secure footing when he was introduced to a rich barrister, William Llewellyn Hacon, who invested £1,000 and became Ricketts's business partner in the firm. A fire at the printers in 1904 destroyed the press's woodcuts, and Ricketts and Shannon decided to abandon publishing and turn to other work. They closed the Vale Press and threw the type into the river. Ricketts marked the demise of the press by publishing a complete bibliography of its publications. Thereafter, he occasionally designed books for friends such as Michael Field (the joint pen name of Katherine Harris and Emma Cooper) and Gordon Bottomley. Paintings and sculpture Ricketts increasingly turned to painting and sculpture. A later painter, Thomas Lowinsky, has commented on how different Ricketts's styles were as a book designer on the one hand and as a painter on the other: "his books expressed in their pre-Raphaelitism the English side of his character, whilst his pictures, with their debt to Delacroix and Gustave Moreau, the French". Delaney cites Symbolist influences, seen in his choice of themes: tragic and romantic... focused on key moments in the destiny of his subjects, such as Salome, Cleopatra, Don Juan, Montezuma, and (though Ricketts was a non-believer) Christ, figures he admired for the way they courageously met their fates. Delaney ranks among Ricketts's best paintings The Betrayal of Christ (1904); Don Juan and the Statue (1905) and The Death of Don Juan (1911); Bacchus in India (c.1913); The Wise and Foolish Virgins (c. 1913); The Death of Montezuma (c. 1915); and The Return of Judith (1919), and Jepthah's Daughter (1924). At least one of Ricketts's paintings – The Plague – is in a continental gallery, the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. In Delaney's view, Ricketts's