Ralph Nicholas Chubb was born at Harpemden in Hertfordshire on 8 February 1892. Chubb attended St Albans School and Selwyn College, Cambridge, before serving as an officer in the army in the Great War. He developed neurasthenia and was invalided out in 1918. From 1919 to 1922 he studied at the Slade. It was there that he met Leon Underwood. He contributed several articles and poems to Underwood’s magazine The Island. Although his work was shown at both the Goupil Gallery and the RA, his paintings did not sell. He moved to the village of Curridge, near Newbury in Berkshire and began to devote his talents to the printed works which would become the chief labour of his life. Heavily influenced by Whitman, Blake and the Romantics, he created a highly intricate personal mythology, one that was anti-materialist and sexually revolutionary. His typeset books of the 1920s were a humble offering, showcasing Chubb’s talent for woodcuts and his quaint, visually inspired poetry. Even at that stage, his life-long obsession with the adolescent male was apparent. He expanded upon this theme rather more explicitly in An Appendix, a pederastic and spiritualist manifesto duplicated from a cursive manuscript. An Appendix was the first of his printed works to be printed in his own hand. He soon followed it up with the first of his lithographic books, The Sun Spirit. Throughout the 1930s, Chubb’s books became more elaborate and appealing. Water Cherubs crystallised his aesthetic of the youthful male form, and The Secret Country unfolded like an illuminated manuscript, recounting stories of Chubb’s family and his journeys among the Romani of the New Forest in Hampshire. His work was interrupted by the Second World War, but in 1948 he brought forth two massive volumes: The Child Of Dawn and Flames of Sunrise. Each page of these two volumes was crowded with obscure examples of Chubb’s complex mythology and drawings of symbolic significance. Briefly, his vision was a prophecy of the redemption of ‘Albion’, or England, by the boy-god Ra-el-phaos, of whom Ralph modestly claimed be both prophet and herald. This echoes an earlier announcement to be found in The Heavenly Cupid: ‘I announce a secret event as tremendous and mysterious as any that has occurred in the spiritual history of the world. I announce the inauguration of a Third Dispensation, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost on earth, and the visible advent thereof on earth in the form of a Young Boy of 13 years old, naked perfect and unblemished.’ Other themes run through Chubb’s work. He was haunted by the memory of a young chorister at St Albans, who disappeared from his life, just as Chubb had summoned up the courage to speak to him. Similarly, a brief sexual relationship with another boy when Ralph was 19 served as a template for future visions of paradise. Chubb’s books became progressively more self-absorbed and paranoid. Seeking to articulate his desires, he created a mythology which explained everything in terms only he could understand. Nonetheless, his work is of fascinating psychological significance; each of the various angels, knights, seers, and boy-gods in his dream world represents an aspect of his introspective and persecuted self. Like many other artists of his generation, he resented science for its intrusion into his imagination and excoriated the taboos and frustrations of modern life. In 1927 he wrote: ‘Existence, besides being a miracle, is a symbol. Albeit here for inscrutable purposes the spirit is only to be discerned as it were in a distorting-glass.’ Chubb stated: ‘I do not necessarily claim to be a great artist or writer; but I claim to be a true spirit – this is a subtler test. Seek me out; but you may not find me.’ Failing in health and beset by legal and financial difficulties, Chubb abandoned his work in the mid-1950s and began to collect and reprint his early poems and childhood memories. Treasure Trove and The Golden City (published posthumously) are devoid of naked youths, but instead offer a glimpse into his youthful imagination, and some of his most charming poetry. In his later years, Chubb donated his remaining volumes to Britain’s national libraries. He died peacefully on 14 January 1960 at Fair Oak Cottage in Hampshire and was buried next to his parents at Kingsclere. None of the editions of Chubb’s books exceed more than 200 copies, and some of his lithographed masterworks exist in only 30 or 40 copies, of which a mere six or seven were meticulously hand-coloured.