Stage design occupied a large proportion of Ricketts's time from the mid-1900s, when he produced his first designs for plays by Yeats, Binyon and Sturge Moore. The present drawing is for a drop curtain and symbolises 'The Triumph of Faith'. The play has not been identified, but John Masefield's Philip the King, directed by Harley Granville-Barker at Covent Garden as a charity matinée in November 1914, seems a possibility. Ricketts designed the sets and costumes, as well as painting 'two pictures by El Greco for Philip to pray to'.

The figure running in from the right, brandishing a banner, seems to be based (in reverse) on that of Pallas in Mantegna's picture of Pallas expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (Louvre), painted for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este at Mantua, while the twisted columns derive from Raphael's cartoon of Peter and John healing the Blind Man at the Gate of the Temple (Victoria & Albert Museum). This, like his painting of 'El Grecos', was typical of Ricketts. When staging Henry VIII at the Empire Theatre, London, in 1925, he wrote that he 'intended putting Holbein on the stage', and that the sets would include tapestries 'in the most roly-poly Romano-Van Orley style'