646. Harold Acton visits Ricketts

The British writer and aesthete Harold Acton (1904-1994), born and died in Villa La Pietra outside Florence, knew the likes of George Orwell, Henry Green, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh. Once he visited Charles Ricketts.

Harold Acton at Oxford around 1922
[Wikipedia Commons]

Acton bequeathed his villa, including its extensive art collection, to New York University. The Pietra Library contains two Vale Press books: Michael Field, Julia Domna (1903) and Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (1900), two books designed by Ricketts: a first edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward Lock, 1891) and Lord de Tabley's Poems Dramatic and Lyrical (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane; New York: Macmillan and Company, 1893), as well as Ricketts's own collection of essays Pages on Art (London: Constable, 1913).

His visit to Ricketts is recorded in a letter written by Acton to the author Ralph Ricketts (1902-1998) in October 1972. He remembered that Ricketts's taste was exquisite, that he hated Cézanne and post-impressionism, and that Ricketts and Acton were both friends of the artist Thomas Lowinsky.

Ricketts had given Acton a tour of Lansdowne House, subtly commenting on each work of art - and he remembered Ricketts as a delightful and stimulating companion.

He mentions also that he wrote a review of Self-Portrait in 1940, but that he had lost the book and the review with it. Said to be published in World Review, I have not been able to locate  a copy yet.

The writer Ralph Robert Ricketts was born in Simla in India and an unpublished family story recorded a curious incident:

On one of her visits to England, Ricketts recalled his mother proudly showing his grandfather a drawing of a daffodil, which he had done for her. The old man, possibly fearing that Ricketts would go the way of his distant relation the collector, publisher, designer, and friend of Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, silently tore the drawing into little pieces before sighing and finally saying "we'll say no more about that".

Before Ralph Ricketts published his first novel (A Lady Leaves Home, 1934), J.C. Squire offered him a job at The London Mercury for which he worked until 1939. He suffered from ill-health all his life, writing books during better periods. A leading theme in his novels was the conflict between worldly and spiritual life. The novelist L.P. Hartley praised his novel The Manikin (Faber and Faber, 1956), and became a friend. His last novel appeared in 1961.