Harry Graf Kessler (1868-1937) and Charles Ricketts met a few times, but Ricketts did not particularly like him. Kessler was a German publisher, author, diplomat and art collector whose Cranach Press is considered to be the most elegant and important private press in Germany. His edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1929), with wood engravings by Gordon Craig, is regarded in particular as a modern highlight in the art of book design.
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| Harry Graf Kessler in 1889 Photo by Leonard Berlin (1841–1931) [Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Nachlass Harry Graf Kessler] |
During a visit to Berlin in August 1903, Ricketts ran into Kessler – whom he must have met previously, probably in October 1897 – on several occasions at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. In a letter to Charles Shannon, he makes his discomfort about these meetings clear:
I have bumped against Kessler some 3 times I find that cutting him or being cut by him is undermining my health. He dresses in quite a slatternly way which is nice of him, he is very voluble and eager much more than I am, next to him I am a Piero della Francesca figure.(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. I, p. 217, letter 227).
A year later Ricketts and Kessler corresponded about Maxim Gorki who was arrested during the first Russian Revolution.
In January 1912, Kessler and Ricketts were among the guests of a supper to honour the stage-director Max Reinhardt, and in a letter to a friend Ricketts wrote:
[...] Count Kessler was there also, I am glad to say he is quite bald.
He underlined the last word to emphasise his delight.
(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. II, p. 778, letter 736).
Finally, in a letter to the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley from March 1915, Ricketts wrote about the rehearsal of the London performance of Richard Strauss' opera The Knight of the Rose (Der Rosenkavalier):
Count Kessler who first thought of the plot before a picture of Veronese, is an old personal dislike and enemy of ours in Germany.
(The Collected Letters of Charles Ricketts, vol. II, p. 966, letter 905).
In this letter, the animosity is linked to Kessler's support for Post-Impressionism. The elephant in the room.
Kessler himself may well have felt differently, although his diaries reveal no evidence of either antipathy or sympathy. He did mention both Ricketts and Shannon in a relatively short list of English painters whose work appealed to him, when he gave an interview to the Daily Mail:
You have, besides, some most remarkable artists, who are perhaps thought too little of in your own country – men like Wilson Steer, Charles Shannon, Ricketts, Condor, Rothenstein, and young artists of great promise like John Gordon Craig and Wells. […] Even in painting, the brushwork of men like Whistler or Charles Shannon has hardly any rival in our day for its grace and charm.
('German View of Our Art. "Conceived by Gentlemen for Gentlemen." How it is Unique', in Daily Mail, 4 August 1904, p. 2)
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| Harry Graf Kessler in 1924 Photo: Chevallier Georges [Musée Albert-Kahn] [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license] |
In 1897, Kessler had travelled to London to meet Ricketts. It is not entirely certain whether that meeting actually took place. The reason for his visit was his admiration for Ricketts’s early editions: Daphnis and Chloe (1893) and Hero and Leander (1894).
Kessler had been working for some time on a new edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), which finally appeared in 1908. At first he wanted Ricketts to design the book, then he approached Georges Lemmen (who designed a new typeface for the book), and in the end Henry van der Velde designed the work.
Both Belgian artists had received samples of the two early Ricketts and Shannon books, as Kessler wanted them to be inspired by the Caslon type that was used.
