Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt – Windsor Castle 1881

Count Harry Kessler, art connoisseur/diarist was born in Paris on May 23^rd 1868, five days after Nicholas II on May 6^th (OS) / 18^th (NS).

In 1881 Kessler was attending the prep school St. George’s in Ascot near Windsor. On Saturday July 9^th he “… went to a review of 62,000 volunteers but the most interesting thing was the Queen’s procession. In the first carriage was the Queen in black the Princess of Wales in dark blue and the Crown Princess of Germany in white … Then followed some huntsmen next came another carriage with the duchesses of Teck and Connaught and two other ladies then some more huntsmen and the princesses of Hesse-Darmstadt in blue then the officers of police and last but not least the King of Sandwich Islands in another carriage. After these carriages came a royal huntsman in gold and dark crimson then came the Prince of Wales in some dark color … riding next to the Crown Prince of Germany in a white uniform, then came the dukes of Teck, Connaught and Cambridge and the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt the husband of the late unfortunate Princess Alice …”

Illustration (below) of the Review on July 9^th 1881 at Windsor Castle and aerials today

Alix, the daughter of Grand Duke Ludwig and Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, married Nicholas II on November 14^th 1894 becoming Empress Alexandra. Count Kessler’s life intersected in later years with Nicholas and Alexandra.

On Saturday August 31^st and Sunday September 1^st 1901 Count Kessler and Henry van de Velde visited Darmstadt’s artist’s colony under the patronage of Grand Duke Ernest. They were contemplating a similar enterprise in Weimar. The exhibition ‘A Document of German Art’ had opened on May 1^st to immediate controversy.

Kessler returned to Darmstadt on Friday January 3^rd 1908 and visited Grand Duke Ernest in his Neues Palais to discuss a forthcoming exhibition in Paris. At the conclusion of their discussion, Kessler wrote in his diary that Ernest ‘sprang up and reached for some glass vessels that were standing on the mantelpiece. I thought they were Tiffany’s. He contradicted me very forcefully: no that is done locally, by me here in the palace with Schneckenburg. Tiffany wants to get the secret from them’.

The Count further wrote that Ernest wanted to educate the people not to buy overstuffed decorations for their rooms. Kessler looked around the room in the Neues Palace and thought it ‘the most clumsy, over decorated room, stuffed full of inferior modern bronze and knickknacks … The music room next door is an orgy of material and affectation. Between two mosaic walls, a colossal six-or-eight cornered blue grand piano surrounded everywhere by tall thin columns, like sharp icicles, impaled with naked boys and men. In between hovering from above, rings of blue glass that spread a blue light’.

On Wednesday October 27^th 1910 Nicholas and Alix left Wolfsgarten at 3:00 pm and went to the Neues Palais. He wrote that ‘we had been there for a long time. I looked over with Erni [Ernest] several new rooms in the palace’. Nicholas did not comment on what he thought of the rooms. On a previous visit on Saturday September 27^th 1903 they looked ‘over an exhibition of various items, furniture and room arrangement in the new style of Mathildenhohe. It was disgusting to look at in my opinion’.

Photographs (below) of the Neues Palais and Grand Duke Ernest's interiors

On Thursday October 22^nd 1914 Count Kessler was stationed in Cieblovice [Poland] in the Imperial Forest three kilometers from the imperial hunting palace Spala and “drove out to the palace, which is a small one-story, very simple structure looking like the outbuilding of a Swiss inn. Inside it is simply but decently decorated in the English fashion with many bathrooms and other comforts. The princesses slept each two to a room; the tsarevich had on the other hand a room for himself. The tsar and tsarina had a common, very simple bedroom with a large, covered veranda with a pretty view of the park and the Pilica River. The only object of luxury is the very beautiful, enormously large chandelier of silver and antlers …”

Aerial View and Photographs (below) of Spala c1930s