Memories of a friendship with Diego Giacometti: ‘He was so gentle and kind. Such a beautiful man’

The first time Lady Mercia Harrison saw furniture by Diego Giacometti she was at a cocktail party in Zurich. ‘They were so beautiful I started to cry,’ she says. ‘There was something so joyous about them.’ She begged her host for Giacometti’s telephone number, but was warned that he had a thick book of orders which he ignored, and was not interested in meeting collectors.

Undeterred, she phoned the artist. ‘I didn’t want to address him as “Monsieur”, so I called him “Maître”, which he thought hilarious, and I think it broke the ice.’ Even so, Giacometti rejected her invitation to lunch, so she got on a plane to Paris. ‘I rang the bell of his studio on Rue Hippolyte-Maindron and said: “I am Mercia Harrison, would you like to have lunch with me?” He was so surprised that he agreed.’ It was the start of an unlikely friendship between the furniture-maker and the wife of a world-famous British actor.

Slight and vivacious, with a sharp sense of humour, Lady Harrison is the widow of Sir Rex Harrison, renowned for his portrayal of Professor Henry Higgins in the film My Fair Lady. The couple met in Antibes in 1975. With her delicate oval face and dark hair, Mercia had been likened to the actress Merle Oberon, and soon Rex was head-over-heels in love with her. ‘She’s a wonderful woman, very beautiful, terribly bright,’ he told the press when they married in 1978.

Rex introduced Mercia to the glamorous world of show business, and she in turn introduced him to the world of art, having been a passionate collector of Pop art since the early 1960s. ‘I love the way it thumbs its nose at convention,’ she says. Today, seated in her apartment, surrounded by books (‘I panic if I don’t have 25 on the go’) and her Giacometti furniture, the nonagenarian is still very much the art lover, with a keen grasp on the contemporary art world.

The collector believes that her friendship with Giacometti was based on their mutual non-conformity. Born in Singapore in 1928, Lady Harrison has lived a globetrotting life between Asia, Europe and the United States, while Giacometti led an unconventional life in Paris, rejecting high society for a bohemian existence in Montparnasse, surrounded by cats and half-finished orders. He was habitual (always eating in the same restaurant) and mercurial, telling Lady Harrison that he was a communist because a man from the Russian consulate had once paid the tax on his new shoes when he was caught crossing the border between France and Switzerland without any money.

Lady Harrison recalls that Giacometti was ‘so good-looking, so humble’, and was uncomfortable with being described as a ‘sculptor’. ‘I am an artisan,’ he would protest to collectors keen to venerate his immense talent. As the younger brother of the celebrated sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Diego preferred the shadows to the limelight, quietly working as his sibling’s technical assistant and muse.

By the time the elder Giacometti died in 1966, however, Diego was widely respected as a furniture-maker, providing works for Fondation Maeght and the Picasso Museum. His designs echoed his brother’s rough-hewn, thin-as-a-blade style, yet in Diego’s hands, Alberto’s fragile anxiety became playfully conversational. His consoles and chairs have an archaic, timeless quality — they could have been excavated from an Etruscan tomb.

As an animal lover, he often incorporated little creatures into his designs: a tiny filigree stag, a dog lifting its leg, or an owl resting on a coat stand. ‘There was such imagination and dexterity,’ as his long-time admirer Hubert de Givenchy once said.

On 3 December 2024, works by Diego Giacometti from the collection of Lady Harrison will be offered in the Design sale in Paris. They include the witty ‘Promenade des Amis’ console, featuring a horse and three dogs meeting under a tree, as well as two chairs with lions’ heads, a pond-like table with frogs and birds, and another inspired by bats.

As one of the very few collectors Giacometti approved of (another being Mrs Paul Mellon), Lady Harrison was fortunate to be allowed to acquire so many pieces. ‘If you can call it that,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Diego had no interest in money. He kept his francs in a little wooden drawer. It was so careless, but he told me he had been robbed so many times it didn’t matter.’

Wearing workman’s clothes and a battered felt hat, often cocked at a rakish angle, Giacometti could be found working in his little shed in what was once the artisan area of Montparnasse, a few metres away from his ivy-clad house on Rue du Moulin Vert. His spartan existence was a hangover from the Second World War, when the impoverished artist struggled to feed himself. He once told Lady Harrison that he and his friends were so starved for entertainment, they used to go to the cemetery in the early morning to watch the pale blue will-o’-the-wisps that would emerge from the coffins waiting to be buried.

The last time Lady Harrison spoke to her friend was just before his cataract operation in 1985. ‘I think he had a premonition,’ she says. ‘He told me he was worried, but everyone just assumed it was safe.’ He died on the operating table later that day.

When she thinks of Giacometti, she recalls his love of cats. ‘I remember walking back from lunch on a cold winter’s day, and he asked if he could drop by the foundry because the central heating was a bit wonky and he was worried about the stray cat living there. We arrived, and it was freezing. So he took off his coat and put it in the cat’s bed. He was so gentle and kind. Such a beautiful man.’

On 3 December 2024, Christie’s in Paris will offer some 180 lots in the Design sale, from mid-century French masters Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Royère and Georges Jouve to more contemporary pieces, such as a Maria Pergay ensemble and iconic works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. On view from 28 November to 3 December