Philip Alexius DE LASZLO

Relatively few drawings by de László are known. While he made drawn studies for his early genre pictures, as a portraitist he tended not to work from preparatory drawings but to draw directly on the canvas. However, the artist did produce several finished portrait drawings, in pencil, charcoal or coloured chalks.
 
De László and his wife visited Morocco in March 1934, staying at the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh for three weeks and stopping at Tangiers on their way back to England. The artist’s diary account of his brief time in Morocco reveals that he found the experience discouraging: ‘We drove through the moorish quarter – which terribly disappointed us – poor – miserable people…it is a great blow to us all – especially to me – as I looked forward to paint interesting subjects.’ Nevertheless, he was invited to lunch by the powerful Pasha of Marrakesh, Thami El Glaoui, and also met the French painter Jacques Majorelle through a mutual friend, Camille Mauclair. Majorelle invited de László to paint in his famous garden in Marrakash and also allowed him to make use of his adjoining home studio, in which he painted two of Majorelle’s Berber models. As has been noted, ‘There are five recorded studies of nudes and figures that he produced during this time. Many of them remain in the possession of the artist’s descendants’. During his Moroccan stay, de László produced two landscapes and two paintings of nudes, as well as an oil sketch of a young girl holding an urn that may depict the same sitter as the present sheet.

The present sheet is listed in the de László studio inventory as Study of a Marakeesh as no.186. A comparable watercolour study of a Berber, of the same date, is today in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.