12108

Still Life

A Verre Opaline Absinthe Set on a Tray on a Table Covered with a White Cloth with Branches of Pink Flowers and Cream-Yellow Roses 1937

Oil on canvasboard, 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)

Inscribed and dated verso: 1937 Villa les Brises

Studio Inventory, p. 109 (645): Study of ornaments on a Gold Rimmed Tray. Painted at Les Brises, Cap Ferrat

Private Collection

The verre opaline absinthe set must have been among the contents at the Villa Les Brises, Cap Ferrat when Lord Beaverbrook lent his holiday home to de László and his wife Lucy in 1936.^[1] There they spent the winter and early spring, he supposedly resting after a severe attack of angina in August 1936. For a fuller account of the Cap Ferrat period, and the related still-life and landscape paintings, see [11783].

The absinthe set is composed of the large decanter for water, the smaller for the absinthe, the lidded bowl for sugar, with the matching drinking glass. The larger decanter appears in another study of Red and Pink Carnations [11992]. De László also used the verre opaline bowl in his still-life Red, White and Blue Hyacinths [13216].

PROVENANCE:

In the possession of the artist on his death

EXHIBITED:

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6 -22 January, 2004, nº 133, ill.

LITERATURE:

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London 2004, p. 201, ill.

SMdeL & SdeL 2013