Great Britain’s leading theatre designer from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, Oliver Messel (1904-1978) won international acclaim for his lavish, painterly and poetic designs informed by period styles. His work spans ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue. Messel’s traditional style of theatre design became unfashionable from the mid 1950s onwards, and he increasingly concentrated on painting, interior and textile design, including designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

Mozart’s comic opera The Abduction from the Seraglio was one of four Mozart operas performed at Glyndebourne in 1956 to celebrate the bi-centenary of his birth. Messel’s exuberant designs are inspired by 18th-century Western European art and design and its fascination with the Ottoman Empire, in harmony with the light-hearted spirit of Mozart’s opera.

The palm tree and giant turtle stress the exotic location of Selim’s palace on the Turkish coast. Messel used painted acetate to create an effect of intricate lattice work for the palace, inspired by Asian-style pavilions depicted in English tapestries and on Meissen porcelain. The composition and the stiff, upright trees are based on an etching by the Italian 18th-century artist Bernardo Bellotto (ca. 1721-1780), featuring a scene from the ballet Le Turc Genereux (1759).