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 opera Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) (1786) was performed to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1955. Critics praised Messel’s exuberant pastiche of 18th-century art and design ‘The décor by Oliver Messel was in his richest and most inventive vein, fully emphasising the unique blend of sharp satire and human understanding for the folly and unhappiness of the characters which Mozart so perfectly caught in his music’ (The Tatler, 22 June, 1955).

This preliminary charcoal sketch for the garden has evidently been drawn at some speed, indicating Messel’s feverish creativity leading to the completion of designs for a production. Sometimes he would work all night to see his ideas through to fruition, on top of daytime meetings with costume and prop makers.