Many of Oliver Messel's best designs were for operas at Glyndebourne, the opera house built onto John Christie's private house just outside Lewes, in Sussex. His imaginative and lavish costumes and sets informed by historical styles proved an effective complement to many productions, especially Mozart and Rossini operas. He also designed programme covers, working variations on his designs for the productions on which he had worked that year. However, as the 1953 season coincided with the Coronation of Elizabeth II, Messel based his design upon the Royal insignia, creating a charming, rather playful image derived from the often more austere heraldic beast. In the end, the design was not used.

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain’s leading theatre designer throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, mastering every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well working in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic concepts were perfectly in tune with the times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, that style was becoming unfashionable, and Messel gradually abandoned theatre and built a new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.


A design produced for a Glyndebourne programme, possibly for 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth I's coronation, but unrealised.