Costume design by Percy Anderson for Bouncer in Cox and Box, Princes Theatre, 1921.

Cox and Box, or, The Long Lost Brothers by Francis Burnand and Arthur Sullivan was first performed at Moray Lodge, Campden Hill, on Saturday 26 May 1866.

This one-act opera was conceived for one of Arthur Lewis’s Moray Minstrels’ parties given at his Kensington home four Saturdays a year– all-male affairs before his marriage in 1867, with glee-singing, oysters at 11pm, an entertainment, and copious drinking and smoking. Guests included some of London’s most influential creative men including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Edwin Landseer, George Du Maurier, Frederick Leighton, and Frederick Walker, who designed Lewis’s engraved invitation card from 1865 to 1871.

Following Offenbach’s Les Deux Aveugles at a previous event, Burnand suggested that he and the 24-year old Sullivan set John Maddison Morton’s 1847 farce Box and Cox as an operetta. With its plot concerning a hatter and a printer who unbeknown to each other occupy the same room in lodgings due to their working hours, it was repeated at Moray House on 27th April 1867, and with Sullivan’s orchestration for benefits at the Adelphi Theatre on 11th May 1867, and at Manchester Theatre Royal on 29th July 1867. It had its first professional run at London’s Royal Gallery of Illustration from 29th March 1869, and featured in the D’Oyly Carte repertoire after its inclusion at the Savoy Theatre on 31st December 1894.

The artist and costume designer Percy Anderson (1851-1928) was based in London where he exhibited watercolours at the New Water Colour Society in 1886. He designed costumes for the original productions of the last four Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Savoy Theatre - The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), Utopia, Limited (1893), and The Grand Duke (1896), and for several D’Oyly Carte revivals including that for Utopia, Limited considered by Rupert D’Oyly Carte in 1926 and but never realised. Given Gilbert’s exacting attitude to his productions it is an accolade to Anderson that he worked with Gilbert on so many, including Gilbert and Edward German’s Fallen Fairies (1909), when Gilbert said Anderson: ‘surpassed himself’.

Anderson designed costumes for many other notable late 19th century productions including several by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre, and musical comedies produced by George Edwardes at Daly’s Theatre such as San Toy (1899) and The Duchess of Dantzig (1903). Among his other successes were costumes for Oscar Ashe’s spectacular productions Kismet (1911), Chu Chin Chow (1916), and Cairo (1921). He also painted portraits including those of his great friend Edward Elgar (1905), Stephen Phillips (1902), and Joseph Conrad (1918).