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Lot Essay
Michael Ayrton and John Minton were commissioned by John Gielgud to design the sets and costumes for the 1942 production of Macbeth at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. The artists then held a joint exhibition at the Leicester Galleries the same year. Ayrton and Minton also illustrated the 1951 edition of W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (with an Introduction by Sir Lewis Casson) published by the Folio Society, London. In the introduction Casson recounts:
Michael Ayrton was only nineteen when John Gielgud commissioned him to design sets and costumes for Macbeth. Not unnaturally he felt that the task might be beyond him and suggested a collaboration with John Minton, with whom he had shared a studio in Paris during the year immediately preceding the outbreak of war. In the event, both were called up into the forces and the designs had to be completed during short snatches of leave. Nonetheless the collaboration was so successful, and the work of both artists so closely interwoven, that it is all but impossible, in the set designs, to distinguish which artist was responsible for what.' (L. Casson, The Tragedy of Macbeth, London, 1951, p. 12)
Michael Ayrton was only nineteen when John Gielgud commissioned him to design sets and costumes for Macbeth. Not unnaturally he felt that the task might be beyond him and suggested a collaboration with John Minton, with whom he had shared a studio in Paris during the year immediately preceding the outbreak of war. In the event, both were called up into the forces and the designs had to be completed during short snatches of leave. Nonetheless the collaboration was so successful, and the work of both artists so closely interwoven, that it is all but impossible, in the set designs, to distinguish which artist was responsible for what.' (L. Casson, The Tragedy of Macbeth, London, 1951, p. 12)