The View from Firefly

Details

Sir Noël Coward (1899-1973)
The View from Firefly
oil on canvas
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61.3 cm.)
Painted circa 1955.

Literature

S. Morley, Out in the Midday Sun The Paintings of Noel Coward, Oxford, 1988, pp. 78, 79, illustrated.

Special notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

Lot Essay

In the 1950s Coward began to feel that his first home in Jamaica, Blue Harbour, had become too busy to work at, and so in 1955 he built Firefly, a modest one-bedroomed house with spectacular views across the Caribbean.

‘Firefly Hill has given me the most valuable benison of all: time to read and write and think and get my mind in order,’ Coward wrote in his diary. ‘I love this place. It deeply enchants me. Whatever happens to this silly world, nothing much is likely to happen here.’

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