Lot Essay
The present work is from a small series of pictures of gardens in Morocco, painted during one of the artist's regular winter sojourns in Tangier, at his home on a hill outside the city, Dar El Midfah, or 'The House of the Cannon' because apparently there was a half-buried cannon in the garden. The girl riding the donkey is the artist's step-daughter Alice, who came to Morocco with her mother Hazel after she had married Lavery in July 1909. The donkey, Moses, was a delinquent animal which Alice later gave to her mother in exchange for a horse. The moorish child may be Hadeshia, one of Lavery's models, or Aida, the housemaid whom the Laverys smuggled back to London, and who appears with Hazel, Alice and Eileen in 'The Studio', Lavery's homage to Velasquez, begun around 1910 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).