Notes

In 1935, Le Roux Smith Le Roux, a Michaelis art student, was selected alongside Eleanor Esmonde-White to produce a large-scale mural, in pure egg tempera, on the upper floor of South Africa House in London. After training in the technique under William Rothenstein at the Royal College of Art, and making scouting trips to study quattrocento examples, the two completed the so-called Zulu Room, a panoramic, stylised and ambitious interpretation of the tribe’s ceremony, landscape, tradition and mythology. Le Roux’s linear style, with its flat, strong colour combinations – all on show in the present lot – was well-suited to mural decoration, and certainly conjured the work of his more famous contemporary, Diego Riviera.