Lavery painted this in 1938 at Dar Maroc, a Moroccan-style villa his friend Gordon Coutts had built in Palm Springs in memory of the years the two men had spent together in Tangier. Lavery had first visited in 1936 to see Coutts, then ailing; two years later he returned at the dying wish of Coutts's widow Gertrude, an opera singer, who wanted the painter back as her guest. Days into the visit, Gertrude was killed in a car crash. Lavery, his granddaughter and his secretary stayed on regardless — sittings with Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, were already arranged for the coming weeks.
The sessions took place by the pool, Doris seated on the diving board while her marriage to Viscount Castlerosse was quietly falling apart in the British press back home — the divorce was heard in London the same month this painting hung at the Royal Academy. Lavery had painted her once before, in 1933, during the same strained marriage. Look closely at the finished canvas and there's a second, unexplained pair of legs at the left edge — for decades nobody was certain whose they were. They turned out to be Doris's too, caught between sittings.
Getting the canvas home was its own story. Lavery's granddaughter and secretary drove it from Palm Springs to New York for the ship home, and when floodwater took out a bridge along the way, they slept in the car with the painting as their mattress.
Doris Delevingne later became owner of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice — the building later sold to Peggy Guggenheim, and now the Guggenheim Museum, Venice.
Sizes & Format
40 × 50 cm / 16 × 20″
Available framed (black, white, wood) or unframed
Print & Frame Details
Archival matte paper, 250gsm (110lb), acid-free and FSC-certified — off-white, uncoated. Framed prints: solid oak or ash wood frame, 20mm thick, with shatterproof protective glazing. Ready to hang, hanging kit included. Unframed prints ship flat.
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