CHARBON ANTHRACITE
signed Nobili lower left
gouache and charcoal on card
26 x 26cm; 10 1/4 x 10 1/4in
40 x 40cm; 15 3/4 x 15 3/4in (framed)

Provenance
Purchased by the parents of the present owner in Paris in the 1950s

The scenographer, costume designer, and fashion illustrator Lila de Nobili was born in Lugano to an Italian father and Jewish-Hungarian mother. She was inspired to draw by her elder brother, Marcel Vertes (1895-1961). During the 1930s she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome before moving to Paris in 1943 where she sketched fashion plates and high-end illustrations for advertisements and magazines, especially Vogue. She worked closely with director Raymond Rouleau, designing costumes for his operas, ballets, and plays. Shows included Angel Pavement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), Anna Karenina (1951), Gigi (1951), The Crucible (1954), La Plume de Ma Tante (1958), Carmen (1959) and The Aspern Papers (1961). de Nobili worked alongside directors and composers including Giancarlo Menotti and Luchino Visconti, putting on a grand presentation of La Traviata at La Scala in Milan. During the late 1950s and 1960s, she designed seven Shakespeare comedies, including Cymbeline (1957) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959), for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She also designed the sets and costumes for productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; her neo-gothic designs for The Sleeping Beauty in 1968 was a particular triumph. She simultaneously maintained a prolific designer career in France and Italy for film, ballet, and opera. Her later projects included Jean Balibée’s Sable (1956), Franco Zeffirelli’s Mignon (1957), Menotti’s La Bohème (1960), and Zeffirelli’s Falstaff (1961), Aida (1962), and Rigoletto (1963).