This work came to Mayor Gallery from ‘the suitcase collection’ featured in the 2022 film 'De Verdwenen Lijnen van Marlow Moss’ [The lost lines of Marlow Moss] directors: Fifi Visser and André van der Hout – featuring Andreas Oosthoek, Florette Dijkstra, Ankie de Jongh-Vermeulen, Bart De Baere, Yuranan Panya In, Matthijs Erdman, Joost Jobse, Maaike de Wolf-Mol and myself.

It is a preparatory study for a composition – either a painting or relief. It bears some similarity to a number of different works from the early 1940s, and is clearly part of Moss’s customary working process.

From A.H. Nijhoff’s account, published in the 1962 Stedelijk Museum exhibition catalogue (translated here from the Dutch) the following is gleaned of her working method:

A free-hand sketch in pencil on an odd sheet of paper or perhaps on a piece of linen, coloured in gouache or oils – that is the first stage of her paintings. Alterations are made to this sketch until she is satisfied with it. And only then does she start working with numbers and a ruler. The sketch is measured, ratios checked...

This work is perhaps a ‘second stage’ in the development of the composition, including as it does measurements and ruled lines – the absence of colour may indicate it was for a white relief, in wood or with rope. It is an extremely interesting piece, of great value to scholars, as it lays bare Moss’s thought process and methods.

-Lucy Howarth