Property from the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust MARIE-LOUISE VON MOTESICZKY (AUSTRIAN 1906-1996) The Gardener oil on canvas 76.1 x 50.8 cm (29 7/8 x 20 in) LITERATURE: I. Schlenker, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky 1906-1996, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, New York, 2009, p. 178, no. 75 catalogued, p. 179, illustrated Painted in 1945. Ines Schlenker assumed in her 2009 catalogue that the present work depicts a gardener employed by Marie-Louise and her mother in Amersham, because the painting was done when Marie-Louise and her mother were living there. Recently it has been suggested that the subject might be a gardener who worked on the Motesiczkys' estate at Hinterbrühl, south west of Vienna where they spent their summers before the War (fig. 1). If this is so, he would have been painted from memory and photographs. A photograph survives in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky archive at Tate of the man in question, Josef Rasser, although it does not allow a definitive identification with the gardener in the painting. Jill Lloyd in her biography of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky describes the beauty of Hinterbrühl which 'comprised a magnificent villa, with some eighteen large rooms, surrounded by several acres of landscaped gardens and woodland.' Henriette, Marie-Louise's mother, who inherited the property on her parents' death, evoked the house in its heyday: 'with its sweeping stone stairways, its scented rose gardens and its candlelit rooms, filled with the perfume of dark-red and pink carnations, which were placed every evening in a china jardinière at the centre of the dining table.' (Lloyd p. 3). See introduction to lot 328.