Marguerite McBey by James McBey

It's been nearly thirty years since my wife and I started our Christmas morning at Marguerite McBey's villa, El Foolk, overlooking the Straits of Gibralter.  Surrounded by lavender and sunlight we shared champagne before crossing to Algercirus and on to Paris.

I saw Marguerite once more, perhaps two years later, in New York at a gallery opening for her recent watercolors.  I knew she had been married to a Scots painter.  She scattered references to him among her comments. "James collected these telescopes", she explained at the top of the villa's turret.

Otherwise I only knew she was somewhere in her sixties or seventies, striking, witty, generous and fun.  Later I learned more of her extraordinary life.  Boldness and beauty belong together.  Marguerite died 14 years ago today. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Tangier by Marguerite McBey

El Foolk by Marguerite McBey (India Ink)

Her obituary from The Guardian:

Marguerite McBey, who has died aged 94, was the lover of artist Oskar Kokoschka in 1920s Paris, married the celebrated Scottish etcher and painter James McBey in the 1930s, and went on to paint watercolours of Morocco in her 50s. She was born in Philadelphia. Her father had worked for the family banking house in Mannheim until he emigrated to the United States, where he and an uncle established a successful tobacco business. He and his wife's friends included Nathan Straus, owner of Macy's department store and a distant relative. Marguerite was educated in Philadelphia, Switzerland and at the Sorbonne. She also studied bookbinding in New York and at the Ecole et Ateliers d'Art Decoratif in Paris. While there she embarked on a passionate affair with Kokoschka, who nicknamed her "Tamarisk". "I love you so completely that I want to make you my wife, gladly and whenever you please," he wrote to her in August 1925. "I have such complete confidence in you that I will voluntarily let you go away from me again, as dreadfully far and for as long a time as your parents think is necessary, so that they can be convinced that you have not made a mistake and that you want to be united with me." It was not to be: her father called under-age Marguerite back to Philadelphia. In New York she trained and worked as a photographer before opening a business on West 57th Street, binding books by contemporary writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Anatole France. Her professionalism and devotion were intense: she once spent 120 hours binding a book on Manet. Her creations were exhibited in New York and San Francisco, attracting early praise from the New York Times and Vogue. Marguerite met McBey at a Philadelphia dinner party in 1931, and in March they were married two hours before sailing for England. The wedding was covered by the London Evening Standard and thereafter Marguerite's dark good looks attracted notices in the British and American press. She was named as one of the New York Herald Tribune's best-dressed women of 1940. James McBey was among the most successful British artists of his generation - an official war artist during the first world war, he later undertook important private commissions. The couple settled into his imposing home and studio at 1 Holland Park Avenue, in Notting Hill. McBey had visited Morocco in 1912, and been captivated by the country and its peoples. As Marguerite later explained: "James loved Morocco. He returned there with me in 1932, bought property, and I got to love it too. The strange difference of light, the hard beauty of the country, the charm of the people in their traditional clothes, the leisurely tempo, and the dramatic ambience suited us both." Eventually the couple moved into El Foolk (the Ark), a substantial property on the Old Mountain, Tangier, although they spent the war years in an apartment in Greenwich Village. James died in 1959 and Marguerite, who had been much under his influence, began to come into her own. She took up watercolours - "Unconsciously, the challenge of a medium which allows of no corrections drew me like a magnet," she said. "My idea is to capture the thrill of what inspired me. For this you have to get it on to the paper before it disappears or is forgotten. Inspiration can stop in the course of work or light can change in minutes. For years I had watercolours at the ready in every room, like a writer with a pen and paper." Much of Marguerite's inspiration came from Morocco, but she also journeyed deep into the sub-Saharan desert to paint. Her work was exhibited in Tangier, New York and in London - being transported there in the private jet of the Tangier-based, American tycoon Malcolm Forbes. Marguerite donated many of her husband's paintings to the Aberdeen Art Gallery - he was born in Aberdeenshire - and to the old American legation in Tangier. She was instrumental in the publication of James McBey's Morocco, and collaborated with Paul Bowles when his last novel, Too Far From Home, appeared, making available sketches from her Saharan notebooks. Much of her family jewellery was given to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and she generously endowed the American School of Tangier with properties and money. After James's death, Marguerite formed an attachment with Lady Carolyn Duff. According to David Herbert, social arbiter of the Tangerine expat community, "it was a genuine amitié amoureuse - two ladies of a certain age finding a haven in friendship". She also became close to Veronica Tennant, and, from 1976 until her death in 1998, with Nancy Eastman, ex-wife of the American consul-general in Tangier. As recently as 1998 she was photographed by Bruce Weber for Vanity Fair, and Hello! magazine dubbed her "the doyenne of Morocco-based artists". She was a warm, amusing and unassuming friend to many, and retained a radiant beauty.