National Galleries of Scotland

This illustration is an example of the work for which Warhol became renowned as a commercial artist in New York from the early 1950s. It appears to be a design for the cover of the popular American monthly lifestyle magazine, ‘Town and Country’. It demonstrates his intuitive blotted-line technique combined with washes of coloured ink. The colour was possibly added at one of Warhol’s colouring parties, hosted at the fashionable Serendipity 3 café after its opening in 1954. He would encourage his friends – some of whom would have helped him create the original illustrations - to colour the works with an inventiveness that adds to their whimsical nature. This process looks forward to the production methods of Warhol’s legendary studio, The Factory, in the 1960s.