Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by Mark & Aleen Dawson;
A private collection;
Bequeathed to Aleen Dawson's niece, Donna Regan Lefeve;
By direct descent to the current owners.

Exhibited
Cape Town, Maskew Miller Gallery; Durban, Greenacres department store, (1949);
Cape Town; Johannesburg; Durban, Stuttafords Department Store, American and Canadian Tour Exhibition, (September - November 1952);
USA, San Jose, Rosicrucian Gallery; San Francisco, Emporium department store; Los Angeles, Bullock's departments store; Dallas, Sanger's; Wisconsin, Boston Store; Chicago, Marshall Field's; Ohio, Higbee's; Seattle, Frederick & Nelson; Canada: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Victoria, British Columbia, Eaton's Stores, American and Canadian Tour Exhibition, (1953-1955).

Literature
Boris Gorelik, Incredible Tretchikoff, Life of an Artist and Adventurer, (London: Art Books Publishing Ltd, 2013), pp. 28, 132, 153, 169-72, 171 (illustrated), 175, 177, 181, 183, 272.
Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff and Anthony Hocking, Pigeon's Luck: Tretchikoff, Artist's Life Story That Reads Like A Thriller, (London: Collins, 1973), pp. 126-127 (illustrated), 236, 241.
Andrew Lamprecht, Tretchikoff, The People's Painter, (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers (PTY) LTD, 2011), pp. 154 (illustrated), 204 (illustrated).
Howard Timmins, Tretchikoff, (London: George G.Harrap & Company Limited, 1969).

The Lost Orchid is one of Vladimir Tretchikoff's most reproduced and best-known works. The artist ranked it among his paintings that he was most proud.

In the 1950s, it first appeared in reproduction and became one of the top ten best-selling prints in the United Kingdom. Many thousands of his admirers in Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa who bought the lithographs were mystified by the beautiful flower lying in the debris on stairs. Once the print was hung on a living-room wall, hosts and their guests debated its significance. Monika Pon-su-san, the model for Tretchikoff's iconic Chinese Girl (auctioned by Bonhams in 2013), told me, 'My favourite picture of his has always been Lost Orchid'.

Tretchikoff described his style as 'symbolic realism'. Nowhere was this more prominent than in his flower studies. He first painted them in Java, enchanted by the rainbow-like colours of cannas in the garden. But his fascination with these plants probably started much earlier, in his youth in China, where flowers can symbolise a quality or idea.

Poets and painters in China, where orchids were cultivated from ancient times, made this flower an emblem of love and refinement. Confucius likened the company of good friends to a room of fragrant orchids. Indonesians also held this flower in high regard. Javanese and Sumatran legends endowed orchids with mystical powers. Singapore, where Tretchikoff lived and worked before the Second World War, was a city of orchids. Well adapted to the equatorial climate, they bloomed in almost every garden.

Orchids had a special meaning for Tretchikoff. When he was living in Indonesia under the Japanese occupation, an unknown admirer used to send boxes of these flowers to him. The shop that delivered the flowers refused to tell him the buyer's name. He never found it out. 'Somebody evidently had faith in me', he remembered. 'And it grew to mean so very much, when all around was desolation, poverty and suffering.' Tretchikoff took these gifts as an encouragement to continue painting. With each new picture he did, he wondered if the mysterious benefactress would like it. He even did a painting called the Lady of the Orchids, her fictitious portrait.

The first version of Lost Orchid was done in Batavia (Jakarta). One morning, shortly after the Japanese had released him from the prisoner-of-war camp, he saw an orchid lying in a street. 'Fresh dewdrops shone on its leaves and for me it was as if the flower wept', remembered Tretchikoff. 'Flowers are emotional beings that can feel just like people.... and those flowers wept, wept bitterly.' He went home and painted a picture of a gorgeous orchid lying on a littered flight of steps. 'The orchid represents life,' he explained. 'People use it and throw it away afterwards, without thinking. That is why now it is abandoned, lost, crying!'

But evidently, the world-famous Lost Orchid was produced after the war, when he joined his family in Cape Town. The work is dated '1948'. The flower is a cattleya, known as 'the queen of the orchids'. Some of the flowers that Tretchikoff had received from the secret admirer in Indonesia were also cattleyas.

The species is South American, Cattleya warscewiczii, distinguished by its splendour and extraordinary size. Tretchikoff might have first seen this flower before the war. It had been brought into Singapore from Britain in the early 1930s.

Tretchikoff first exhibited this painting on his 1949 tour of South Africa. In Johannesburg, he had a visit from John Schlesinger, who had just taken over Schlesinger Organisation, a conglomerate that dominated the country's insurance, entertainment, broadcasting and hotel industries. Tretchikoff must have known him. The artist had immigrated to South Africa three years before as an employee of an advertising agency owned by the Schlesingers, which remained his day job until he became a full-time painter. John Schlesinger bought Lost Orchid for his wife. He had courted her with orchids.

In 1952, Tretchikoff accepted an invitation to hold his first exhibition in the USA. He wanted to display his best work and asked Schlesinger to lend him the Lost Orchid. Eventually, the artist bought it back. 'He made me cough up three times what he had paid for it, but in view of its success I suppose it was fair', Tretchikoff wrote later.

A few months before the departure, he took his 'American and Canadian Tour Exhibition' on the road in South Africa. None of the paintings were for sale. Meanwhile, visitors could purchase large and smaller lithograph reproductions of the Lost Orchid.

His first show in America took place at the Rosicrucian Gallery, San Jose, in 1953. Tretchikoff brought more than forty works to the USA. The Lost Orchid was one of the highlights of the San Jose exhibition and of the rest of the tour.

In Chicago the same year, the attendance of his show at Marshall Field's exceeded fifty thousand. A New York actor, Mark Dawson (1920-2007), saw the exhibition while on a tour with a Broadway production, in which he starred. The Theatre World Award winner and US Marine Corps veteran wanted to buy the Lost Orchid. The painting was too expensive for Dawson, and the artist would not lower the price. However, the work could only be delivered after the tour, nearly two years later. The actor used the delay to save money for the purchase.

In 1955, the tour was over, Tretchikoff wrote to the buyer to let him know that the painting would soon be in his possession. The artist added that Schlesinger, the original owner, wanted to have the painting back, 'Now he says that he misses it badly, particularly that the reproductions of the Orchid are distributed throughout the world.'

In Britain, reproductions of the Lost Orchid first became available in 1955. The prints were distributed by Frost & Reed, an old Bond Street art dealership. The Fine Art Trade Guild, the country's biggest association of producers, sellers and framers of colour reproductions, enthused over this new artist. 'The cobwebs and the greenish milk-and-water of academic impressionism have been swept by a visual tornado from the windows of half a hundred print shops,' gushed its journal. 'Vladimir Tretchikoff is the name of this phenomenon who has shaken the slumbering art lovers of Britain as they have not been shaken before.... Tretchikoff's prints have sold as prints never sold before.'

Tretchikoff brought to Britain his African portraits, his paintings of flowers from faraway lands, his pictures of a burnt forest in the Cape. His lithographs introduced new themes, subjects, and colours that galvanized the British print trade. Even his Lost Orchid was non-conventional. Instead of a magnificent bunch of flowers in a vase – the subject of many popular prints of the era, he depicted a corsage bloom lying abandoned on littered stairs.

As for the painting, Mark Dawson kept the Lost Orchid for the rest of his life, and it remained in his family ever since.

We are grateful to Boris Gorelik for his completion of this footnote.