Smokey Mountain Café, Morocco is an exceptionally large watercolour resulting from Procktor’ s first visit to Morocco in 1968 with his friends Ossie Clark, Anthony Page and the socialite Michael Duff who was introduced to him by David Herbert, the flamboyant English aristocrat who reigned for half a century over the British expatriate colony in Morocco.

The idea of visiting Morocco probably came from a suggestion from the Redfern Gallery’ s founder and chairman, Sir Rex Nan Kivell who had bought El Farah, a former hotel in Tangier, and retired there in 1965. Herbert also introduced him to the doyenne of Tangier society, Marguerite McBey, widow of the artist James McBey. Procktor visited Tangier again in 1972 with his future wife Kirsten Benson and her two children.

Osborne Samuel, London