Recently dicovered work sheds new light on artist's work

Our ongoing research and planned monograph on Scottish/Australian/French artist, Mary Cockburn Mercer (1862-1963), received a boost recently with the auction and sale of an important painting at the French auction house, Minion. Featured alongside another Moroccan-styled work by her American artist companion, Alexander Robinson, Mary’s painting is the earliest that we know of and firmly establishes MCM within the hotbed of pre-WW1 modernist artists resident in Paris.

​Inspired by Fauvism and the Nabis, and infused with the contemporary fascination with North African subjects that had been boosted by French political control of Morocco, the painting was listed as being from a former private Parisian collection; acquired from a friend of the artist in the 1920s, thence by descent.
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Mary Cockburn Mercer  Mendiant aveugle (Blind Beggar) 1914, oil on canvas. Orientalism and Africanism, Millon, 3 July 2026, lot 61