Jacobs (Sally).- Costume Designs

Including:

Eugene Onegin, English National Opera, 51 designs, 1988;

Die Soldaten, English National Opera, 31 designs, 1996;

almost all signed and dated, mixed media (pencil, pen, ink, wash, crayon and collage), many with fabric swatches, each c. 30 x 21 to 34 x 28 cm;

(82)

***Sally Jacobs (1932 – 2020) was a British stage designer whose career was innovative, wide-ranging and influential.

The artworks in the present collection offer an insight into the costume design process behind landmark productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Opera, working with directors such as Peter Brook. In Jacobs’ signature style, they colourfully depict an array of British acting royalty.

Comparable works are held by institutions including the Harvard Theatre Collection and Victoria & Albert Museum.

Biography

Sally Jacobs was born in Whitechapel and, having left school at 14, worked initially as a secretary at a film company before studying stage design at the Central School of Art.

She began working at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, before moving to Los Angeles from 1967 to 1982, where she worked at the Mark Taper Forum.

“At Covent Garden, Jacobs followed her triumph on Turandot with another Serban production, Fidelio in 1986, for which she found engravings expressing the opera’s themes of redemption, freedom and the soul’s release from suffering; the set was a vast dungeon which finally breaks open as Leonora rescues Florestan and sunlight floods the stage. For the ENO, she also designed a critically approved Eugene Onegin, directed by Graham Vick, and David Freeman’s 1996 version of Zimmermann’s modern classic Die Soldaten.” - Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd. For the full obituary in the Guardian see here.

Jacobs also taught stage design both in the UK and US, including at the California Institute of the Arts; University of California Los Angeles; New York University; The Actors Studio and Slade School of Fine Art. She was a senior lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design and a Fellow at Goldsmiths University.