OBJECT LESSONS | WILLIAM JOHNSTON: His Residence & Collection

OBJECT LESSONS presents a new opportunity to see significant objects, gathered by William Johnston, that create an English Georgian-inspired domestic interior in his East Melbourne house.

In The Green Drawing Room, OBJECT LESSONS creates a relaxed British-style interior found in India around the 1830s. The early 19th century British-Indian items in the Collection, along with other elements, fashions a reposeful reception space in which to display a gentleman’s collection.

By reinterpreting The Green Drawing Room as an early 19th century British colonial interior, the exhibition provides visitors with an insight into what it was like to live as an Englishman abroad.

After exhausting his sources in England, antique dealer William Johnston turned his sights and travels to India, and especially Calcutta, which became Johnston's favourite place to replenish stock for his retail shop, Kent Antiques in High St, Armadale.

The exhibition is based on, and re-presents aspects of the original arrangement of William Johnston’s collection in Fairhall, as it was when it first opened to the public as an exhibition-house in 1990.

This exhibition continues exploring one of the themes underpinning The Johnston Collection, that ‘Old is New'.