WILLIAM MORRIS & the interiors of Adelaide’s most fashionable houses 1880-1929 with Rebecca Evans

The Art Gallery of South Australia holds the most comprehensive collection of Morris & Co. furnishing outside of the United Kingdom. This collection is due to Adelaide’s wealthy Barr Smith family, who furnished their large houses with Morris designs. This lecture will examine the interiors of these houses and how they signified the taste, status and identity of the Barr Smith family and by extension proclaimed Adelaide as cosmopolitan in the late 19th and early 2

REBECCA EVANS is the Curator of Decorative Arts, Art Gallery of South Australia. In 2016 she curated an exhibition on South Australian artist Catherine Truman and a display celebrating 50 years of the Guildhouse organisation. She is currently preparing for an exhibition featuring Linda Jackson’s creative collaborations with Utopia and Santa Teresa. 
Her previous lecture at the Collection was Scottish Migration and the Wool Industry in Colonial Australia (2016).

This lecture is generously supported by The Friends of The Johnston Collection.

image caption:  designed by William Morris (English, 1834-1896) for MORRIS & COMPANY, London, specimen of Wreath wallpaper, wood-block print on paper, collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, 20032D1, (used with permission)