Wealth and Colour

In this lecture duet, partners in life and in research Caroline Dakers and Neil Burton explore another partnership—between architect, decorator, and color theorist Owen Jones and the wealthy Victorian collector Alfred Morrison.

Alfred Morrison (1821–1897) was one of the most important yet least-known Victorian collectors. He filled his houses at Fonthill in Wiltshire and Carlton House Terrace in London with Chinese Imperial porcelain, Old Masters and modern paintings, engraved portraits of famous men and women, coins and medals, autograph manuscripts and objets d’art by Europe’s leading enamelists and metalworkers. From the early 1860s he was the most significant private patron of the architect, designer, and color theorist Owen Jones and employed him to decorate the interior of his London and country houses.

Owen Jones (1809–1874) is now known only as the author of the Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856, but in his lifetime he was known as “Alhambra Jones” for his detailed and highly colored studies of the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Spain, published in the 1840s, and as the man responsible for the painted decoration of the 1851 Great Exhibition building. He trained as an architect and embraced the modern technology of the mid-nineteenth century in his use of iron, glass, and fibrous plaster, but his real skill was as an interior designer, and he produced several spectacular interiors, now all lost apart from the London mansion of Alfred Morrison in Carlton House Terrace. While working for Morrison at Fonthill, Jones was able to study the fabulous collection of Chinese porcelain and his study bore fruit in Examples of Chinese Ornament, which he published in 1867.

After this pair of talks, Dakers and Burton will discuss what happened to the reputations of Morrison and Jones after their deaths.