National Trust to display rescued Arts and Crafts De Morgan collection
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Version 0 of 1. More than 70 years after the owner of a mansion in Wolverhampton volunteered to rescue an internationally important collection of paintings and ceramics, the offer has been accepted, and the homeless De Morgan collection is about to go on display in a new gallery. For at least the next 10 years, the gallery will be a showcase for the beautiful ceramics and dreamy paintings by the Arts and Crafts couple William and Evelyn De Morgan. It has been created at a cost of £170,000 by the National Trust at Wightwick Manor. The original offer was of safe temporary storage to rescue the collection from the Blitz in London. However, the De Morgan Foundation, whose offices are now based at the Watts Gallery in Surrey, has been without a permanent exhibition space since it lost its council-owned premises in south London in 2011, despite passionate local protests about the closure of local authority museums and libraries. The foundation holds the most valuable collection anywhere of works created by William De Morgan, a friend of William Morris and a leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement, renowned for his beautiful, shimmering lustre glazes and Islamic influenced decoration, and the paintings by his wife, Evelyn. The new gallery has been created in the Malthouse, which previously served as a squash court for its millionaire owner, the industrialist and Liberal MP Geoffrey Mander. In 1937 he persuaded the National Trust to take on Wightwick Manor, which was built only 50 years earlier for his parents, who had taken careful notes at a lecture by Oscar Wilde on The House Beautiful. Partly demolishing a genuine medieval manor house, they created a carved oak and stained glass-filled Victorian dream of the Middle Ages, complete with minstrels’ gallery, great hall and secret staircase. Mander, whose fortune came from the family paints firm, and his second wife, Rosalie, became live-in curators. They showed their home on Thursdays and Saturdays, and spent a small fortune adding furniture, tapestries and works of art – including the extraordinary folding bed once occupied by the poet Algernon Swinburne – by pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts artists, at a time when their work was as completely out of fashion as the house itself. Although the De Morgans never visited the house, there were already many links with Wightwick, including De Morgan tiles filling many of the fireplaces. Rosalie Mander was a close friend of Wilhelmina Stirling, the younger sister of Evelyn De Morgan. Stirling formed the collection and offered to take it in during the second world war. The foundation was formed to preserve it permanently on Stirling’s death in 1965. John Wood, the conservation and development manager for the house, said there were also many political sympathies in common between the De Morgans, who were passionate believers in social reform, women’s suffrage and workers’ rights, and Mander, whose factory was the first major employer to introduce the 40-hour week. Mander was also a campaigner for peace who pleaded with the government to accept more Jewish refugees as the second world war approached, and was honoured to learn his name was on one of Hitler’s death lists. Wood lives on site in the former chauffeur’s lodgings, and learned from a grand-daughter of the last chauffeur that he was regularly ordered to stop the magnificent Sunbeam and Morris cars and offer lifts when Mander spotted an employee walking to work in the factory. “As soon as we started installing the pieces they felt as if they had always been here,” he said. “ I think the De Morgans would have been pleased to know this is where their works have ended up.” The new Malthouse gallery opens on 6 May. |