Wealth and Colour: Alfred Morrison and Owen Jones

Wealth and Colour: Alfred Morrison and Owen Jones

A lecture duet by Caroline Dakers (University of the Arts London) and Neil Burton (Architectural History Practice)

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

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.

Dr. Caroline Dakers is professor emerita in cultural history at the University of the Arts London. She is currently working on British Artists: The Popular View 1850–1950 for Princeton University Press and is a contributor to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue on Philip Webb (Bard Graduate Center). She edited and contributed to Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History (UCLPress, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). She has written three books for Yale University Press: Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (1993), The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (1999), and A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons(2011). She is a fellow of the Society for Antiquaries and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Neil Burton is currently a director of the Architectural History Practice. He was previously a historian with the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division, an inspector of Historic Buildings with English Heritage, and the secretary of the Georgian Group. His books include Life in the Georgian City (with Dan Cruikshank, published by Viking) and Behind the Façade: The London Town House Plan, 1660–1840 (with Peter Guillery, published by Spire Books). He contributed a chapter on Alfred Morrison’s architectural works in Fonthill Recovered (UCL Press, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Image: Ignacio Zuloaga, Alfred Morrison, ca. 1894. Private collection. Owen Jones (with Jackson & Graham), interior of 16 Carlton House Terrace. Photo: © Christie’s.