Miss Rutherford and Australian flora, Yvonne Barber
Abstract:
Many items of Australiana are distinguished by their use of Australian materials or their use of Australian motifs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several English ceramic factories made wares specifically for the Australian market. The scanty records of the Sydney Technological Museum noted that the person who, between about 1900 and 1910, provided designs of Australian flora as templates for Doulton artists in England to decorate their art ceramics was a ‘Miss Rutherford’. Trove enabled us recently to identify her as Miss Geraldine Rutherford (1869–1952), from a 1910 Bathurst newspaper report. Yvonne Barber looks into Geraldine Rutherford and her family, comprising several amateur lady artists, and their milieu, to illuminate some of the sources of Australian flora designs.
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