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Florence Broadhurst (1899-1977), designer, was born in Bundaberg, Queensland. A talented singer, in the early 1920s she travelled to southeast Asia and established a Performing Arts Academy in Shanghai. She married in England in 1929 and with her husband became co-director and designer for Pellier Ltd, a fashionable Mayfair dress salon. In 1949 she returned to Australia. After ten years of painting and exhibiting, she established a wallpaper business in Sydney. Finding the monochromatic, muted tonings that Australians favoured for interiors insufficiently vigorous to 'withstand modern living', she began producing vibrant oversized prints. The Broadhurst Design Collection had grown to some 800 patterns when Broadhurst was murdered in October 1977 (the case has never been solved). More than 500 examples have been revived by Signature Prints, a Sydney business marketing Broadhurst wallpaper, textiles and art, and the designs have been archived by the Powerhouse Museum.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of the artist 2003
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
Accession number: 2003.51
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Lewis Morley (49 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
The name of Florence Broadhurst, one of Australia’s most significant wallpaper and textile designers, is now firmly cemented in the canon of Australian art and design.
Magda Keaney speaks with Lewis Morley about his photographic career and the major retrospective of his work on display at the NPG.
Drawn from some of the many donations made to the Gallery's collection, the exhibition Portraits for Posterity pays homage both to the remarkable (and varied) group of Australians who are portrayed in the portraits and the generosity of the many donors who have presented them to the Gallery.