Acquired from the costume designer Phoebe de Gaye

This short, fitted jacket has been hand made from linen block-printed with a vivid design, as yet unidentified, by the Crysède company in Cornwall. It belonged to the donor’s mother Kathleen Morgan, an artist who trained at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen in the 1920s, and throughout the 1930s, when she would have worn the jacket, taught art in a school in Oban. (A photographic portrait can be seen in Additional Images). She made her own clothes and was a gifted embroiderer. The jacket was clearly a much-worn garment as it has been carefully mended and darned. The design of the fabric is characteristic of Crysède in its strong colours and vibrant curving and diagonal lines and dabbed markings, an expressionistic interpretation of landscape paintings by the company owner Alec Walker, upon which many fabrics were based. Crysède designs vary in scale and balance of abstraction and representation; this example is perhaps one of their more abstracted versions of a landscape. The John Bright Collection also owns samples of Crysède printed linen that were sent to Morgan as part of their mail order service. (See Related Items)