ABSTRACT
John Dibblee Crace was an important English interior decorator and author. Crace remained interested in the academic and historic aspects of decoration publishing an article on ‘Household Taste’ in the Furniture Gazette, as well as a paper on ‘Pugin and Furniture’. James Ward was supportive of John Gregory’s Crace’s work at the Great Exhibition. J.G. Crace was involved again in exhibition work when he became the Superintendent of Decoration for the Great Exhibition building of 1862 where he used a colour scheme that avoided repeating Owen Jones’s 1851 use of primary colours. A firmer, surer, and more purposeful hand is needed for the colouring of a bare public building than will serve for the domestic interior, in which picturesque arrangement, suggestions of historical association or foreign travel, or the collector’s taste, may often play a more important part than either architecture or decorative colour.
