The collection of Arts and Crafts furniture below comes from the estate of Fiona MacCarthy (1940-2020) who was married to David Mellor (1930-2009), the Sheffield-based designer. MacCarthy’s background as a journalist for House and Garden magazine and the Guardian lay the foundations in her seminal biographical works on S R Ashbee, William Morris, Eric Gill and ‘Walter Gropius, Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus’ which was published in 2019. Involved across the arts, she curated exhibitions such as ‘Homespun to High-speed: British Design 1860 to 1960’ at Sheffield Museums and Art Galleries in 1979; ‘Eye for Industry: Retrospective of the Royal Designers’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1986, and ‘Anarchy and Beauty, William Morris and his Legacy’ at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014.
