Museum. The exhibition was sent to ten cities in America and five in Canada and comprised a series of cases with displays of related craft items grouped by materials (‘pottery’, ‘stoneware and porcelain’, embroideries’, and ‘silver’ for example), together with idealised middle class room settings arranged formulaically, and in the manner of settings in the Little Gallery itself, covering such topics as the ‘town dining room’, ‘music room’ and ‘country dining room’. In this latter display a sycamore dining table ‘designed and executed by Edward Barnsley’ was ‘lent by The Little Gallery’. Rose was to keep the table for her personal use, cutting it down to suit her diminutive stature, and finally gifting it to the Crafts Study Centre.12 The exhibition opened in the auspicious setting of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May 1942.13 One of her first key tasks as a British Council employee was to organise another major craftbased exhibition. On this occasion the British Council joined together with the Rural Industries Bureau, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the Highland Home Industries in presenting the Exhibition of Rural Handicrafts from Great Britain which toured to New Zealand and Australia in 1946.14 A major consequence of the first exhibition tour (The Exhibition of Modern British Crafts) was the establishment of the British Council’s craft collection, curated by Muriel Rose who was employed by the Council as Crafts and Industrial Design Officer, a post she held until her retirement in 1957.15 The establishment of a collection was a new policy for the Council which hitherto had only collected for exhibition purposes. Muriel Rose gathered a formidable team of subject experts around her to advise on purchases for this ‘Permanent Collection of examples of Industrial Design and Crafts’, including Gordon Russell, Marianne Straub and W. B. Honey. There seems little doubt that nothing was added to the collection that did not meet her exacting standards of taste and artistic judgement. The collection is important because it
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