Rooms do furnish a book. This book was inspired by a 1930s interior in a photograph that art historian Bruce Adams came upon when interviewing Sydney painter Grace Crowley (1890–1979) at her home in 1973. Two years later, Adams visited the building that had intrigued him: Moly-Sabata, on the left bank of the Rhone about sixty kilometres south of Lyon. In this account of the artists who lived there from the late 1920s to early 1950s, a big-faced, stiffly dressed, middle-aged Australian makes her presence felt. In contextualising expatriate painter Anne Dangar’s twenty-one-year tenure in the art colony, Adams shows what her aspirations were, why she turned herself into a village potter, and the political use that was made of her work.
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