Exploring the Augusto Lorenzini archive

Assistant Research Curator Anna Stewart-Yates reflects on discoveries and questions raised by months spent cataloguing the archive of Augusto Lorenzini, 19th-century decorator of vanished Sydney interiors. The archive is now fully catalogued and can be explored online.

For six months I was buried in the Augusto Lorenzini Archive, looking closely at drawings and photographs, rehousing fragile material, cataloguing designs and reference books, and trying to work out what all these pieces might tell us about the career of an artist-decorator in late-19th-century Sydney.

One of the most exciting but stressful tasks has been unrolling over 70 rolled cartoons – full-scale drawings for painted decorations. The anticipation when unrolling one of Lorenzini’s cartoons is intense because you never know what you might find. It could be a scrolling vegetal border, a procession of fantastical creatures such as sphinxes or griffins, a lively design populated by unexpected animals – snakes, roosters and even rats – or one of the mysterious geometric compositions featuring masonic symbols.

It is also impossible to guess what condition you will find the paper in. Some of the cartoons are remarkably well preserved, almost pristine despite their age. Others have clearly been used, sometimes repeatedly, and bear the physical evidence of their working lives. They have been reinforced with newspaper or fabric tape, pricked with thousands of tiny holes and covered in black ‘pouncing powder’, used to transfer the design onto a wall or ceiling before it was painted in. Some cartoons are torn or fragmented, and some seem intent on rolling themselves back up as soon as they are released, threatening to tear themselves apart in the process unless the fragments are immediately weighted down. Who knew that curatorial work required such agility!

I can only speculate as to when these cartoons were last unrolled. Perhaps some were opened when the material was first acquired by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now part of Museums of History NSW) in 1998. Perhaps others had not been properly examined for considerably longer – possibly more than a century, when Lorenzini himself was still alive.

The cataloguing project is now complete, opening up a remarkable body of material relating to one of 19th-century Sydney’s most ambitious and distinctive painter-decorators.

From Rome to Sydney

Augusto Leopoldo Francesco Lorenzini was born in Rome in 1852. Before coming to Sydney with his wife, Maria, in 1883, he spent time in Paris and London. The archive preserves evidence of his early engagement with the European decorative tradition, including tracings of frescoes by brothers Federico (1541–1609) and Taddeo Zuccaro (1529–1566) made at the Palazzo Caetani in Rome in 1875, and a watercolour copy of Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) prophet Jeremiah from the Sistine Chapel.

These materials help explain the visual language that Lorenzini brought to Australia. His designs are informed by Renaissance ornament, classical allegory and the formal strategies of the old masters of fresco.

When he arrived in Sydney, Lorenzini found a city experiencing considerable economic and architectural growth. He established himself quickly, presenting himself not merely as a painter or house decorator but as an ‘Italian Artist Decorator’. The archive gives us an unusually detailed record of what that meant in practice.

Chatsworth

A particularly revealing example is Chatsworth, the grand Potts Point mansion of politician and publican Charles James Roberts. Shortly after Lorenzini arrived in Sydney, he undertook the decoration of the house, including its entrance hall and new ballroom. The archive preserves an 1884 design for the ballroom ceiling depicting goddess Amphitrite’s wedding to Poseidon, cartoons for allegorical figures representing the seasons, and photographs by Charles Bayliss showing the completed interior. The photographs are especially valuable because Chatsworth itself has long since been demolished. The archive allows us to picture the extraordinary room that contemporary observers described as among the finest in the southern hemisphere.

Chatsworth was only the beginning. In the 1880s and 90s, Lorenzini’s work appeared everywhere: cafes, hotels, theatres and churches, private houses and ambitious public projects.

His work on Chatsworth also hints at the social world in which a successful decorator operated. Lorenzini was not simply a tradesman brought in to apply paint. He presented himself as an ‘artist decorator’, cultivated important patrons and participated in the social and artistic life of Sydney. When the refurbished Chatsworth was opened with a grand ball in 1884, Lorenzini was invited, and played a ceremonial role in presenting Mrs Roberts with a key to the ballroom. These details suggest that his relationship extended beyond the straightforward transaction between client and tradesman. Charles Roberts appears to have been an important patron, who also commissioned Lorenzini to decorate the walls and ceilings of the Roberts Hotel, on the corner of Pitt and Market streets, between 1886 and 1888. He may even have encouraged Lorenzini’s move to Australia and been involved in promoting his work, including the display of the Chatsworth photos at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886.

A collaborative practice

Lorenzini cultivated the status of an artist and gentleman decorator, and his professional success depended not only on his technical abilities but also on relationships with patrons, clients and other members of Sydney’s social and artistic world. Other forms of network were also crucial to his decorating practice. Large-scale decorative work was necessarily collaborative. Lorenzini employed assistants and apprentices, worked alongside other decorators and maintained connections with artists and craftspeople across Sydney and Melbourne.

One of his apprentices was John Ross Anderson, who had previously worked for Thomas Bates & Co in London, where Lorenzini had undertaken specialist commissions. Anderson subsequently worked with several of the major decorating firms in Australia, including Lyon, Wells, Cottier & Co, the Paterson Brothers, and Beeler and Davies.

John Clay Beeler is another important figure in this network. Lorenzini and Beeler appear at different times as competitors and collaborators. They were both involved in the decoration of Sydney’s Criterion Theatre in 1886, and Beeler and Davies subsequently secured the principal decorative contract for the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition building in 1888.

Lorenzini prepared a substantial display for the New South Wales Court at that exhibition and was awarded a first order of merit for his mural art decorations. The archive also contains Lorenzini’s elaborate presentation drawings for the exhibition building itself, including designs for ceilings, walls and windows and allegorical figures representing the Australian colonies. A design for New South Wales personifies the colony as Commerce, surrounded by Australian vegetation but rendered through the visual language of classical allegory.

The relationship between these designs and the decoration ultimately executed by Beeler and Davies remains unclear. Contemporary descriptions of the Beeler and Davies interiors refer to features that have striking parallels with Lorenzini’s surviving designs – including a ceiling imitating the sky and allegorical figures representing the Australian colonies. Whether these similarities reflect shared decorative conventions, influence, competition or some more direct connection is not yet known.

Lorenzini worked with Beeler again in 1903, on Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, where the broader decorative scheme was associated with Beeler while Lorenzini undertook the figurative work. A cartoon in the archive corresponds with a putto carrying a torch and lightning bolts visible in contemporary photographs of the theatre, which has since been demolished.

Wet plaster fresco

A large proportion of Lorenzini’s cartoons are pricked and appear to have been used for pouncing. This technique is typically used to rapidly transfer a design to fast-drying wet plaster fresco, in contrast with stencilling, when paint is applied directly to the wall or ceiling surface. There are no known stencils in the archive. This is significant when considered alongside Lorenzini’s own statements about the techniques he wished to teach.

In his proposals for an instructional art studio, Lorenzini described his preferred method as ‘the original fresco painting used by the masters of the fifteenth century’, distinguishing it from contemporary commercial methods. In an 1889 letter to The Sydney Morning Herald he criticised the ‘hackneyed stencil work’ common in the colony.

A recent discovery at Edina, Waverley, a grand Italianate house built by Ebenezer Vickery in 1885 and now the Uniting War Memorial Hospital, offers a unique opportunity to uncover Lorenzini’s methods. In early 2026, parts of a false ceiling in the Edina drawing room were temporarily removed to reveal an intact Lorenzini fresco – the only positively identified surviving example of his work. This discovery opens up the possibility of conducting material analysis which could, combined with the archive, provide a firm conclusion on whether Lorenzini used the wet plaster fresco technique in his commissions.

This technically demanding method was unusual in the Australian context at the time. Many contemporary decorators relied on stencils and newly developed paints that could adhere readily to the finished wall surface. Lorenzini appears to have instead positioned himself within a much older European tradition. The cartoons are therefore important evidence not only of his designs but also of his technical practice.

It is perhaps because of his insistence on wet plaster fresco, a technique requiring specialist training, that Lorenzini was an uncompromising advocate for formal instruction in decorative art. He repeatedly attempted to establish an instructional studio to correct what he saw as a shortage of skilled workmen in the colony. His proposed instructional studio in 1886 failed to find suitable premises, and he later approached Sydney Technical College with another proposal. His correspondence, preserved in the archive, makes clear that he regarded decorative painting as a specialised artistic discipline requiring serious training.

Looking for Lorenzini

After six months working with this archive, I feel it reveals something of Lorenzini himself. His spelling is terrible (in both English and Italian). His annotations are sometimes difficult to decipher. Historical styles are not always labelled accurately – a design initially identified by Lorenzini as ‘Louis IVI’ has been corrected in pencil, while another labelled ‘Henry IV’ appears stylistically closer to the Louis XVI period. Newspapers from the time show he was not shy about expressing his opinions in letters to the editor, or about standing up for his interests through litigation. Contemporary accounts also document his striking appearance, particularly his abundant hair. The designs themselves reveal a prolific and technically accomplished draftsman, deeply invested in historical ornament and figurative decoration.

Lorenzini’s most visible period of activity was concentrated in the 1880s and early 1890s. During this time he worked on major domestic, commercial, theatrical and ecclesiastical interiors and exhibited his work publicly.

The economic depression of the 1890s and changing tastes appear to have substantially reduced the market for the elaborate polychromatic interiors in which he specialised. Architectural and decorative fashions were shifting towards less heavily ornamented schemes, while the kind of lavish Victorian interiors that had provided Lorenzini with major commissions became less fashionable.

He eventually established an orchard at Dural, north-west of Sydney, but continued his decorative practice, describing himself in 1904 as an ‘art decorator and orchardist’. By the 1910s, the surviving evidence points towards smaller commissions and increasing financial difficulty. Lorenzini was declared insolvent in 1914 and died at Dural in 1921.

The archive’s second life

Almost all of the built work associated with Lorenzini is long gone. This makes the survival of his archive particularly important. The story of its rediscovery is almost as remarkable as the material itself. Lorenzini’s work resurfaced among the effects of commercial artist Winn Albury (1896–1994), whose 1995 estate auction included material by the then largely forgotten decorator. Elements of the archive were subsequently acquired by the Historic Houses Trust in 1998. The material became the foundation for the 2001 exhibition Augusto Lorenzini: Italian Artist Decorator in Victorian Sydney, and for important research by Megan Martin, librarian at the Caroline Simpson Library, and Elizabeth Bay House curator Scott Carlin.

The recent cataloguing project builds on that earlier work. I am particularly indebted to Megan Martin, whose research and previous cataloguing have provided an essential foundation, as well as to colleagues and predecessors across Museums of History NSW whose work has brought the collection to this point.

Completing the cataloguing does not close the story of Lorenzini. Rather, it makes the archive much easier to explore. The connections between designs, cartoons, photographs, buildings, clients and fellow decorators can now be followed more systematically. There are questions about commissions that remain unresolved, possible relationships between surviving designs and lost interiors, and further connections to the wider international network of 19th-century decorative art waiting to be investigated.

Above all, the archive reminds us that 19th-century interior decoration was not simply a matter of making rooms look fashionable. For Lorenzini, it was an artistic discipline with a history, a technique and a professional ethic.

More than a century after his death, the archive allows us to see Lorenzini again – not only as the decorator of vanished Sydney interiors, but as a talented draftsman, teacher, craftsman and ambitious artist whose career connected Rome, Paris, London, Sydney and Melbourne. Cataloguing the collection has made that story easier to discover, and there is still much more to learn.