Ideas and Objects: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain
Author(s): Alan Crawford
Source: Design Issues , Spring, 1997, Vol. 13, No. 1, Designing the Modern Experience,
1885-1945 (Spring, 1997), pp. 15-26
Published by: The MIT Press
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Ideas and Ob jects:
The Arts and Crafts Movement
in Britain
Alan Crawford
Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,
the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred
of modern civilization.'
The speaker is William Morris, the leading figure of the Arts and
Crafts movement in Britain. The sentiment in this quotation is negative
and perhaps even shocking; but it represents my subject. I want
to suggest that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was
inspired by the desire to produce beautiful things and by a hatred of
modern civilization.
The Wolfsonian's inaugural exhibition, and the book which
accompanies it, convey two arguments with admirable clarity. One
is the general argument that design serves to express ideas, and that
it shifts our perceptions of the world. The other is that design in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preoccupied with
the experience of modernity.
The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain fits well into these
arguments. Not since the Gothic Revival earlier in the century,
whose idealism was derived from a powerful religious movement,
had the designing and making of things carried such serious meanings.
Arts and Crafts people had ambitious ideas about the nature
of work and the improvement of design, and they were always, if
obliquely, concerned with modernity. What is more, the Arts and
Crafts movement was linked with politics, for some of the most
important figures in the movement were also part of the early
Socialist movement in Britain.
In this paper, I will concentrate on the general point that
design serves to express ideas; I will take up the themes of modernity
and politics at the end. My argument goes in two directions. It
starts with ideas and goes towards objects, asking what effect these
ideas had on design. Then it turns round, starting with objects and
listing their typical qualities, in order to discover the spirit in which
they were designed.
Both approaches are necessary, for the relationship between
ideas and objects in the Arts and Crafts movement is not always
straightforward. Sometimes you cannot move directly from idea to
object, as from plan to execution. Sometimes the objects contradict
1 May Morris, ed., The Collected Works
of William Morris, vol. 23, (London:
Longmans Green and Company,
1910-15), 279.
( Copyright 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Figure 1
72-3 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London,
by C. R. Ashbee, 1896-97.
Elevation and cutaway drawing.
Drawing by Sutton Webster.
I
_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ F
Scale
0 5 10 20 30 Fcet _______
the ideas they appear to illustrate. The free disposition of the
windows on the elevation of 72-3 Cheyne Walk, London (figure 1)
seems to be a clear statement of a free plan, an example of the Arts
and Crafts idea that buildings and objects should express their functional
and structural character without pretense, that they should be
"honest." But if you compare the elevation with the cutaway drawing,
you will see that it does not express the internal arrangement at
all; if anything it belies it. I do not say that honesty has no bearing
on this design. Ashbee meant you to read the front as honest. But
you cannot read this design as a straightforward example of Arts
and Crafts honesty. It is complex and contradictory, what children
would call "pretend" honesty.
The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was animated by
three principal ideas. The first was "the Unity of Art," Arts and
Crafts people opposed the hierarchy in which the arts were
arranged in late-Victorian Britain: painting and sculpture at the top
as fine arts; architecture somewhere in the middle, less artistic but
still with high professional status; and the decorative arts at the
bottom, their status low both artistically and professionally. They
argued that, in the Middle Ages, this hierarchy had not existed; and
that in their own day, painters, sculptors, architects, and decorative
artists should be on an equal footing again.
Two narratives will show the bearing of this idea. In 1884, a
group of progressive architects established the Art Workers' Guild
in London under the banner of the Unity of Art. They believed that
architecture should be seen as an art, not as the profession into
which modernization was shaping it. They set up the Guild as a
private club where they could associate with painters, sculptors,
and decorative artists; and talk about Donatello or bronze-casting.
They did not want to associate with lawyers and quantity surveyors,
and local government officers, or to talk about drains.
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Figure 2
Ernest Gimson and Sidney and Ernest
Barnsley with their families at Pinbury Park,
Gloucestershire, c.1 896.
Archive photograph, Cheltenham Art Gallery A,
and Museum.
About ten years later, three arch
move, but in the same spirit. Erne
Barnsley went to live in the Cotsw
area. They wore soft collars, cord
were farmers (figure 2). They hoped
they could get away from paperw
they were not disappointed. They
few buildings they designed, most
building work, they set up the wo
work, metalwork, and particularly
Art Workers' Guild associated themselves with artists; Ernest
Gimson and the Barnsley brothers associated themselves with
craftsmen.
The "Unity of Art" shaped the story of the Arts and Crafts
movement in this way-the Art Workers' Guild becam'e the central
Arts and Crafts organization in London. But it did not have a great
effect on the design of buildings or objects. There were a number of
building schemes in which architects, artists, and craftsmen worked
together in its name; Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, London,
designed by J. D. Sedding and embellished by a group of distinguished
artist-craftsmen between 1888 and 1892, is the best known.
But the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement were always
individualists, and though the artist-craftsmen thought and talked
a good deal about the Unity of Art, it is hard to see what difference
this made to their work here, or in other places. Holy Trinity is
simply a church decorated by various designers, working in sympathy
but following their own preferences.
The second idea was "Joy in Labor." The idea was that the
ordinary experience of work can become a source of pleasure
through the play of imagination. Like so much of the Arts and
Crafts movement, this idea was rooted in a Romantic sense of the
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past, and specifically in a long passage called "The Nature of
Gothic" in the second volume of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice,
published in 1853. Ruskin read the history of Venice in its buildings,
and when he looked at the carved detail of Venetian Gothic buildings,
he imagined the workmen to be ordinary workmen of their
time. Left to their own imaginations, he thought, they produced
carvings which were rough, vivid, and imaginative.
For Ruskin, the freedom of this Gothic work was a stinging
indictment of work as he imagined it to be in modern factories. He
wrote:
Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle,
slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense,
and the best sense, free. [He is thinking of the Middle Ages:
political tyranny and creative freedom.] But to smother
their souls with them [he is thinking of modern factories],
to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling
branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and
skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God, into
leathern thongs to yoke machinery with, this is to be slavemasters
indeed.'
This is as fierce a piece of antimodernism as you could hope
to find, fixing its anger on the image of the factory, but sweeping the
whole rationalist temper of the nineteenth century with its savage
rhetoric. And note Ruskin's political language: he taunts his readers
with the thought that, if they cannot achieve creative freedom, then
all their precious nineteenth-century rights, their votes, their democratic
freedoms, are worse than medieval slavery.
When William Morris set up his own printing press in the
1890s, he published "The Nature of Gothic" as a small book, and
wrote in the preface:
The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the
expression of man's pleasure in labor; that it is possible for
man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us
today, there have been times when he did rejoice in it.3
This joy in work, this creative freedom, was equated with
handwork by the Arts and Crafts movement, and we can see the
impact of this idea on Arts and Crafts objects whose appearance
declares that they are handmade-the hammer marks on metalwork,
the fluid, irregular contours of some pottery and glass, and
the marks of the adze or chisel on wood or stone. But though details
like this are very common on Arts and Crafts objects, they are only
details. The real importance of joy in labor in the Arts and Crafts,
and of its dark twin, the drudgery of machine-minding, was not
that they guided the act of designing, but that they served as myths
of personal endeavor. In the fitful light of Ruskin's prose, Arts and
Crafts people saw dark factories, men losing their souls in day after
2 E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn,
eds., The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10,
(London: George Allen and Co., 1903-12),
193.
3 John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: A
Chapter of the Stones of Venice (London:
Kelmscott Press, 1892), i.
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day of minding machines. That made it feel good to stitch a binding
by hand, or to mix a new batch of enamels. And it is noticeable that,
though the idea of joy in labor really applied to all people who
worked in factories, the Arts and Crafts did not address themselves
to those trades where factory production was most advanced. They
addressed themselves to architecture, furniture, metalwork, textiles,
pottery, stained glass, and certain kinds of printing. This is not a list
of industrialized trades as such, it is a list of the decorative arts. Joy
in labor begins to look less like an Arts and Crafts program for
changing society, and more like a banner under which decorative
artists could do what they would have done anyway.
The third idea was "Design Reform," that is, a movement to
improve the design of objects consumed by the public. Unlike the
previous two ideas, it was not peculiar to the Arts and Crafts movement.
The archetypal design reformers were the mid-Victorians
Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave. It was they who set up a
national system of art education in Britain, which became known as
"the South Kensington system," in order to improve standards of
design in British manufacturing.
The Arts and Crafts movement inherited much of this
approach. Arts and Crafts designers were generally high-minded
people and they talked about their work in terms "honesty,"
"1simplicity," and "the nature of materials." Though words like these
could be embodied in Arts and Crafts designs in complex and
contradictory ways, as Ashbee's house on Cheyne Walk shows, they
did encourage Arts and Crafts people to feel that they had a mission
to improve public taste. And in schools of art, in particular, design
reform and the Arts and Crafts served a single program: the
simplicity of working by hand lent itself to educational purposes
while, at the same time, national and local government used the
schools to improve the standard of design in local trades as a way of
improving economic performance. In the 1880s and 1890s, many
schools started classes in decorative arts relevant to local trades. In
Birmingham, for example, where the city's economy was heavily
dependent on decorative metalwork and jewelry, the city council
established the Birmingham Municipal School of Art in 1885.
Birmingham's progressive policies were shaped by the city's elite,
and the School of Art satisfied the advocates of Arts and Crafts
ideals as well as the commercial concerns of the Birmingham coun-
cil.
We have reached the halfway stage in looking at the relationship
between Arts and Crafts ideas and Arts and Crafts objects.
I do not think that ideas have taken us very far towards an understanding
of the objects. In fact, they seem to have had more to do
with how Arts and Crafts people felt about themselves-as artists,
as happy, as reformers-than with their work. It is as if their minds
were focused not so much on the design of objects as on the experience
of designing and making them. This is crucial to my argument.
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Once one accepts that the primary focus of Arts and Crafts ideas
was not so much objects as personal experience, a lot of things fall
into place. The Unity of Art (artists and craftsmen working
together), Joy in Labor (the creative satisfaction of ordinary work),
Design Reform (making manufactured objects better), all three can
be seen as facets of a single idea which I take to be at the heart of the
Arts and Crafts movement. That is the idea that creativity can be
part of the daily experience of ordinary people at work; that it is not
something special, not the preserve of fine artists and geniuses. That
was the idea which was in Ruskin's mind when he studied the
details of Venetian architecture. The hope of the Arts and Crafts
movement was that experience might become general. I will come
back to this idea at the end.
I am now going to turn around and look at Arts and Crafts
objects, in the hope of getting a clearer sense of the spirit in which
they were designed. I am going to list the qualities which I think
characterize them. Not all of these qualities will be found on all
objects, but I think almost any Arts and Crafts object will have more
than one of them. They do not amount to an Arts and Crafts style,
for Arts and Crafts objects are too varied visually for that. But they
do amount to a common visual language.
There is no single English word for my first quality. I want a
word which means that the design of the object reflects its nature
and purpose; it does not embellish it unduly or make it look like
something else. So I am going to invent one, "thinginess." Members
of the Arts and Crafts movement used to admire this quality in
products which they thought had escaped the attentions of the
decorative artist, such as sports equipment and cooking utensils.
(Nowadays, of course, design and consumption are having a field
day in just these two areas.) The three objects in figure 3 were made
by a workshop called the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft in the
1890s, and seeing them together provides a neat illustration of
thinginess. They are objects of different status: the flowerpot and the
Figure 3
Brass- and copper-wares, probably designed
by Arthur Dixon, and made by the Birmingham
Guild of Handicraft in the mid-1890s.
Photograph: Alan Crawford. Objects in the
collections of the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
4k
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Figure 4
Part of the fifth exhibition of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition Society in London, 1896.
Archive photograph, National Art Library,
London. Pressmark RC.LL.41, 57.
l y ~~~il
|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. . ... ..
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
table lamp belong in the drawing room, and the kettle belongs in
the kitchen. Yet they look much the same. Thinginess has overridden
middle-class propriety, and the drawing room objects emulate
the simplicity of the kitchen. When words such as "simplicity" and
"honesty" occur in Arts and Crafts writing, as they often do, they
usually refer to this kind of plainness.
Which brings me to the second quality of Arts and Crafts
objects, and that is almost exactly the opposite of the first. Walter
Crane once wrote:
The great advantage and charm of the Morrisian method is
that it lends itself either to simplicity or to splendor. You
might be almost plain enough to please Thoreau, with a
rush-bottomed chair, piece of matting, and oaken trestle
table; or you might have gold and lustre (the choice ware of
William De Morgan) gleaming from the sideboard, and
jeweled light in your windows, and walls hung with rich
arras tapestry.4
Elaborate ornament was just as important in the Arts and
Crafts as plainness, as the view of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in
figure 4 shows. A plain cabinet in the foreground is surrounded by
the sumptuous tapestries of Burne-Jones and Morris and Company.
If this taste for elaboration seems to contradict the first quality,
thinginess, remember that we are looking at objects and investigating
taste. If we were still in the first part of this paper, there would
be a contradiction, because we would be talking about abstract
ideas, "Simplicity" and "Splendor." But here we are dealing with
taste, which is more subtle and more generous than ideas. It is
perfectly possible-perhaps even necessary-to enjoy the simple
and the splendid aspects of the Arts and Crafts.
4 William Morris to Whistler: Papers and
Addresses on Art and Craft and the
Commonweal(London: George Bell and
Sons, 1911), 54-5.
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Figure 5
71-5 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London,
by C. R. Ashbee, 1896-1913.
Photograph: Anthony Kersting.
<.. <.>.'.o .9..... ... .. .. .... .. .. ... .. . ee5?s_
*:: :::}: }::.e; .}:: ..... :: .:i 8x8:'S;. _ 1 | R ...... s I 3 _t g ?5,>- --...... . . ....... ........
4. II~~~~~~~~~~~~
The third quality is association. It is normal in Arts and
Crafts objects for some aspect of the design, often but not always the
ornament, to be associated with, or refer to, something else. So
when you are trying to understand the object, you are looking at its
construction, use, and formal qualities; and at its associations. This
all sounds very technical, but it is a familiar part of decorative art.
Arts and Crafts objects usually spread their field of association
over two areas. One was nature and the other was the past.
Nature in Arts and Crafts designs was typically both stylized and
realistic. In the handbook Silverwork and Jewellery by the leading
designer Henry Wilson, there is a section on how to make a pendant
in the form of a nightingale. It begins, "First go and watch one
singing. "' Designs like this were meant to carry the mind out into
the countryside. It was a Romantic approach, and very different
from that of such mid-Victorian design refor mers as Henry Cole and
Christopher Dresser, who argued that ornament should be
abstracted from nature, so that it looked more like geometry and
less like things.
Figure 5 shows a group of houses by C. R. Ashbee in Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, London, including that shown in figure 1. T'he
picturesque details and jumbled facades recall the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century streetscape of English country towns. We naturally
think of this streetscape as the "source" of Ashbee's designs,
where he went for inspiration. But we should also think of it as the
"/association" of his designs: he thought of Chelsea as a kind of
urban village, growing through history, and he wanted to convey
5 Henry Wilson, Silverworkand Jewellery
(London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd.,
1903), 127.
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Figure 6
Necklace and pendant by Fred Partridge,
c.1906-1O0.
Photograph: Sotheby's, London.
that sense in his houses. Here, as in most Arts and Crafts contexts,
the past is a source both of inspiration and of association.
The last item in this catalog of Arts and Crafts taste is that it
was reactionary, or antithetical. I mean that it reacted against the
prevailing middle-class taste of its day. Arts and Crafts designers
looked at what was in the shops and then went away and designed
the opposite. The fashion in late-Victorian trade jewelry was for
diamonds, which were discovered in large quantities in South
Africa in 1868, and which became a symbol of wealth. They usually
were mounted in fine gold settings with other pale stones, in
designs which mimicked nature closely and whimsically-horses'
heads, shamrocks, and so on. Figure 6 shows a necklace by the Arts
and Crafts jeweler Fred Partridge. The design includes not
diamonds but a mixture of semiprecious stones; not fine gold
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settings but a setting of silver; not pale stones but color; and not
mimicking of nature, but evocation. We can only understand this
necklace fully when we put it in its antithetical context. It as much
as statement as a necklace. It says, "I am not about money. I am
about color, and craftsmanship, and art."
Now that we have traveled in both directions, what can we
conclude? I cannot claim to have given you a coherent picture of the
Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. I cannot reconcile splendor
and simplicity for you, or explain why collaborative attempts at the
Unity of Art did not come to much. I can only give you an interpretation
of parts of this, to me, too rich and too loose phenomenon.
But if there is a leitmotif running through what I have said, it is the
sense of the Arts and Crafts as marking itself off, underlining its
separateness from the world about it. We have seen this just now in
the association of Arts and Crafts objects with the Romantic dream
worlds of nature and the past, and in the antithetical approach. It
also was implied in the big ideas at the beginning. It was an important
part of the Unity of Art to be against professionalism. It was an
important part of Joy in Labor to be against that dark, mythical,
soul-destroying factory. And it was an important part of design
reform to be against current commercial taste.
Up until now, I have concentrated on the basic premise of the
Wolfsonian's inaugural exhibition, that design expresses ideas. But
as it has turned out, I have also been discussing the central theme of
the exhibition, modernity. You may wonder at my saying that, for I
have not mentioned the word "modernity" since the beginning.
That is because I have been talking about it in a negative sense. I
have been talking about antimodernism, for that is, I think, the best
general word for the inspiration which lay behind the turning away
of the Arts and Crafts movement.
I see the Arts and Crafts movement as a late episode in the
history of Romanticism. It upholds the imagination over reason,
feeling over intellect, and the organic over the mechanical. Instead
of the libertarian politics of a Rousseau or a Shelley, it tries to bring
Romantic values to bear on the daily life of the working man. Now
Romanticism was one, if not the principal, current of nineteenthcentury
antimodernism. Its values challenged the modernization of
society in the nineteenth century-a developing economy, industrialization,
the growth of cities, the dominance of the urban bourgeoisie,
and secularism. Even democracy which it had originally
championed it came to despise-in the London of Morris's News
from Nowhere, the Houses of Parliament have become a dung heap.
I would go further and say that Romanticism was antithetical to
modernity; that it embodied values which were a necessary opposite
to the rationalizing of society in Victorian Britain, as opposite
and as necessary as sleep is to waking. Romanticism and modernity
hate each other and need each other. Remember the quotation from
William Morris with which I started. The Arts and Crafts movement
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in Britain was simply a brave and slightly foolish application of the
spirit of Romanticism to the everyday world of work, and it too was
made up of hating and needing.
There remains the question of politics. I referred at the beginning
to the link between the Arts and Crafts movement and socialism.
Examples can be cited easily enough. William Morris, the
leading member of the Arts and Crafts movement was a leading
Socialist in the 1880s and early 1890s. A good number of his Arts
and Crafts friends and associates were also Socialists, notably Philip
Webb, the most revered Arts and Crafts architect. Walter Crane
devoted his talents as an illustrator to the Socialist cause. And C. R.
Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft was a brave and sustained attempt to
create Ruskinian freedom in the workshop, inspired by Ashbee's
concern for working men.
Does this mean that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain
was aligned with Socialism, that it was in some way left wing? That
would be interesting for, if modern craft movements have had political
affiliations, they usually have been with nationalism, as in
Eastern Europe and Scandinavia at the turn of the century, or with
the right wing, as in Germany and Italy in the early twentieth
century.
I think that there was a sense of social responsibility in the
Arts and Crafts movement, a sense of designing and making things
in a spirit which did not take profit as its motive. But that is too
vague a spirit to be identified with socialism. And the specific links
with politics are not as close as they may seem at first sight. Morris's
socialism was very real, and intimately linked with his work as a
designer, but it was not the cause of that work. If anything, it was
his work as a designer and the joy it brought him which led to his
socialism. It would be truer to say that his politics was design
inspired than that his design was politically inspired. And though
Ashbee brought his social beliefs and his design work together in an
impressive way, his links with political socialism were, at most,
loose. His friend, Alec Miller, recalled "I know that he never was a
member of any socialist group or organization, and I doubt if he
ever gave a vote for Labor in a party election."6
And for every left-wing element in the Arts and Crafts we
can cite a right-wing one. Against the profound socialism of Morris
we can weigh the equally profound right-wing sentiments of
Ruskin. The opening words of Ruskin's autobiography are: "I am,
and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old School."7
Philip Webb's greatest building was a large country house called
"Clouds." It was built for an aristocrat, Percy Wyndham, who made
it a gathering place for right-wing politicians and intellectuals. In
assessing the Arts and Crafts movement, should we not give as
much weight to the Tory client as to the Socialist architect? And
against the Romantic socialism of an Ashbee we can weigh the
conservative individualism of a Voysey, who gave up reading one of
6 In a letter to Nikolaus Pevsner, March 10,
1957; seen by the writer among Sir
Nikolaus's papers in 1968.
7 John Ruskin, Praeterita (London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1949), 5.
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Ashbee's books in disgust because its call for state protection of the
crafts irritated him so much.8
I do not cite these right-wing examples in order to give you
the impression that the Arts and Crafts movement was politically
bland, indifferently right or left wing. It had a potential for political
extremism: Morris the Marxist and Ruskin the furious Tory were
both its mentors. And I think we can understand why this should
be. The inspiration of the Arts and Crafts movement lay in the
Romantic critique of industrial society, that is, in antimodernism. At
its heart was the conviction that creativity can be a part of the lives
of ordinary people. There was nowhere on the face of mainstream
politics in the late nineteenth century where this critique, this
conviction could take hold. The Arts and Crafts movement represented
values for which politics had no place. It has no place for
them today. But if you care about these things, the Arts and Crafts
movement remains of abiding interest.
8 In a letter, c.1910, to Arthur W. Simpson,
in the possession of John Brandon-
Jones.
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