The Society's exhibitions were held annually at the New Gallery from 1888 to 1890, and roughly every three years thereafter,[1][2] were important in the flowering of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the decades prior to World War I.
[2] Of its goals and purposes, he wrote: We desired first of all to give opportunity to the designer and craftsman to exhibit their work to the public for its artistic interest and thus to assert the claims of decorative art and handicraft to attention equally with the painter of easel pictures, hitherto almost exclusively associated with the term art in the public mind.
Ignoring the artificial distinction between Fine and Decorative art, we felt that the real distinction was what we conceived to be between good and bad art, or false and true taste and methods in handicraft, considering it of little value to endeavour to classify art according to its commercial value or social importance, while everything depended upon the spirit as well as the skill and fidelity with which the conception was expressed, in whatever material, seeing that a worker earned the title of artist by the sympathy with and treatment of his material, by due recognition of its capacity, and its natural limitations, as well as of the relation of the work to use and life.
[3] William Morris succeeded Crane as president in 1891.,[4] and the Society thereafter chose to reduce the frequency of showings in order to ensure an abundance of materials to display.
Crane died in 1915, and architect and designer Henry Wilson was president from 1915 to 1922, but the exhibitions failed to recover the critical and artistic success of the 1890s.