Arts and Crafts movement

Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface", as well as displaying "vulgarity in detail".

[12] Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),[13] all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly-made things.

[27] John William Mackail notes that "Carlyle's Past and Present stood alongside of [Ruskin's] Modern Painters as inspired and absolute truth.

Morris further developed this idea, insisting that no work should be carried out in his workshops before he had personally mastered the appropriate techniques and materials, arguing that "without dignified, creative human occupation people became disconnected from life".

Although Morris was famous for getting hands-on experience himself of many crafts (including weaving, dying, printing, calligraphy and embroidery), he did not regard the separation of designer and executant in his factory as problematic.

Walter Crane, a close political associate of Morris's, took an unsympathetic view of the division of labour on both moral and artistic grounds, and strongly advocated that designing and making should come from the same hand.

[48] In 1881, Eglantyne Louisa Jebb, Mary Fraser Tytler and others initiated the Home Arts and Industries Association to encourage the working classes, especially those in rural areas, to take up handicrafts under supervision, not for profit, but in order to provide them with useful occupations and to improve their taste.

[49] In 1882, architect A.H.Mackmurdo formed the Century Guild, a partnership of designers including Selwyn Image, Herbert Horne, Clement Heaton and Benjamin Creswick.

The London department store Liberty & Co., founded in 1875, was a prominent retailer of goods in the style and of the "artistic dress" favoured by followers of the Arts and Crafts movement.

There was a proliferation of amateur handicrafts of variable quality[62] and of incompetent imitators who caused the public to regard Arts and Crafts as "something less, instead of more, competent and fit for purpose than an ordinary mass produced article.

Leach was an active propagandist for these ideas, which struck a chord with practitioners of the crafts in the inter-war years, and he expounded them in A Potter's Book, published in 1940, which denounced industrial society in terms as vehement as those of Ruskin and Morris.

Horace W Elliot, an English gallerist, visited the Ewenny Pottery (which dated back to the 17th century) in 1885, to both find local pieces and encourage a style compatible with the movement.

[75] Other architects practicing in Ireland included Sir Edwin Lutyens (Heywood House in Co. Laois, Lambay Island and the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin) and Frederick 'Pa' Hicks (Malahide Castle estate buildings and round tower).

"[79] In Finland, an idealistic artists' colony in Helsinki was designed by Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren, and Eliel Saarinen,[1] who worked in the National Romantic style, akin to the British Gothic Revival.

In Hungary, under the influence of Ruskin and Morris, a group of artists and architects, including Károly Kós, Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, and Ede Toroczkai Wigand, discovered the folk art and vernacular architecture of Transylvania.

[82] Some of the advocates of the exhibit were Langford Warren, founder of Harvard's School of Architecture; Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead, social reformers; and Will H. Bradley, graphic designer.

This mandate was soon expanded into a credo, possibly written by the SAC's first president, Charles Eliot Norton, which read: This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft.

It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality.

It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it.

[83]Built in 1913–14 by the Boston architect J. Williams Beal in the Ossipee Mountains of New Hampshire, Tom and Olive Plant's mountaintop estate, Castle in the Clouds also known as Lucknow, is an excellent example of the American Craftsman style in New England.

Restored and landmark-protected examples are still present in America, especially in California in Berkeley and Pasadena, and the sections of other towns originally developed during the era and not experiencing post-war urban renewal.

As theoreticians, educators, and prolific artists in mediums from printmaking to pottery and pastel, two of the most influential figures were Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) on the East Coast and Pedro Joseph de Lemos (1882–1954) in California.

[86] Among his many unorthodox teachings was his belief that manufactured products could express "the sublime beauty" and that great insight was to be found in the abstract "design forms" of pre-Columbian civilizations.

It also advances the claim of all and each to the common possession of beauty in things common and familiar, and would awaken the sense of this beauty, deadened and depressed as it now too often is, either on the one hand by luxurious superfluities, or on the other by the absence of the commonest necessities and the gnawing anxiety for the means of livelihood; not to speak of the everyday uglinesses to which we have accustomed our eyes, confused by the flood of false taste, or darkened by the hurried life of modern towns in which huge aggregations of humanity exist, equally removed from both art and nature and their kindly and refining influences.

Red House, in Bexleyheath, London, designed for Morris in 1859 by architect Philip Webb, exemplifies the early Arts and Crafts style, with its well-proportioned solid forms, wide porches, steep roof, pointed window arches, brick fireplaces and wooden fittings.

She worked with the English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, for whose projects she created numerous landscapes, and who designed her home Munstead Wood, near Godalming in Surrey.

[90] Jekyll created the gardens for Bishopsbarns,[91] the home of York architect Walter Brierley, an exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and known as the "Lutyens of the North".

Morris's ideas were adopted by the New Education Movement in the late 1880s, which incorporated handicraft teaching in schools at Abbotsholme (1889) and Bedales (1892), and his influence has been noted in the social experiments of Dartington Hall during the mid-20th century.

This lack of craft training also caused concern in industrial and official circles, and in 1884 a Royal Commission (accepting the advice of William Morris) recommended that art education should pay more attention to the suitability of design to the material in which it was to be executed.

As head of the Royal College of Art in 1898, Crane tried to reform it along more practical lines, but resigned after a year, defeated by the bureaucracy of the Board of Education, who then appointed Augustus Spencer to implement his plan.