Arts and Crafts movement

The Arts and Crafts movement was an international style in decorative and fine arts that first took hold in the British Isles, then spread across the British Empire, Europe, and North America. Its start is broadly placed in the 1880s, with the term itself first used in 1887, and by around 1920 it was largely finished in the UK, though the name continued to be used loosely for various popular design elements. The movement arose as a reaction against what was seen as a decline in decorative arts and the poor conditions of their production, flourishing between about 1880 and 1920 in Europe and North America. Some view it as the origin of the Modern Style, a British version of what later became known as Art Nouveau; others see it as the English form of Art Nouveau; and still others consider it opposed to Art Nouveau, which it criticized for using industrial materials like iron. In Japan, it appeared in the 1920s as the Mingei movement, which championed traditional craftsmanship. The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at an 1887 meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, though the underlying principles and style had been developing in England for at least twenty years. The movement was inspired by historian Thomas Carlyle, art critic John Ruskin, and designer William Morris. In Scotland, key figures included Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The writings of Viollet-le-Duc on nature and Gothic art also shaped the movement’s aesthetics. The Arts and Crafts movement grew out of efforts to reform design and decoration in mid-19th-century Britain, reacting against a perceived drop in standards linked to machinery and factory production. Critics were especially harsh on items from the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered overly ornate, artificial, and ignorant of material qualities. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted that the exhibits showed “ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface” and “vulgarity in detail.” Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole, Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt, and Richard Redgrave, who all condemned excessive ornament and impractical or poorly made goods. They were “unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits.” Owen Jones complained that architects, upholsterers, paper-stainers, weavers, calico-printers, and potters produced “novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence.” These criticisms led to publications outlining correct design principles. Richard Redgrave’s *Supplementary Report on Design* (1852) analyzed design and ornament, pleading for “more logic in the application of decoration.” Other works followed, including Wyatt’s *Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century* (1853), Gottfried Semper’s *Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst* (1852), Ralph Wornum’s *Analysis of Ornament* (1856), Redgrave’s *Manual of Design* (1876), and Jones’s *Grammar of Ornament* (1856). The last was especially influential, widely given as a student prize and reprinted nine times by 1910. Jones declared that ornament “must be secondary to the thing decorated,” that there must be “fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented,” and that wallpapers and carpets should not have patterns “suggestive of anything but a level or plain.” While a Great Exhibition fabric might show a natural motif made to look realistic, these writers advocated flat, simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that “style” required sound construction before ornamentation and a proper awareness of material quality, stating “Utility must have precedence over ornamentation.” However, these mid-19th-century design reformers did not go as far as the Arts and Crafts movement. They focused more on ornament than construction, had an incomplete grasp of manufacturing methods, and did not criticize industrial methods themselves. In contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much about social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners saw the two as inseparable. Some of the movement’s ideas were anticipated by Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic Revival in architecture. He advocated truth to material, structure, and function, as Arts and Crafts artists later did. Pugin also articulated the social critics’ habit of contrasting modern society’s faults—like urban sprawl and poor treatment of the poor—with the Middle Ages, a tendency that became routine with Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. His book *Contrasts* (1836) showed bad modern buildings and town planning alongside good medieval examples. His biographer Rosemary Hill notes that he “reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmanship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail.” She describes the spare furnishings he specified for a building in 1841—“rush chairs, oak tables”—as “the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo.”

The Arts and Crafts philosophy largely came from John Ruskin’s social criticism, which was deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle.