Arts & Crafts

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851 which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. 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".[10] Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),[11] all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly made things.[12] The organizers were "unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits."[13] Owen Jones, for example, complained that "the architect, the upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter" produced "novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence."[13] From these criticisms of manufactured goods emerged several publications which set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analyzed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for "more logic in the application of decoration."[12] Other works followed in a similar vein, such as Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), Gottfried Semper's Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ("Science, Industry and Art") (1852), Ralph Wornum's Analysis of Ornament (1856), Redgrave's Manual of Design (1876), and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856).[12] The Grammar of Ornament was particularly influential, liberally distributed as a student prize and running into nine reprints 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 must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain".[14] A fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, whereas these writers advocated flat and simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that "style" demanded sound construction before ornamentation, and a proper awareness of the quality of materials used. "Utility must have precedence over ornamentation."[15]The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in 1892 in his Golden Type inspired by 15th century printer Nicolas Jenson. This chapter from The Stones of Venice was a sort of manifesto for the Arts and Crafts movement. However, the design reformers of the mid-19th century did not go as far as the designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. They were more concerned with ornamentation than construction, they had an incomplete understanding of methods of manufacture,[15] and they did not criticize industrial methods as such. By contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.