What Is The Arts And Crafts Movement?

The Arts and Crafts movement was the British design reform movement that emerged from the workshops, lectures, and publications of William Morris, Philip Webb, John Ruskin, and their second-generation followers between 1860 and the First World War. It produced the most significant body of decorative design in late nineteenth-century Britain (wallpapers, textiles, furniture, stained glass, ceramics, metalwork, books) and shaped twentieth-century design culture across Europe and North America. The movement's central principle was that the act of making and the act of designing should not be separated, and that ordinary objects should be beautiful, well-made, and produced under conditions that respected the worker.

According to the V&A's introduction to Arts and Crafts, the movement took its name from a specific exhibition society: "Structured more by a set of ideals than a prescriptive style, the Movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, a group founded in London in 1887 that had as its first president the artist and book illustrator Walter Crane."

The basics

• Period: c.1860–1914 (peak 1880s–1900s)
• Country of origin: Britain (with parallel movements in Europe, the United States, and Japan)
• Named after: the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded London 1887
• Founders / central figures: William Morris, Philip Webb, John Ruskin, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee, William Lethaby, C.F.A. Voysey
• Core principles: unity of designer and maker, truth to materials, simple functional form, respect for traditional craftsmanship, social reform of the workplace
• Output: wallpapers, textiles, furniture, stained glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, architecture, books, typography

The Victorian crisis the movement responded to

Britannica's entry on the Arts and Crafts Movement identifies the immediate Victorian crisis that produced it: "By 1860 a vocal minority had become profoundly disturbed by the level to which style, craftsmanship, and public taste had sunk in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its mass-produced and banal decorative arts." The Great Exhibition of 1851 had shown the British public what mass-produced decorative art at industrial scale looked like (machine-carved furniture, electroplated silver, garish printed cottons), and the reaction among Ruskin, Morris, and the younger generation was sharp and immediate.

The V&A frames the underlying intellectual position: "Ruskin argued that separating the act of designing from the act of making was both socially and aesthetically damaging." Ruskin's chapter "On the Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice (1853) was the founding text the Arts and Crafts movement built on, and his argument that medieval craftsmanship had been morally as well as aesthetically superior to nineteenth-century industrial production was the core idea Morris and his circle worked out in practice from 1860 onward.

Morris and the firm of 1861

The V&A identifies the central practical figure: "Many of the people who became involved in the Movement were influenced by the work of the designer William Morris, who by the 1880s had become an internationally renowned and commercially successful designer and manufacturer." Morris's design firm, founded in 1861 with Webb, Burne-Jones, Brown, Rossetti, and Faulkner, was the practical demonstration that a workshop could produce wallpapers, textiles, stained glass, furniture, and embroidery to high artistic standard while also functioning as a commercial business. By the time the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was founded in 1887, Morris had been running the firm for twenty-six years and was the natural senior figure of the movement.

Looking to the medieval workshop

The V&A characterises the historical orientation: "Looking to the past, particularly the medieval period, for simpler and better models for both living and production, Morris argued for the return to a system of manufacture based on small-scale workshops." The medieval-revival framing distinguished Arts and Crafts from the contemporary French academic style, the German Biedermeier, and the American industrial aesthetic.

It also distinguished it from the contemporary geometric Reform Style of Owen Jones, which drew on Islamic and Egyptian sources rather than European medieval ones, and from the contemporary Aesthetic movement (Whistler, Wilde, Beardsley) which emphasised art-for-art's-sake without the social-reform argument. Arts and Crafts was specifically a movement to reorganise modern decorative production along pre-industrial lines, with the medieval workshop as its model.

The second generation and the Guild of Handicraft

The Arts and Crafts movement broadened in the late 1880s and 1890s as a younger generation set up their own workshops modelled on Morris's. Charles Robert Ashbee founded the Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888, William Lethaby co-founded the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1896, and a network of regional Arts and Crafts settlements emerged at Chipping Campden, Sapperton, the Cotswolds, the Lake District, and the Highlands. The decorative output of the second generation (silverware, cabinet-making, embroidery, weaving, bookbinding) is now scattered across museum collections in the V&A, the Cheltenham Art Gallery, and the Wilson, and many private American collections.

The international reach

The Arts and Crafts movement spread quickly. The Vienna Secession (1897) and the Wiener Werkstätte (1903) under Josef Hoffmann took the workshop principle into Austrian Jugendstil. The Deutscher Werkbund (1907) carried it into German design education and eventually into the Bauhaus. American Craftsman architecture (Greene and Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School) developed in California, and the Mission Style transformed American furniture for a generation. Mingei, the Japanese folk-craft movement, was founded by Yanagi Sōetsu in the 1920s as a direct application of Morris's principles to Japanese craft tradition.

The Tate's art-term entry on Arts and Crafts identifies the historical place of the movement: "The Arts and Crafts movement is often seen as the starting point for modern design approaches, as noted in Nikolaus Pevsner's book Pioneers of Modern Design: William Morris to Walter Gropius first published 1936." Pevsner's book traces the line directly from Morris's 1861 firm through the second-generation Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus in 1919, and that thesis is the standard art-historical framework used to teach modern design today.

What the movement left behind

Arts and Crafts is the founding moment of the design tradition that includes Morris wallpapers, English country-house craftsmanship, Hoffmann silverwork, Wright Prairie houses, and Mingei pottery. The movement's principles (truth to materials, the unity of design and making, the social reform of the workplace, and the idea that ordinary objects should be beautiful) are now baked into modern design practice. The output of the movement is held by the V&A, Tate Britain, the Cheltenham Art Gallery, the Lakeland Arts Trust, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and dozens of other major institutions.

For Arts and Crafts decorative work specifically, browse the full archive of Morris-influenced patterns at William Morris Wallpaper.

FAQ

When did the Arts and Crafts movement start?

It emerged gradually from 1860 onward, with William Morris's 1861 design firm as the founding workshop, but took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded in London in 1887. The Society's first exhibition opened in 1888 at the New Gallery in Regent Street, and the movement's peak years run from 1888 to about 1910. Walter Crane was the first president of the Society.

Who founded the Arts and Crafts movement?

There is no single founder. The intellectual foundation came from John Ruskin (whose 1853 chapter "On the Nature of Gothic" set out the social and aesthetic argument), and the practical foundation came from William Morris (whose 1861 design firm produced the first body of work in the new style). Walter Crane, Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, William Lethaby, Charles Robert Ashbee, and C.F.A. Voysey are the other central figures of the founding and second generations.

What did Arts and Crafts produce?

Almost everything decorative: wallpaper, printed and woven textiles, furniture, stained glass, embroidery, tapestry, carpets, ceramics, silver and other metalwork, jewellery, bookbindings, typography, architecture, and church decoration. The defining principle was that all decorative work should be made to the same artistic standard, and that the boundary between fine art and decorative art (which Victorian academic culture defended) should be removed.

Where can I see Arts and Crafts work today?

The V&A has the largest single collection. Tate Britain, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, the Wilson, the Lakeland Arts Trust at Blackwell, Wightwick Manor (National Trust), Standen House (National Trust), and Red House at Bexleyheath all hold significant collections. In the United States the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt all have major Arts and Crafts holdings.