The Victorian Era

How Did the Arts and Crafts Movement Begin?

Article · Architecture & Design · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Arts and Crafts Movement was the most important design reform movement of the Victorian period. Founded in the 1860s and 1870s around the painter, designer, and writer William Morris, it sought to reassert the value of handcraft, honest materials, and the dignity of the worker against the machine production and shoddy design of the industrial age, and in doing so it influenced architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, wallpaper, pottery, metalwork, jewellery, printing, and bookbinding in Britain, the British Empire, and the wider world. The first business of the movement was Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., founded in 1861 by Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner, and Peter Paul Marshall; it was reorganised as Morris & Co. in 1875 and remained in production until 1940. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1887, gave the movement its name. The history of the movement is examined in Victorian Furniture and Decorative Arts, and the broader context is set out in Victorian Architecture and Interior Design.

The Origins of the Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement had its origins in a small circle of friends who met at the University of Oxford in the early 1850s. William Morris (1834–1896), then an undergraduate at Exeter College, formed a close friendship with Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), then an undergraduate at Exeter, and through Burne-Jones with a group of like-minded young men, including the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), the architect Philip Webb (1831–1915), and the painter Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893). They shared an enthusiasm for medieval art and medieval literature, a distaste for the prevailing taste of mid-Victorian England, and a Romantic commitment to the value of the handmade.

The circle took its intellectual bearings from three writers. John Ruskin, particularly in The Stones of Venice (1851–53) and The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), argued for a return to the honest, simple, and natural forms of the medieval period, and denounced the moral corruption of industrial labour. A. W. N. Pugin, in Contrasts (1836) and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), made a parallel argument from a Catholic perspective, and laid the theoretical foundations of the Gothic Revival. Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843) and Signs of the Times (1829), criticised the prevailing taste, the prevailing morality, and the prevailing social conventions of the age, and called for a return to the heroic, the spiritual, and the moral values of the past. The Arts and Crafts Movement can be read as the attempt to put these arguments into practice.

The Formation of the Firm

The first practical step was the foundation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. at 8 Red Lion Square, London, in 1861. The firm was a partnership of seven: Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Brown, Webb, Faulkner, and Marshall. Morris was the principal designer and the businessman; Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Brown supplied the painted designs; Webb supplied the architectural and furniture designs; and Marshall was the working joiner. The firm produced furniture, painted tiles, stained glass, tapestries, embroideries, wallpaper, and eventually chintzes and carpets, all in a hand-made, hand-crafted, hand-finished, hand-decorated, hand-painted, hand-dyed, and hand-printed style.

The firm was reorganised in 1875 as Morris & Co., with Morris as sole director, and it moved its workshops to Merton Abbey on the River Wandle in south-west London, where it had access to water power for its dyeworks and its looms. By the 1880s Morris & Co. was the most successful and most influential design firm in Britain, and its products — the Trellis wallpaper, the Fruit and Snakehead printed cottons, the Honeysuckle and Pomona tapestries, the stained glass of Burne-Jones, the Sussex chairs and the rush-seated country chairs, the Kelmscott Press books — were to be found in the artistic interiors of London, the home counties, and the world.

The Principles of the Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement was based on a small number of principles, repeated so often in the writings of Morris, Ruskin, and the design reformers that they became the commonplaces of the movement. The first was truth to materials, the idea that a design should respect the nature of its material, should be appropriate to it, and should not pretend to be made of something else. The second was the unity of design, the idea that the design of a house, a room, a piece of furniture, or a wallpaper should be coherent and integrated as a whole. The third was the dignity of labour, the idea that the worker should be respected, fairly paid, involved in the design process, and proud of his or her work. The fourth was the social value of art, the idea that art should be accessible to all, should be part of daily life, should be functional as well as decorative, and should be of service to the community.

These principles were a reaction against the industrialisation of the period, against the mass production of the period, against the poor design of the period, and against the social and economic conditions of the period. They were also a reaction against the prevailing academic taste, which the reformers saw as a tired and lifeless copying of historical styles. The Arts and Crafts Movement was a movement of social reform as well as a movement of design reform, and it was associated with the socialist, radical, trade unionist, and co-operative currents of late Victorian reform.

The Spread of the Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement spread rapidly through the United Kingdom, the Empire, the United States, Continental Europe, and the wider world in the 1880s and 1890s. It spread through the establishment of design firms — Morris & Co., Liberty, Heal’s, the workshops of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society — through the establishment of art schools, through the publication of design books, through the organisation of exhibitions, and through the formation of societies such as the Art Workers’ Guild (1884) and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1887).

The movement was particularly influential in the reform of design education, in the building conservation movement — notably through the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded by Morris in 1877 to oppose the heavy-handed restoration of medieval churches — and in the garden city and early town planning movements of the turn of the century. The work of the SPAB, and the broader restoration debate, is examined in What is Gothic Revival architecture?.

The Legacy

The legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement is substantial. It was the most important design reform movement of the late nineteenth century, and it influenced many of the major developments of the early twentieth: Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil, the Deutscher Werkbund, the Vienna Secession, the Chicago School, and, more indirectly, the Bauhaus and the Modern Movement. Its social ideals also left their mark on the co-operative, garden city, and conservation movements of the early twentieth century, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the National Trust, and the Arts Council of Great Britain can all be traced, in different ways, back to the work of Morris and his circle. The history of the parallel Aesthetic Movement is examined in What is Aesthetic Movement design?.