What was Arts and Crafts? William Morris and the return of craftsmanship

Arts and Crafts was a movement in Britain from around 1860 to 1910 that sought to restore good craftsmanship in response to industry's cheap and over-decorated mass-produced goods. William Morris is the central figure. The movement championed simple, honest forms, motifs from nature, local materials and a whole in which architecture, furniture and textiles belong together.

Facts

A revolt against the machine

At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 industry's new products were shown, but many critics thought them ugly: machine-made copies of old styles, overloaded with ornament. The art critic John Ruskin instead praised medieval craftsmanship, in which, as he saw it, the craftsman could express himself and labour had dignity.

William Morris, who had studied at Oxford and read Ruskin, put the ideas into practice. He believed that art did not belong only in museums but in everyday life, in chairs, wallpapers and books. Read more about the movement under Arts and Crafts.

Red House and the firm

When Morris married, his friend the architect Philip Webb designed Red House in Bexleyheath outside London, completed in 1860. The house was built of red brick with steep roofs and pointed-arched windows, and friends helped to decorate it with paintings, embroideries and furniture. The experience led Morris to start a company with friends in 1861 to make furniture, stained glass, textiles and wallpapers.

The firm, later Morris & Co, also sold an adjustable armchair with a reclining back, the so-called Morris chair, which became widespread. Morris himself concentrated mostly on pattern and learnt old techniques of vegetable dyeing and weaving.

The patterns

Morris's patterns are based on the plants of the garden and the meadow, often with birds, in dense, symmetrically repeated designs. Trellis, his first wallpaper, shows a trellis with roses and birds. Strawberry Thief of 1883 shows thrushes stealing strawberries in his garden and was printed by a time-consuming method in which indigo was bleached out to make room for other colours.

Willow Bough with its willow branches is among his best-known wallpapers. The patterns are clearly drawn and flat, with no illusion of depth, which distinguishes them from Victorian wallpapers with shaded flowers. His daughter May Morris became a leading embroidery artist.

The movement grows

From the 1880s the ideas spread. In 1887 the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was formed, giving the movement its name, and guilds of craftsmen were founded. The architect and designer Charles Voysey designed country houses and wallpapers with stylised birds, and C.R. Ashbee founded the Guild of Handicraft in London in 1888.

Morris summed up the attitude in a famous piece of advice: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. At the same time there was a contradiction of which he himself was aware: hand-made objects were expensive, and it was mostly the rich who could buy them.

The legacy in Sweden and the world

Arts and Crafts influenced the whole of Europe and the United States. The ideas lived on in Art Nouveau, in the Wiener Werkstätte and in the Deutscher Werkbund, and from there in the Bauhaus. Paradoxically, the movement that turned against the machine led to modern industrial design, through the idea that form and function belong together.

In Sweden the influence can be seen in the handicraft movement and in Ellen Key's pamphlet Beauty for All of 1899. Carl and Karin Larsson's home Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, with light colours, simple furniture and woven textiles, combines English ideas with the Swedish rural tradition. Read more in the guide to Swedish folk art.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who is the central figure of the Arts and Crafts movement?