Brother Rabbit Lifestyle, Part 3: Design Principles

 

When we hear the term “Arts & Crafts” in terms of architecture, furniture, or decorative arts, we often think of Craftsman bungalows and square, rough-hewn chairs, and rooms adorned with pottery in subdued hues. In fact, there was never merely one style of Arts & Crafts design. Beginning, as we have noted previously, in the Gothic Revival in Britain, and under the strong influence of the Mediaevalism of Ruskin and Pugin, the drive for incorporation of historical and vernacular styles (local to the area in which the items were made) was an early tenet of the look. Morris certainly did this with his inclusion of such items as Sussex chairs and refectory (or trestle) tables; the Sussex chair became widely known as the Morris chair and was copied worldwide.

Morris famously advised clients to 'have nothing in your homes which you do not know to be beautiful and believe to be useful.' However, fed a constant stream of gimcrack manufactured items, how was the average person – whom Morris wished to reach in his reforms – to know what was beautiful, or indeed discern what was truly useful from the plethora of so-called labour saving devices come upon the market (such as carpet sweepers and any manner of kitchen gadgetry)? One answer was to look to the Art & Crafts designers for advice as arbiters of the beautiful, rather than manufacturers of mainstream Victorian furniture and decorative arts items. Another, equally valid, method was to look to nature, both wild and domestic, and impart these designs by simple means into or onto the furniture one's local ancestors had always made, or the items made by the household for their use. The advantage to the latter is that we may incorporate symbols which are important to ourselves, our family, or our local or ethnic history into the ornamentation of our homes and their decoration, thus truly making a statement about who we are and what matters to us, which has always been a purpose of design, but which was especially important to the Arts & Crafts, and even moreso to us today.

Following on this edict was the principle of simplicity of design; that is, no 'excess' ornamentation (for its own sake), as may be seen in the Victorians' use of multiple layers of drapery and curtains, table coverings, or combining of several period styles of carving in one piece of furniture. The Renaissance revival style is a good example of this 'excess ornamentation', being a mishmash of a wide range of classical Italian and French modes, without much regard to the rules of the classical orders. Real Renaissance era buildings and furnishings adhere to the rules of proportion, and thus appear balanced and pleasing, while much of their Victorian counterparts are a jumble and disturbing to the senses.

In the melding of the Arts & Crafts with Art Nouveau, Jugenstyl, and other national or local styles, such as Viking revival or Tiffany glasswork, some may argue that this principle of simplicity was lost; while others – the work of Macintosh and the Glasgow School, Archibald Knox, Stickley, Greene & Greene, the Roycroft Co-operative, and Frank Lloyd Wright retain the simplicity of design of the pure Arts & Crafts ethos. Personally, I have a great fancy for both Knox's pared down Celtic designs – which were sold through Liberty and Company's department store – and work of G.F and Mary Watts, notable the Watts Chapel. Somewhere in the middle of this design spectrum is the embroidery work of Jessie Newbery and the MacDonald sisters, Frances and Margaret. I will confess to being awed and overwhelmed by the beauty of Tiffany glass, seen up close in an exhibition many years ago, but after a while, it became disturbingly too much for the senses, whereas the softer colours of the designs inside the Watts Chapel were much more restful to the eye; thus I learned an important lesson about what was meant by 'simplicity' in this matter. It is one thing to have bright scarlet walls with industrial furniture as a design statement, but quite another to live a comfortable, relaxed life with it.

For the everyday person especially, working in shops, offices, or factories, coming home to a restful, beautiful environment impacted the quality of life as much as having beautiful interiors did to the upper classes, and this is why Morris strove to make beautiful, well-crafted items available to the masses, even if production costs made individually crafted items prohibitively expensive to the masses. The philosophy of the effect of beauty and harmonious surroundings upon the spirit of man is a very important one in Arts & Crafts design, following on Ruskin's idea that in the Middle Ages when the common folk worked outdoors for the most part and were surrounded by nature, then went home to simple, handmade furnishings and hand worked neccessaries, they were happier than the contemporary man, working in a dirty, grey gritty factory full of noise, coming home through dirty, crowded noisy streets to squalid cheaply furnished accommodations often shared with too many others, punctuated by ugly tin souvenirs from hard-won seaside holidays. I am exaggerating but a little the everyday life of ordinary people in the period. This concern for the mental as well as physical well-being of the working man was an enormous preoccupation for many social reformers at the time, of whom our Arts & Crafts designers were numbered. The drive for Beauty wasn't just an ivory tower ideal promulgated by backward-looking academics, but a real, nuts and bolts, crying from the streetcorners reform movement that took many forms. We may ask ourselves in the 21^st century, with lives full of endless technology and media bombardment, whether we may not learn something of how to make our lives better from these efforts of our radical Victorian friends.

Specifically, what distinguishes items as Arts & Crafts, whether made in the accepted period of 1860-1900 or today, is that they are made from start to finish by the designer (not designed by one person and parts made individually by others then assembled at some future point); using natural local woods with exposed joints (or locally available metals); made from or incorporating vernacular, traditional designs, used in the local area for generations; with stylised designs (often of a folk nature) taken from the local outdoors. What I mean by stylised designs is the flat, Pre-Raphaelite etching style seen in Mediaeval woodcuts. Morris said of textile designs that they weren't supposed to look like an actual field of flowers (referencing the mania for extreme shading then popular; today we would call it needlepainting.) There is some shading, to distinguish one part of the design from another, but it is very minimal, and indeed to our eyes as well as the Victorians', the design will look flat, not three dimensional.

We can see why, then, that there was no specific 'Arts & Crafts' style, being adapted to suit local materials and conditions. An Arts & Crafts style can be Japanese, German, Czech, or Nigerian, as long as it follows on the design principles. One is not better than another, or 'more' Arts & Crafts. We will have our personal preferences, of course, and that is perfectly acceptable.

Finally, an important aspect to designing one's own interiors and exteriors – the front terrace garden and walk being as much a part of the design of one's environs as the curtains or crockery indoors – is cohesion. Pick a local style of Arts & Crafts design and by and large stick to it. This limits the options, of course, but also chaos which may ensue from competing styles and a disconcerting jumble to the eye. If you must, mix two or three which are analogous (for instance, Viking, Jacobean, and Celtic) for some variety. As an example, I love Japonisme, East Indian and Tibetan folk art, but as I have European, mostly Jacobean style furniture and lots of plaid, being Scottish, the exotic East really wouldn't go, so I limit my forays to a few clothing items. Otherwise, my digs would look like a rather neglected anthropology museum instead of a Scottish country manor in miniature, which is my object. Also, contrary to the 'country' decorating style, try not to have vast collections of things you don't actually use cluttering up the walls and shelves, whether it be baskets, quilts, depression glass, or real ancient Greco-Roman urns (which, unless you inherited them from your uncle who excavated Troy you shouldn't have anyway.) If you have real, beautiful things, use them. If you need a dinnerware set for 100 people because you host State dinners, then by all means, have it. But a collection of 2000 antique china thimbles can probably go to your local museum, where you can visit them if necessary.

Brother Rabbit Lifestyle, Part 2: The Arts & Crafts Movement - Founders, Practitioners, and Timetime

We must first note, with respect to the Arts & Crafts Movement, that we often are called upon to distinguish what we mean by this form of art and of life from what is colloquially known as 'arts and crafts', of the nature a child will do at summer camp, school, or the like. Rest assured, we mean nothing to do with ice-pop sticks or hot stick rhinestones.

As discussed previous post, according to the V&A, the The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was born out of an increasing understanding that society needed to adopt a different set of priorities in relation to the manufacture of objects. Its leaders wanted to develop products that not only had more integrity but which were also made in a less dehumanising way.

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 Society's chief aim was to assert a new public relevance for the work of decorative artists and decorative art.

However, by that time the oft-referred father of the Movement, William Morris, known familiarly as Topsy by his friends, had been in business in the style since 1861, first as Morris Marshall Faulkner Company, then as Morris & Company. The firm was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer, with a medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. Morris & Company closed in 1940.

The company was jointly created by Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Faulkner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, P. P. Marshall, and Philip Webb. Most of these men were Pre-Raphaelite artists or designers, or associated with that Brotherhood. The prospectus set forth that the firm would undertake carving, stained glass, metal-work, paper-hangings, chintzes (printed fabrics), and carpets. The first headquarters of the firm were at 8 Red Lion Square in London. 

The decoration of churches was from the first an important part of the business. A great wave of church-building and remodelling by the Church of England in the 1840s and 1850s increased the demand for ecclesiastical decoration of all kinds, especially stained glass. But this market shrank in the general depression of the later 1860s, and the firm increasingly turned to secular commissions. On its non-ecclesiastical side, the product line was extended to include, besides painted stained glass windows and mural decoration, furniture, metal and glass wares, cloth and paper wall-hangings, embroideries, jewellery, woven and knotted carpets, silk damasks, and tapestries. 

They were hugely influenced by two titans in the Neo-Gothic Victorian revival: the artist and art critic John Ruskin, and architect and interior designer, Augustus Pugin.

Pugin, the son of a refugee from the French Revolution, Pugin learned drawing from his father, and for a while attended Christ's Hospital. After leaving school he worked in his father's draughting office, and in 1825 and 1827 accompanied him on visits to France. His first commissions independent of his father were for designs for the goldsmiths Rundell and Bridge, and for designs for furniture of Windsor Castle, England from the upholsterers Morrel and Seddon. Through a contact made while working at Windsor, he became interested in the design of theatrical scenery, and in 1831 obtained a commission to design the sets for the production of the new opera Kenilworth at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He then established a business supplying historically accurate, carved wood and stone detailing for the increasing number of buildings being constructed in the Gothic Revival style. 

In 1836, Pugin published Contrasts, a polemical book which argued for the revival of the medieval Gothic style, and also "a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages". Each plate in the book selected a type of urban building and contrasted the 1830 example with its 15th-century equivalent. 

Following the destruction by fire of the Palace of Westminster in Westminster, London in 1834, Pugin was employed by Sir Charles Barry to supply interior designs for his entry to the architectural competition which would determine who would build the new Palace of Westminster. Pugin also supplied drawings for the entry of James Gillespie Graham. This followed a period of employment when Pugin had worked with Barry on the interior design of King Edward's School, Birmingham. Despite his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1834, Pugin designed and refurbished both Anglican and Catholic churches throughout England. He worked extensively in Ireland on chapels and Cathedrals. He died in 1852, of complications of hyperthyroid.

John Ruskin in 1849 was in Venice, working on The Stones of Venice, a seminal work which ranged from Venetian architecture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history. It reflected Ruskin's view of contemporary England, serving as a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had slowly degenerated in thanks to its artists honouring themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness.

Praising Gothic ornament, Ruskin argued that it was an expression of the artisan's joy in free, creative work. The worker must be allowed to think and to express his own personality and ideas, ideally using his own hands, rather than machinery. This was both an aesthetic attack on, and a social critique of, the division of labour in particular, and industrial capitalism in general. 

Within William Morris' own family, his wife Jane was one of the principle embroiderers of Morris's designs from the time of their marriage in 1859 onwards. The daughter of a stable hand, after her engagement, she was privately educated to become a gentleman's wife. Her keen intelligence allowed her to recreate herself. She was a voracious reader who became proficient in French and Italian, and she became an accomplished pianist with a strong background in classical music. Later on, her daughters Jenny and May joined her in the embroidery works, with May taking on the Direction of the Embroidery Department at Morris & Company in 1885, aged 23. She had studied embroidery at the National Art Training School (later the Royal College of Art), and was a designer of embroideries at Morris & Company in her own right. Her choice of colours was rather brighter than her father's but still in the stylised (conventionalised) manner of the firm.

Morris' college friend, and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Edward Coley Burne-Jones (Ned) was a founding partner of Morris Marshall Faulkner Company. Burne-Jones continued to contribute designs for stained glass, and later tapestries until the end of his career. Although known primarily as a painter, Burne-Jones was also an illustrator, helping the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic to enter mainstream awareness. In addition, he designed books for the Kelmscott Press between 1892 and 1898.

Born in 1833, the son of a Welshman, Burne Jones attended the Birmingham School of Art and Exeter College, Oxford, where he met Morris. They read John Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches, and worshipped the Middle Ages. At this time Burne-Jones discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which was to be so influential in his life. He had had no regular training as a draughtsman, and lacked the confidence of science. But his extraordinary faculty of invention as a designer was already ripening; his mind, rich in knowledge of classical story and medieval romance, teemed with pictorial subjects, and he set himself to complete his set of skills by resolute labour, witnessed by innumerable drawings. The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail.

Burne-Jones's paintings were one strand in the evolving tapestry of Aestheticism from the 1860s through the 1880s, which considered that art should be valued as an object of beauty engendering a sensual response, rather than for the story or moral implicit in the subject matter. In many ways this was antithetical to the ideals of Ruskin and the early Pre-Raphaelites. When Morris died in 1896, the health of the devastated Burne-Jones declined substantially. He died in 1898, of influenza.

The man who gave the name to the Arts & Crafts Movement, artist and illustrator Walter Crane, was born in 1845, and a student of the works of the  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and John Ruskin. He devoted much time and energy to the work of the Art Workers Guild, of which he was master in 1888 and 1889 and to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which he helped to found in 1888. He was also a Vice President of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a dress reform movement begun in 1890, whose aim was to promote the loose-fitting clothing, in opposition to "stiffness, tightness and weight". His early work includes illustrations for an edition of Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, in which he had shown his preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher's and the decorator's art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books.

Of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, formed in London in 1887 to promote the exhibition of decorative arts alongside fine arts, Crane wrote,

We desired first of all to give opportunity to the designer and craftsman to exhibit their work to the public for its artistic interest and thus to assert the claims of decorative art and handicraft to attention equally with the painter of easel pictures, hitherto almost exclusively associated with the term art in the public mind.
Ignoring the artificial distinction between Fine and Decorative art, we felt that the real distinction was what we conceived to be between good and bad art, or false and true taste and methods in handicraft, considering it of little value to endeavour to classify art according to its commercial value or social importance, while everything depended upon the spirit as well as the skill and fidelity with which the conception was expressed, in whatever material, seeing that a worker earned the title of artist by the sympathy with and treatment of his material, by due recognition of its capacity, and its natural limitations, as well as of the relation of the work to use and life.

In the 1930s it became clear to some members that if the Society was to survive in any form it had to confront the role of the crafts in relation to industry and the place of machinery in craft production. The Society’s 1935 exhibition introduced a section devoted to mass-produced articles designed by craftsmen to demonstrate the influence the crafts could have on industry, which brought its exhibitions to the notice of the press again.

The Society continued to exhibit periodically until the 1950s^.. In 1960, it merged with the Cambridgeshire Guild of Craftsmen to form the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which is still active. Thus we can see that the Arts & Crafts Movement never really died out before the 1970s craft revival, rather going underground as a subculture.

In the next post, we will look at the design principles of the Movement; how an object qualifies as belonging to the English Arts & Crafts.

Brother Rabbit Lifestyle Origins: Part 1 -The Great Exhibition

In this series, a discussion of what is meant by the Brother Rabbit Lifestyle, we will discuss the origins of our influences. The first of these is most foremostly the Arts & Crafts Movement, and the impetus for this great worldwide movement was The Great Exhibition of 1851.

This influence upon the founders of the Arts & Crafts Movement may best be called a negative impetus. How not to be, if you will; a spur to a happier vision of life. There are those enough who found the Industrial Revolution a marvel and steam and coal mechanisation a great Wonder of the World. But for the working man, it was – in the view of the founders of the Arts & Crafts – the death knell of a happy life being in control of one's daily work in one's own environs, the fulfilment of William Blake's vision of 'dark Satanic mills', and of Mary Shelley and the Romantics' fear of industrialisation upon the character of man, who would seek to place himself above all of nature, controlling every thing and everyone, dehumanising the working man. To quote Denise Willard, 'Before industrialization, people worked on the land. People experienced a connection with nature. However, with the rise of industrialization, people worked less with the land and more with machines and in factories. It did not require skilled workers. All this new technology required was faceless workers to perform simple tasks, and with this came a fear of being swallowed up, or forgotten in the glory of innovation.' So, this tension of cross-purposes was the backdrop against which the Great Exhibition was born.

Being impressed with the French industrial exhibition two years earlier, in 1846 Henry Cole and Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, teamed up to create an international exhibition in Britain. The Duke of Wellington was a proponent of having the Exhibition in Hyde Park, and the architectural firm of Fox and Henderson changed their design of an iron and glass conservatory style building (later known as The Crystal Palace) to accommodate the elm trees in the park, buiulding around them and incorporating them into the building. The Crystal Palace was constructed from prefabricated and interchangeable parts made of the most modern materials, iron and glass. The Exhibition, which ran from May through October, 1851, showcased British design in every area of manufacture, and was deliberately filled with products of great size and ingenuity to shock and awe – huge blocks of coal, the largest steam locomotives, hydraulic presses and steam-hammers, a scale model of the Liverpool docks with 1,600 miniature ships in full rigging; sewing machines, ice-making machines, cigarette-rolling machines, machines to mint medals and machines to fold envelopes were included amonst the pottery, porcelain, ironwork, furniture, perfumes, pianos, firearms, fabrics, and two houses.

Not everyone was a fan of the wonders of modernity. One of the six millions attending, a teenaged William Morris – founder of the English Arts & Crafts Movement - attending with his parents, refused to go inside, being certain that he would loathe it. Being persuaded or forced to go inside, the 17 year old pronounced it all ‘wonderfully ugly’and reportedly was so disturbed by the garishness of modern design and decoration that he fled the building to be sick in the bushes. Similarly, John Ruskin – art critic and patron, draughtsman, watercolourist and guiding light of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts & Crafts Movement - concluded that ‘if any lesson is to be drawn from the Great Exhibition’ it was that ‘design in the hands of a machine-minded money-seeking generation tends to take a downward curve’.

Thus was born the Arts & Crafts. According to the V&A, the The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was born out of an increasing understanding that society needed to adopt a different set of priorities in relation to the manufacture of objects. Its leaders wanted to develop products that not only had more integrity but which were also made in a less dehumanising way.

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 Society's chief aim was to assert a new public relevance for the work of decorative artists and decorative art. It is this primacy of the decorative arts, and of Arts and Crafts ideals that is the basis of our work and the Brother Rabbit Lifestyle.

The Dior Dress, Part One: Planning

I have had this vintage reproduction Vogue pattern for some time now, and the intent always was to make summer frocks from it. That is still on the cards, but I wanted to learn the construction of innards of Dior's New Look dresses and this pattern seemed a perfect opportunity.

The inspiration for the desire to learn Dior Underpinnings came from Couture Sewing by Claire Schaeffer. Some photos from the book are below, to show what I mean by the underpinnings of couture dresses, which techniques are still used today, if you wonder how your favourite celebrities look so fab on the Red Carpet; it's all in what's going on under that marvelous gown:

The first thing to do was to Plan. I found this lovely brocade online from Joann's. I had been looking for something pretty but with gravitas, as befits an afternoon dress, suitable for weddings, christenings, tea with the Queen....

Now that I had the fabric, it was time to do a rendering. Some changes I made from the pattern include the skirt being slightly longer (a personal preference) and fuller than 1947, so using a whole width for the skirt front and back, pleating instead of gathering the heavier fabric.

And, as a final prep before any fabric was cut, measuring self and transferring the adjustments to Lucinda, my dress form:

Then, off to the fabric shop I went, in search of stuffs for the corselet and petticoat. I knew that I wanted the petticoat to have a crinoline layer (the utility fabric used for stiffening curtain pleating and for millinery) in addition to all that net, as well as a muslin under layer, so it was not scratchy (the bane of my childhood at Christmas, Easter, and Important Occasions.) The proper fabric for the corselet is English cotton net, but I got mosquito netting instead, because it was available.  Am I a complete purist? No. I also got some marvelous soft fold-over elastic for the top of the corselet to snug it to the body, zips (one for the underpinning and one for the dress), and miles of  twill tape and bias binding. Here is the haul:

Next up: measuring and cutting the mock up (muslin, toile, etc.) of the corselet in a similar fabric to the final item (in this case, leftover cotton knit). Join us in Part Two!