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.

Hand versus Machine Embroidery

 I am often asked why hand embroidery is so expensive, or why I would do it, as it 'takes so long', or why I do not have an embroidery machine as they are 'faster' and 'more professional.' The everyday world has become so accustomed to the simple chain or satin stitch of machine embroidery, on t-shirts, hats, and what-you-will, that this is regarded as 'normal', even preferable to fine hand embroidery.

Yes, handmade embroidery is very time consuming, but it requires real workmanship, and is inherently more valuable than mass produced, machine-made embroidery. High quality handmade embroidery is collectible while machine-made embroidery is not. And that is why I do it.
Of course I have used machine-made entredeaux and laces for everyday items, because making lace is also a time-consuming, therefore expensive art, and hand-made insertions increase the time and cost of everyday items. But for embroidery, I definitely do not want something that is a cousin to Mouse ears from Disneyland.

The question of hand-versus-machine is not new, and is central to the impetus that gave birth to the Arts & Crafts Movement; it has its origins in the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries, along with cotton gins, weaving machines, and steam engines.

The first embroidery machine was made in France, in 1828, patented by Josue Heilmann. It was run by four people, and could do embroidery work in about one quarter the time of the fastest hand embroiderers. The machine posed a serious threat to the hand-embroidery industry at the time, and they were largely banned in Switzerland. But even there, embroidery machines caught on, and in 1863 by Isaac Groebli invented the Schiffli machine, which could stitch in any direction. Singer touted its sewing machine - while still in the treadle stage - as being useful for machine embroidery, done with a hoop as in with modern free-motion machines. Eventually, Singer developed its own embroidery machine.

There are those who would aver that the embroidery of these machines cannot be distinguished from hand work. However, there are notable differences: machines connect motifs, whether on a border or in a central design; the stitching is 'regular' - of an even length but not necessarily fit to the motif, so the work can look choppy; and until the advent of digitised machines, there were a limited number of stitches possible. The main drawback is that the machine (digitised or not) cannot cope with subtle shadings or make stitch and design choices which distinguish art embroidery, including couture. Yes, couture pieces are hand-embroidered, with the embroidery being fit to the design of the garment the colour, the scale of the wearer, and so on.

From the Middle Ages, most professional embroiderers were men belonging to a Guild which had strict apprenticeships and rules of working for journeymen; women were left to embroidering personal items and decorative arts for the home. Church vestments, spotting of fabrics, men's tailoring, all these were embroidered by men. We have Mr. Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement to thank for bringing women into the profession, as designers and producers as well as cottage-industry workers.

There is a charming and false view of the domestic use of embroidery machines as a family enterprise in the 19th Century: 'As easily used at home as in a factory, a downstairs room of a suitable size would be needed to house the machine. If a machine embroidery business existed in a home, the entire family was usually involved in the process. Generally, the father would oversee the machine’s operation and the wife and children would thread the bobbins, tend to the thread, and so forth.'
Given the size and expense of embroidery machines, and the size and income of the average 19th Century hovel, this is a quaint and dangerously erroneous vision of 19th Century life. I have ancestors who worked in wool and linen and thread mills - father, mother and children of both genders - and they'd have had to amass quite a sum of money to afford one of these machines, or room for it, something hardly possible on the wages of the time.

This brings up the real reason why modern embroidery is so cheap, and if one happens to find something hand-embroidered, it is not cheap, but was produced in China, Maylasia, India, or Indonesia, by people who are earning less than a dollar a day, or worse. They are working in the same miserable, noisy conditions as our 19th Century ancestors, going blind or crippled, for a pittance, while the Boss Man makes all the money.

It is true that the cost of fine craftsmanship in the Arts & Crafts was detrimental to its goal of 'Art for the People', but it is possible now to pay a reasonably fair wage - the $15 an hour much-touted fair minimum wage - and produce beautiful, unique, handmade items in conditions which are humane.

 This is why I am a hand-embroiderer, and offer hand-embroidered goods.