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.
