Art and craft

“ There is no necessary or essential distinction between what we call art and what we call craft. It is a pure accident, and in all probability a temporary one, which has momentarily separated the two in the last hundred years. ”

“ Earliest amongst the inventions of man and his endeavour to unite Art with Craft is the Fictile Art. His first needs in domestic life, his first utensils, his first efforts at civilisation, came from the Mother Earth, whose son he believed himself to be, and his ashes or his bones returned to Earth enshrined in the fictile vases he created from their common clay. And these Fictiles tell the story of his first Art-instincts, and of his yearnings to unite beauty with use. ”

“ It was from pure love of the art as a craft, and the belief that it was a good work in which they were engaged, and from their abundant leisure, that they were enabled to evolve the lovely creations which delight and astonish us when shown in the sacristies and treasuries of foreign religious houses and churches, where they have been cherished for centuries. ”

“ Art, therefore, is art whenever any object or any action, or any arrangement, besides being such as to serve a practical purpose or express an emotion or transfer a thought, is such also as to afford the sui generis satisfaction which we denote by the adjective: beautiful.
But, asks the reader, if every human activity resulting in visible or audible form is to be considered, at least potentially, as art; what becomes of art as distinguished from craft, or rather what is the difference between what we all mean by art and what we all mean by craft? ”

“ There is stored up capital represented in the life of a man whose work is a recreation, and expressive of his own personality.
In a book of this size it is not possible to treat of every art or craft which engaged the skill of the mediæval workers. But at some future time I hope to make a separate study of the ceramics, glass in its various forms, the arts of engraving and printing, and some of the many others which have added so much to the pleasure and beauty of the civilized world. ”

“ But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The wondrous, instinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest pleasure it is capable of in working out the art with which it is endowed ”

“ Each separate craft included in the all-embracing title of art, and making for its good and its glory, works under conditions as definite as those of climate, has characteristics as marked as those of nationality, and speaks also a language of its own. ”

“ Though much of that exists in our modern decorations, it is highly desirable that it should not partake of that character; a little taste, a little poetry, gracefulness, order, and some display of general knowledge, of artistic combinations and principles, cannot fail to make our productions more valued and valuable. Give a tinge of some originality,—display an attempt of your own inventive powers, based upon acknowledged principles of beauty and effect, and your productions will soon reach an eminence of which art is ever capable! ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, consider the artistic finish and the quantity of decorative work which a workman of those days used to put into the beautiful work of art he did, as well as in the simplest thing of domestic life,—a railing, a candlestick, an article of pottery—and you see at once that he did not know the pressure, the hurry, the overwork of our times; he could forge, sculpture, weave, embroider at his leisure—as but a very small number of artist-workers can do nowadays. ”

“ However, I have not undertaken to talk to you of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, in the narrower sense of those words, since, most unhappily as I think, these master-arts, these arts more specially of the intellect, are at the present day divorced from decoration in its narrower sense. Our subject is that great body of art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life: a wide subject, a great industry ”

“ The craftsman, as he fashioned the thing he had under his hand, ornamented it so naturally and so entirely without conscious effort, that it is often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the ornamental began. Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and pleasure in the work by the workman was a matter of more importance still, for it stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure. ”

“ It is true that the manifestations of the art-impulse are innumerable, embracing not only painting, sculpture, literature, music, and architecture, but also the handiwork of the craftsman in the designing of a rug or in the fashioning of a cup or a candlestick; it is true that each art has its special province and function, and that each is peculiarly adapted to the expression of a certain order of emotion or idea, and that the distinctions between one art and another are not to be inconsiderately swept aside or obscured. ”

“ With a limitless wealth of material at his command, and gifted with enterprise, originality, and taste, the American artist can look confidently forward to taking his place beside the best the world has produced. ”

“ This constitutes the inspiration and "if this inner reality (Spirit) does not exist in a work it ceases to be a work of art at all: it becomes an example of beautiful handiwork—fine craftsmanship, perhaps—but not art." ”

“ Painting remained to us,{266} arrogating to herself the rôle which hitherto the whole company had combined to make successful. In her struggle to fill the giant's robe, she has run unresistingly in the ruts of the age. She has crowded her portable canvases, side by side, into exhibitions and galleries, and claimed the title of art for literary rather than æsthetic suggestions. The minor coquetries of craftsmanship, from which once was nourished the burly strength of art, have felt out of place in such illustrious company. ”

“ A very great industry indeed, comprising the crafts of house-building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths’ work, pottery and glass-making, weaving, and many others: a body of art most important to the public in general, but still more so to us handicraftsmen; since there is scarce anything that they use, and that we fashion, but it has always been thought to be unfinished till it has had some touch or other of decoration about it. ”

“ And yet, I say, how have we of these latter days treated the beauty of the earth, or that which we call art?
Perhaps I had best begin by stating what will scarcely be new to you, that art must be broadly divided into two kinds, of which we may call the first Intellectual, and the second Decorative Art, using the words as mere forms of convenience. The first kind addresses itself wholly to our mental needs; the things made by it serve no other purpose but to feed the mind, and, as far as material needs go, might be done without altogether. ”

“ The eye that judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what human institution helped or hindered its making. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ Painting, from being a necessity of life, passed into a luxury, and the king, the state, or the private collector became the patron. Nature and actual life were about the only sources left from which original art could draw its materials. ”

“ After all, it is these arts, intimately connected as they are with a people's daily life and well-being, that may be said to be really of more immediate consequence than what are called the Fine Arts. Though, personally, I do not admit the justice of the distinction usually accepted between Fine and Decorative or Industrial Art. ”

“ The true root and basis of all art lies in the handicrafts. If there is no room or chance of recognition for really artistic power and feeling in design and craftsmanship—if art is not recognised in the humblest object and material, and felt to be as valuable, in its own way, as the more highly rewarded pictorial skill—the art cannot be in a sound condition. ”

“ The painter who knows his trade knows just what graduations of colour, what interrelation of masses and line—in brief, what design in detail and in whole—will, in their complex conjunction, rouse in those who receive them such feelings as he himself felt when he not only saw but spiritually exploited the landskip: and into that design he modulates what he saw. ”

“ And what is the meaning of this beautiful decoration which we call art? In the first place, it means value to the workman and it means the pleasure which he must necessarily take in making a beautiful thing. The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart. I cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational designs are necessary in all work. ”

“ Beautify the work as much as possible by letting the artistic sense have full play. This rule is so important that the attempt to establish it in the larger world outside of the home has given rise to the movement known as the arts and crafts movement, which has its rise in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us until the common things of daily living—the furniture, the books, the carpets, the chinaware—are made to express that creative joy in the maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one. ”

“ For it is becoming the fashion, in our days, for artists of merit—painters, perhaps, even of distinction—to take up the practice of one or other of the crafts. All would be well, for such new workers are needed, if it was indeed the practice of the craft that they set themselves to. ”

“ Attaching itself at first merely to the human face and figure, it has gone on to embrace the works of man's primitive art, and then the higher products of his decorative and imitative skill. Next, seizing on the likeness between human handicraft and the works of nature, envisaged as the productions of an anthropomorphic creator, it has proceeded to the admiration for the lace-work tracery of a fern or a club-moss, the sculptured surface of an ammonite, the embossed and studded covering of a sea-urchin, the delicate fluting of a tiny shell. ”

“ The representative arts comprise painting and sculpture, and literature in its manifestations of the drama, fiction, and dramatic and descriptive poetry. These arts draw their subjects from nature and human life, from the world external to the artist. The arts of form comprise architecture and music, and that limitless range of human activities in design and pattern-making for embellishment—including also the whole category of "useful arts"—which may be subsumed under the comprehensive term decoration. ”

“ The general movement of revival of interest in the arts of decorative design and the allied handicrafts, with the desire to re-establish their influence in art-teaching, has been due to many causes, among which the work of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society may count as important. ”

“ Were art to be judged from the pictorial and realistic viewpoint we might find many meticulous craftsmen of as high an objective efficiency as were the men who stood at the apex of genuine artistic worth—that is, craftsmen who arrived at as close and exact a transcription of nature, who interpreted current moods and mental aspects as accurately, and who set forth superficial emotions as dramatically. ”

“ Here the arts which bring Art home to the multitude have found no entrance. Engraving, printing, carving, ornamental work in metal, wood, or pottery, gardening, or artistic husbandry, are graces that have not crossed this dirty threshold. The aesthetics, which have had some part in the government of the country have never developed the blessed aesthetic of home.
Physically, you find a race of great capacity. The frame, if wanting the compactness of the French and the solidity of the English, is large and shapely ”

“ It is this conscious cultivation of art and the attempt to interest the public in it which the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society has set itself to help, by calling special attention to that really most important side of art, the decoration of utilities by furnishing them with genuine artistic finish in place of trade finish. ”

“ Each of our crafts is exercised upon some special matter—the art of the smith upon iron, that of the carpenter on wood. In all, there is the subject, the form and the work which results from the form. Matter is taken from without—art gives the form—and the work is composed at the same time of form and of matter. ”

“ He thinks that what was gained, by the artists of the next half-century, in ideal grace, and in the fluent refinements of workmanship, was obtained only by a loss of energy, of characteristic expression, and of originality—the εθος of art. ”