Arts and crafts

“ 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. ”

“ Never was a time when the art and science of needlework were so thoroughly understood as in England at the present moment. Our designers can design in any style. Every old method is at our fingers' ends. Every ingenious stitch of old humanity has been mastered, and a descriptive name given to it of our own devising. Every traditional pattern—wave, lotus, daisy, convolvulus, honeysuckle, "Sacred Horn" or tree of life; every animal form, or bird, fish or reptile, has been traced to its source, and its symbolism laid bare. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the various arts and crafts of the Greek, Mediæval, or Early Renaissance periods, there is evident, from the examples which have come down to us, a certain unity and common character in design, asserting itself through all diverse individualities: each art is kept distinct, with a complete recognition of the capacity and advantages of its own particular method and purpose. ”

“ Great thinkers and teachers and artists, including the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement, began to concern themselves with the beauty of the common things of life—with the lesser arts. They taught people to consider in the selection of house furnishings, not only color and form and design, but also the welfare of the maker and the possibilities of his development through his work. ”

“ Painting remained to us, 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. ”

“ There is an eminently proper revival of interest in the arts and crafts of early American workmanship. In glass, wood, metal and textile stuffs our forefathers obtained results of a delightful nature. ”

“ There are very few books dealing with the arts and crafts of the olden time, which are adapted to inform those who have no intention of practising such arts, and yet who wish to understand and appreciate the examples which they see in numerous museums or exhibitions, and in travelling abroad. ”

“ But if you look closely at them with all the acuteness of sight that you can command, and examine the inmost secrets of this wondrous art, you will discover such delicate, such wonderful and finely wrought lines, twisted and interwoven with such intricate knots and adorned with such fresh and brilliant colours, that you will readily acknowledge the whole to have been the work of angelic rather than human skill. ”

“ Page v INTRODUCTION The very general and keen interest in the revival of arts and crafts in America is a sign full of promise and pleasure to those who are working among the so-called minor arts. One reads at every turn how greatly Ruskin and Morris have influenced handicraft: how much these men and their co-workers have modified the appearance of our streets and houses, our materials, textiles, utensils, and all other useful things in which it is possible to shock or to please the æsthetic taste, without otherwise affecting the value of these articles for their destined purposes. ”

“ Begun in the simplest fashion, fashioned by the simplest means, created from the commonest materials, Fictile Art grew with man's intellectual growth, and Fictile Craft grew with his knowledge; the latter conquering, in this our day, when the craftsman strangles the artist alike in this as in all other arts. ”

“ The special limitations of the material should be a pleasure to you, not a hindrance: a designer, therefore, should always thoroughly understand the processes of the special manufacture he is dealing with, or the result will be a mere tour de force. On the other hand, it is the pleasure in understanding the capabilities of a special material, and using them for suggesting (not imitating) natural beauty and incident, that gives the raison d'être of decorative art. ”

“ The true soil for the growth of the painter in this higher sense is a rich and varied external life: familiarity from early youth with the uses of materials and methods, and the hand facility which comes of close and constant acquaintanceship with the tools of the artist, who sums up and includes in himself other crafts, such as modelling, carving, and the hammering of metal, architectural design, and a knowledge of all the ways man has used to beautify and deck the surroundings and accessories of life to satisfy his delight in beauty. ”

“ Now, all furniture that has any permanent value has been designed and wrought to meet the ends it had to serve, and the careful elaboration of it gave its maker scope for his pleasure and occasion for his pride.
If a man really likes what he has got to do, he will make great shifts to express and realise his pleasure; he will choose carefully his materials, and either in playfulness of fancy, or in grave renunciation of the garniture of his art, will put the stamp of his individuality on his work. ”

“ As the stem and branches to the leaves, flowers, and fruit of a tree, so is design to painting. In decoration one cannot exist without the other, as the beauty of a figure depends upon the well-built and well-proportioned skeleton and its mechanism. You cannot separate a house from its plan and foundations. So it is in decoration; often thought of lightly as something trivial and superficial, a merely aimless combination of curves and colours, or a mere réchauffé of the dead languages of art, but really demanding the best thought and capacity of a man ”

“ The reception given to it having so far justified our plea for the due recognition of the arts and crafts of design, and our belief in their fundamental importance—the amount of public interest and support accorded to the Exhibition having, in fact, far exceeded our anticipations, it was determined to hold a second on the same lines, and to endeavour to carry out, with more completeness than was at first found possible, those principles of work, ideas, and aims in art for which we contended, and to make the Exhibition a rallying point, as it were, for all sympathetic workers. ”

“ To sum up the effect of this harmony between art and craft in the Middle Ages, the Abbé Texier has said: "In those days art and manufactures were blended and identified; art gained by this affinity great practical facility, and manufacture much original beauty." And then the value to the artist is almost incalculable. To spend one's life in getting means on which to live is a waste of all enjoyment. To use one's life as one goes along—to live every day with pleasure in congenial occupation—that is the only thing worth while. ”

“ To truly foster and forward the art, the craftsman and the artist should, where possible, be united, or at least should work in common, as was the case when, in each civilisation, the Potter's Art flourished most, and when the scientific base was of less account than was the art employed upon it. ”

“ It means obedience to the limits under which the artist works. The really greatest art craftsmen of all Page xii have been those who have recognized the limitations of the material which they employed. Some of the cleverest have been beguiled by the fascination of overcoming obstacles, into trying to make iron do the things appropriate only to wood, or to force cast bronze into the similitude of a picture, or to discount all the credit due to a fine piece of embroidery by trying to make it appear like a painting. ”

“ Old things, long since done, were to be put into new relations, & upon a higher plane, and all new work was to be conceived of as convergent upon one end, the dignity and sweetness of life, and the workman—artist or craftsman—was to derive therefrom his measure of happiness & delight. ”

“ In house decoration of all kinds—furniture, wall-papers and hangings (which he preferred to paper) , carpet-weaving, and the painting of glass and tiles, needlework, tapestry—he formed a school which was dominated by his protest against commercialism and his assertion of the necessity for natural decoration and pure colour, produced by hand work and inspired by a passion for beauty irrespective of cheapness or quickness of manufacture (see Arts and Crafts) . ”

“ But when a craftsman is possessed of an æsthetic instinct and faculty, he merits the congratulations offered to the students of Birmingham by William Morris, when he told them that they were among the happiest people in all civilization—"persons whose necessary daily work is inseparable from their greatest pleasure."
A mediæval artist was usually a craftsman as well. ”

“ Then, too, the demand for literal presentment of the superficial facts or phases of nature often removes the painter and his picture still farther from the architectural, decorative, and constructive artist and the handicraftsman, who are bound to think of plan, and design, and materials—of the adaptation of their work, in short—while the painter{42} seeks only to be an unbiassed recorder of all accidents and sensational conditions of nature and life,—and so we get our illustrated newspapers on a grand scale. ”

“ It asserts, moreover, the value of the practice of handicraft as a good training for the faculties, and as a most valuable counteraction to that overstraining of purely mental effort under the fierce competitive conditions of the day; apart from the very wholesome and real pleasure in the fashioning of a thing with claims to art and beauty, the struggle with and triumph over the stubborn technical necessities which refuse to be gainsaid. ”

“ Here I am at issue with the writer, and would submit that this general impulse must precede and itself bring about the transformation: and further that this general impulse is precisely and already the impulse constituting that great movement dubbed 'Arts and Crafts,' and that its aim is not merely to help the conscious cultivation of art pending the transformation, but itself to bring the transformation about. ”

“ Some people think that "Arts and Crafts" means a combination which allows of poor work being concealed under a mask of æsthetic effect. Labour should not go forth blindly without art, and art should not proceed simply for the attainment of beauty without utility,—in other words, there should be an alliance between labour and art.
One principle for which craftsmen should stand is Page ix a respect for their own tools: a frank recognition of the methods and implements employed in constructing any article. ”

“ When, as is most often the case, there is actual beauty in the cuts, the books so{133} ornamented are amongst the most delightful works of art that have ever been produced. Therefore, granted well-designed type, due spacing of the lines and words, and proper position of the page on the paper, all books might be at least comely and well-looking: and if to these good qualities were added really beautiful ornament and pictures, printed books might once again illustrate to the full the position of our Society that a work of utility might be also a work of art, if we cared to make it so. ”

“ In our age, for various reasons (social, commercial, economic) , the specialised and purely pictorial painter is dominant. His aims and methods influence other arts and crafts, but by no means advantageously as a rule; since, unchecked by judicious ideas of design, attempts are made in unsuitable materials to produce so-called realistic force, and superficial and accidental appearances dependent on peculiar qualities of lighting and atmosphere, quite out of place in any other method than painting, or in any place but an easel picture. ”

“ The very producer, the designer, and craftsman, too, has been lost sight of, and his personality submerged in that of a business firm, so that we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of an impersonal artist or craftsman trying to produce things of beauty for an impersonal and unknown public—a purely conjectural matter from first to last. ”

“ For, after all, modern design should be as the old—living thought, artfully expressed: fancy that has taken fair shapes. And needlework is still a pictorial art that requires a real artist to direct the design, a real artist to ply the needle. Given these, and our needlework can be as full of story as the Bayeux tapestry, as full of imagery as the Syon Cope, and better drawn. The charm of old embroidery lies in this, that it clothes current thought in current shapes. ”

“ Art does not consist only in original, unusual, or unfamiliar designs; craft does not mean hammering silver so that the hammer marks shall show; the best art is that which produces designs of grace and appropriateness, whether they are strikingly new or not, and the best craftsman is so skilful that he is able to go beyond the hammer marks, so to speak, and to produce with the hammer a surface as smooth as, and far more perfect than, that produced by an emery and burnisher. ”

“ Design comes by designing. On the one hand tradition carefully and continuously shapes the object to fill its use, on the other spontaneous and eager excursions are made{306} into the limitless fields of beautiful device. Where construction and form are thus the result of a long tradition undisturbed by fashion, they are always absolutely right as to use and distinctive as to beauty, the construction being not only visible, but one with the decoration. ”