Craftsman

“ What is it that is lacking? When I see a craftsman who has material lying ready at hand, I look for the finished product. Here also, then, is the craftsman, and here is the material; what do we yet lack? ”

“ As long as the craftsman belonged to the guild of his craft, he was bound by its rules to carry out his work honestly and conscientiously, to use good materials, and to beautify it as far as he was able. ”

“ If use of the tools and knowledge of materials were the only subjects of which a carver need become master, there would be no way equal to the old-fashioned one of apprenticeship to some good craftsman. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And that, after all, is the true test of craft artistry: to the true craftsman the work that he is doing must be the most important thing that can be done. One of the best teachers that I know is that kind of a craftsman in education. A student was once sent to observe his work. He was giving a lesson upon the "attribute complement" to an eighth-grade grammar class. ”

“ When and in so far as the advanced state of the industrial arts, therefore, made it impracticable for the individual craftsman readily to acquire the material means for work in his craft, any proficiency in the craft would be of no effect except by arrangement with some one who could supply these material means. ”

“ Indeed, it is the possession of this knowledge which mainly distinguishes the industrial designer from the ordinary artist. To determine the best training for such designers is one of the problems of technical education. There are many trades, too, in which the handicraftsman and the designer should be united. This is the case in such industries as silversmith’s and goldsmith’s work. In these and other trades the true artisan is the artist and handicraftsman combined. ”

“ When the artisan was an artist and the designer a craftsman, there was but a limited production of industrial art. The articles made were expensive and for the wealthy alone. The common utensils necessary to the household were made on the farm and were of the rudest possible character. ”

“ That the {255} artist-craftsman who gives his talents directly to each particular commodity in the production of which he is concerned—a silver cup, or a lamp, or a curiously-designed carpet, or a printed volume—will produce objects having a charm which is wanting in similar objects produced by the methods of the manufacturer is, no doubt, true. But great artist-craftsmen being few in number, the beautiful objects they make by the craftsman’s methods are few in number also, and are consequently obtainable by a few persons only ”

“ Here it is quite evident that the desire to imitate pictorial qualities has led the craftsman far away from what should have been his aim, viz., to display the qualities of the material which he was using to the best advantage, consistently with the position and purpose of his work in it. Not that perfection of workmanship is to be decried, though it is only occasionally that one is able to make use of, or indeed produce it. ”

“ No one may be a craftsman until he has served seven years as an apprentice. These artificers may have children as apprentices: smith, wheelmaker, ploughmaker, millmaker, miller, carpenter, rough mason, plasterer, a timber sawer, an ore burner, a lime burner, brickmaker, bricklayer, tilemaker, tiler, layer of slate roofs, layer of wood shingle roofs, layer of straw roofs, cooper, earthen potter, linen weaver, housewife who weaves wool for sale or for household use. ”

“ When, in place of being produced in marble, the work has to be cast in metal, the labours of another craftsman have to be called into requisition, those, namely, of the founder or metal caster, whose operations constitute an art, and a very beautiful one, in themselves. ”

“ Considering the very crude material on which he works, and the primitive methods of stone-carving which he continues to favour, the expert craftsman achieves quite a surprising degree of smoothness and polish. ”

“ The thoughtful craftsman, however, should be quite clear as to the principles determining what is to be permitted and what rejected in his own work; for the rest he may follow the lead of fashion—he must, in fact, if his work lies much in that way. ”

“ The style of design used during this great period owes much of its interest to the now obsolete custom of employing direct the craftsman and his men, instead of the present-day habit of giving the work to a contractor. ”

“ But, although coarse and possessing a 50 leaning towards the unwieldy, and often massive without the accompanying grandeur of the highly-trained craftsman's work, there is a breadth of treatment in such pieces which is at once recognisable. ”

“ 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{11} purely conjectural matter from first to last. ”

“ The skill of the craftsman gives an exceptional value to the particular articles on which his own [Pg 25] hands are engaged. It does not communicate itself to the labour of the ordinary men around him. ”

“ These craftsmen were highly skilled workers, employing hand tools, and hence, often termed handicraftsmen. 212. Are there any such workmen now? Very few, if any. Most of the present day crafts are no more than sub-divisions of the old time trades. The mechanical tool displaces skill without dispensing with it so far as the production of commodities is concerned. That is to say that the individual workman does not require that versatility of skill in machine production which was indispensable to the handicraftsman. ”

“ Partly as a protest against this state of things, and partly to concentrate the awakened feeling for beauty in the accessories of life, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society commenced their work.
The movement, however, towards a revival of design and handicraft, the effort to unite—or rather to re-unite—the artist and the craftsman, so sundered by the industrial conditions of our century, has been growing and gathering force for some time past. ”

“ The boy who is interested in carpentry can have many hours of pleasure with his tools and materials, and the average boy, we believe, is interested in the craft, at least to some extent.
The object of this article is to persuade the young craftsman to work systematically and accurately, and to understand the possibilities and limitations of tools; not to use a chisel for a screw-driver, of to drive nails with the butt-end of a plane, or to use a tack-hammer to drive a tenpenny nail when a larger hammer is within easy reach. ”

“ But if the critic be correct why is the craftsman wrong? In this let it be presumed that there is nothing wrong with his craft as such; that he handles his tools skilfully and has perfect control over his material. More than this, however, is necessary. The first requirement is a sense of form, a term which includes outline, proportion and structure. Often and often it is found that a designer depends upon novelty alone for acceptance. ”

“ And the earlier the period of life at which the handicraftsman has to enter into actual practice of his craft, the more important is it that he should devote the precious hours of preliminary education to things of the mind, which have no direct and immediate bearing on his branch of industry, though they lie at the foundation of all realities. ”

“ We require something of the nature of a revival of the older type of craftsmanship in which the æsthetic faculties found room for expression; and in the matter of clothing and house-furniture and decoration there is ample room for the development of a revived craftsmanship where use will go hand in hand with beauty. ”

“ It is usual in economic considerations to credit the period of craftsmanship as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker. The craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative influence. ”

“ In all base schools of Art, the craftsman is dependent for his bread on originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may be recognized as distinct from that of other men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little doings, without any such stimulus;—what must be the effect of the popular applause which continually suggests that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent as it is singular! ”

“ Carpenter work is something with which every boy must familiarize himself to a certain extent in order to do anything in the line of construction, so the fitting up of a workshop and the proper handling of tools have been described in the first two chapters, in view of making it a simple matter to perform the work embodied in the rest of the book. ”

“ In the men's workshop are several clever workmen--a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and two silversmiths; there are not more, because the best artisans on the estates of St Germain live by the walls of the abbey, so that they can work for the monks on the spot and save the labour of carriage. But there were always some craftsmen on every estate, either attached as serfs to the big house, or living on manses of their own, and good landowners tried to have as many clever craftsmen as possible. ”

“ Among the trades which may be taught are those of baker, blacksmith, bricklayer, butcher, cabinet-maker, car-builder, carpenter, carriage-maker, coppersmith, the crafts of constructing, managing, and repairing electrical appliances and apparatus, foundryman, gas-fitter, gold-beater, harness-maker, hatter, locksmith, machinist, marble-mason, moulder, painter, paper-hanger, pattern-maker, plasterer, plumber, printer, saddler, shoemaker, steam engineer, slater, stone-cutter, stonemason, tailor, tinsmith, tiler, turner, wheelwright, and many others. ”

“ The artisan stands between every man, woman, and child and the crude materials embodied in the three kingdoms of Nature, and by the magic of his skill they are transformed into means serviceable for use. The wood in the forest, the marble in the quarry, the clay in the bank, the metal in the mine pass through his hands, take on the form of his thought, become arranged by his intelligence, and the product is the modern dwelling. ”

“ Arts Hunting, fishing, cooking, weaving, dyeing, carpentry, metallurgy, glass-, brick-, and paper-making, printing, and book-binding were in a more or less primitive stage, the mechanical arts showing much servile imitation and simplicity in design; but pottery, carving, and lacquer-work were in an exceptionally high state of development, the articles produced being surpassed in quality and beauty by no others in the world. ”

“ Time was when, for the most part, the skilled artisan, who was master of his trade, worked at home in his own house, assisted, it might be, by a few younger workmen or journeymen. Into his house and family he would receive one or two young lads to learn, during a seven years' engagement, the art and mystery of his craft; the master himself working and teaching them his work, feeding and clothing them, and receiving from them in return the value of the services which, as they became more apt in their work, they were able to render. ”

“ So of every one who practises, apparently automatically, a long-familiar handicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites the iron, the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her bobbin, the weaver at his loom, all will answer the same question in the same way by saying that they have a feeling of the proper management of the implement in their hands. ”

“ Machinery may produce more rapidly, more cheaply, more regular work, of more equal quality, and perhaps of higher finish, but it is work that has lost the delicacy and grace of objects that were shaped by human hands and bear the direct impress of human care, and taste, and fancy. We may be interested in the preservation of the relics of the past, not merely as curiosities from bygone ages, but as examples of beautiful workmanship and skilled manipulation to which the craftsmen of the present day cannot attain. ”

“ In those early handicraft days such work was an art as well as a science; and surely the craftsmen loved their labor, else they could not have exercised the patience necessary to the attainment of such excellence. ”

“ All the apprentices learn also to sketch bits of machinery or even entire machines, figure the sketch from actual measurement, and then with rule and compass draw them carefully to scale. There are two principal workshops, one devoted to the workers in iron, the other to workers in wood. The trades actually taught are forging, metal-turning, fitting, carpentry, wood-turning, and pattern-making. A small workshop for teaching the manufacture of philosophical instruments has also just been organized. ”

“ I had naturally useful hands, and learned the pleasure and utility of being able to do things with them. I took naturally to woodwork, and spent nearly all my Sundays in the carpenter shop, where I cut and bruised my hands, and butchered wood into clumsy, ill-fitting and rickety benches, stools and boxes, which amused our mechanic greatly. But with perseverance, patience and time my skill improved, so that before I left the mill I had become something of an artist in wood, and could really do a very nice and creditable job in joining and fitting. ”