Master craftsman

“ The pity is that often the antiquary is so bigoted, the glass painter so mechanical, the artist so ignorant of glass. The three men want fusing into one. The ideal craftsman is a man familiar with good work, old and new, a master of his trade, and an artist all the while ”

“ If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was {158} considered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was derived. ”

“ Standards of excellence were maintained by trade guilds, who enforced rules as to workmanship as well as rules for the economic conditions of each trade or craft. The painter of pictures, or of mural decorations, was trained in the same way as any other craftsman, working as an apprentice under a master. ”

“ The craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his, with these tools, with these cunning methods,—how little of all he does is properly his work! All past inventive men work there with him;—as indeed with all of us, in all things. ”

“ The artist who works in stone, in color, sounds, words, building materials, and often in steel, as in the designing of bodies for some of the finer automobiles, is but the craftsman working in materials that are often elusive and difficult to handle and bringing into his work not only the skill of the craftsman but also the attempt at an expression of some need of his own inner being. ”

“ That is an example of what I mean by the fascination that the technique of one's craft may come to possess. It is the joy of doing well the work that you know how to do. The finer points of technique,—those little things that seem so trivial in themselves and yet which mean everything to skill and efficiency,—what pride the competent artisan or the master artist takes in these! How he delights to revel in the jargon of his craft! How he prides himself in possessing the knowledge and the technical skill that are denied the layman! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The individual genius of the artist works first in design, though his work is for the use of the craftsman or artisan, his collaborator; for the two, head and hands, must work together, or else will render each other inoperative or ineffective.
The artisan, by right of his title, claims a part in the art itself; the craftsman, by his name, points out that he, too, has to work out the craft, the mystery, the inner meaning, of the design or intention. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the age-long traditions of craftsmanship and structural design, which had lingered on from the Middle Ages, finally faded out under the impact of the new industrialism, the amateur stepped in, his brain teeming with fancies. Craftsmanship was dead, the craftsman replaced either by the machine or by a purely servile and mechanical human being, a man without tradition, without ideas of his own, who was ready to accomplish whatever caprices the amateur or the artist might set him to. ”

“ But as a producer of artistic things, he is a great disappointment. Too versatile to be a supreme specialist, he is far more interesting as a man and craftsman than as a designer. Technical skill he had in unique abundance. ”

“ 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? ”

“ They are of great intrinsic value, of beautiful workmanship, chased and engraved, and enriched with cast and repoussé work and the choicest enamels. Of the craftsman or goldsmith we know but little, but his delicacy of touch, his just appreciation of appropriateness of treatment to his material, and the singular grace and charm of his design are a tribute to his culture and personality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are many trades, too, in which the handicraftsman and the designer should be united. This is the case in such industries as wood-engraving, metal-chasing, and silversmith’s work. In these and other trades the true artisan is the artist aud handicraftsman combined. ”

“ But what is the relation of the craft spirit to these facts? Simply this: the true craftsman, by the very fact that he is a true craftsman, is immune to these influences. What does the true artist care for the plaudits or the sneers of the crowd? True, he seeks commendation and welcomes applause, for your real artist is usually extremely human; but he seeks this commendation from another source—from a source that metes it out less lavishly and yet with unconditioned candor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First and foremost, however, we must have some change in the training of artists, and must direct their attention to utility, rather than pictorial work. It is difficult to count the outlets possible to the decorative craftsman, provided he understands modern machinery and commercial demands. ”

“ He was always discovering new possibilities that opened the door for fresh improvements, and his knowledge of the details of every craft employed in his service was so exacting and complete that the skilled artificers who laboured for him knew well that they were under the trained eye of a master as well as of an employer. ”

“ But he must learn to work systematically and accurately if he is ever to become a genuine craftsman. In the first place, he should understand the possibilities and limitations of his tools. He should never use a chisel for a screw-driver, nor drive nails with the butt end of a plane. Good tools should have good care. Inanimate things that they are, they yet resent ill-usage, and retaliate, in their own way, by becoming dull and otherwise unfit for their work. Indeed, a good carpenter may be known by the condition of his tool-chest and work-bench. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let a print be taken from each plate and presented to an artistically uneducated craftsman and to an artist, the craftsman will go into raptures over the sharp craftsman picture, the artist will do the same over the artistic picture, but the artist will not look for a moment at the craftsman’s ideal, and this little matter any one can prove for himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, as for the craftsman, [113] there is nothing sacred about his work. It is sold in a shop and made to be sold; and all we expect of it is that it shall be in the fashion, which means that it shall be what the commercial traveller thinks he can sell. There are, of course, a few craftsman who are thought of as artists, and their work at once becomes a sacred mystery, like pictures. ”

“ In times past Palissy, Hargreaves, and many another master of a handicraft, has perfected a remarkable invention in a small shop. We may expect the arts to receive golden gifts in the future from the successors of these men, feeling as they do the stimulus of a broadening demand for work executed on new lines of excellence. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ We asserted the principle that the Designer and Craftsman should be hand in hand, and work head with hand in both cases, so that mere redundancy of ingenious surface ornament on the one hand, or mechanical ingenuity in executive23 skill on the other, should not be considered as ends in themselves, but only as means to ends, neither the one nor the other being tolerable without controlling taste. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”