NEW BOOK - Arts & Crafts: Ideas that Shaped the World

This month we are launching a beautifully illustrated new book with essays on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and Scandinavia. 

It has grown out of the conversations that we had last Spring in Sweden, when a group of curators, researchers and historians gathered at the historic Engelsberg Ironworks. We wanted to highlight new research on key figures, including Ruskin, Morris and Ashbee, as well as drawing attention to women's work, with an essay by Karen Livingstone. Qaisra Khan has also contributed an article that considers the influence of Islamic art on 19th and early 20th century design. 

We have also been able to include ground-breaking studies by Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark on the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement across Scandinavia, as well as essays on Swedish style and the Larsson family.

Together Elisabeth Svalin Gunnarsson and I have edited these articles.  It now is available to buy from Waterstones

Here is an extract from our foreword

Hand, head, heart – and hope

The Arts & Crafts Movement and its legacy. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement, in its original incarnation, ended in the dark days of 1940, when Morris and Co., the family firm, finally closed. With the deaths of May Morris (designer and lecturer) in 1938 and then C R Ashbee (founder of the Guild of Handicraft) in 1942, the last links with the pioneering spirit of the movement were broken. These artists and writers had created bold new ways of living and working in a modern world, in Britain and beyond. What was their legacy in the Nuclear Age?

 As the words and actions of William Morris and John Ruskin passed beyond living memory and into history, the personal relationships that shaped the Movement became public property. Houses, texts and objects were now being studied by curators. The things that had belonged to their families and friends became institutionalised. The Arts and Crafts Movement had a domestic focus. Although the artists and architects had accepted public commissions and decorated churches, more often they were working on a smaller scale. They wanted to make ‘the House Beautiful’, and so placed an emphasis on family spaces. As a result, the afterlife of their homes was just as important as museum publications and exhibitions in preserving the histories of the Movement.

This was the case not only in Britain, but also in Sweden, where Carl and Karin Larsson’s family home at Lilla Hyttnäs was opened to visitors in 1946.  

If we look at another home that was central to the ideals of the Movement – Kelmscott Manor - we can see how attitudes to the Arts and Crafts have ebbed and flowed. The Oxfordshire home of William Morris and his family since 1871, it was neglected in the years after May Morris’s death. The house was still decorated with embroideries, furniture and pictures made and collected by her parents and their close circle when May Morris bequeathed the Manor to Oxford University. But they did not want it. After a legal squabble, it became the responsibility of the Society of Antiquaries.

Essential conservation work to save this ‘heaven on earth’ was undertaken in the early 1960s. A film made at the time by architects Richard Dufty and Peter Locke documented the serious structural problems they had to resolve as they tried to save the ‘many-gabled old house’. Rotting timbers, bowing walls, unstable staircases, all had to be replaced so the building could be preserved for the next generation. This work has recently been consolidated, and the facilities updated to make space for the growing number of visitors. The most recent intensive conservation project meant that Kelmscott Manor was closed for two years. It reopened in Spring 2022 with the addition of a sympathetically designed new building, to welcome school groups and provide facilities for an artist in residence.  The current team have taken Morris’s own sensitivities into account. As the founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, William Morris was especially concerned about inappropriate restoration. And his efforts to encourage architects to use vernacular materials and designs, to create minimal impact on older structures, are still being maintained today by the SPAB. The Society still supports craftspeople and architects with Sustainable Heritage awards. They also offer advice on issues like energy efficiency in historic buildings. As Morris said, ‘we are only trustees for those that come after us’.

William Morris has been the focus of consistent popular and institutional interest since the 1960s. This is partly because he was involved in a wealth of different projects, from poetry to political activism. He also established an interior design brand that was recognised throughout the English-speaking world.

However, his reputation has also been maintained thanks to his close and enduring relationship with London’s V&A Museum. In his lifetime, he advised the curators on their acquisitions of textiles and ceramics. After the death of his daughter May, her bequests enhanced the Museum’s collections. This meant that the V&A was able to demonstrate breadth of his work through on-going research. They staged major exhibitions on William Morris in 1934 and 1996, and the International Arts and Crafts exhibition (2005) showed how far his ideas and designs were shared in the 19^th century and since. Morris was champion of sustainability and workers’ rights, a designer who had a profound sense of place and of history. His patterns are still successfully marketed and repackaged for products today, although often the manufacturers have lost sight of his original vision.  

 John Ruskin’s reputation has been more vulnerable. Before the First World War, he was recognised as one of the most prescient and influential thinkers of his age. But by 1969, the 150^th anniversary of his birth, many of his opinions were unfashionable, and his watercolours were not widely known. The collections of art, botanical and geological samples that he had given to the city of Sheffield were mostly in store, and it looked as if the watercolours and manuscripts held in a private collection on the Isle of Wight might be split and sold.

Gradually the tide has turned, and the archives are now secure in the beautiful Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. The building, a work of art in itself, designed to resemble Ruskin’s beloved Venice, is not without its own difficulties. But Ruskin’s legacy has always had an impact beyond the scholarly and institutional. 

At his home in Brantwood, the gardens are flourishing as well as the historical collections. In Sheffield, his ideas have formed the groundwork for hands-on projects, bringing people together from all sorts of backgrounds; bakers and bee-keepers, school children and troubled adults. One unexpected success is the revival of Ruskin Land, an area of the Wyre Forest in the Midlands. The woods, orchards, meadows and small-holdings here were given to Ruskin and his followers, as a place of peace and productivity in the years before the First World War. A century later, they now provide a quiet space for young people who need respite from the city. Wood-working, apple-picking, listening to birdsong, these are also part of Ruskin’s gift to our modern world.

Going ‘Back to the Land’ has always been a part of the Arts and Crafts story. Fiona MacCarthy made it clear in her biography of C R Ashbee, when she called it ‘The Simple Life’ (1981). The pull of the countryside was felt so strongly by Ashbee, that he moved his workshop and colleagues out of London and into the Cotswolds.  His design work, and his radical response to capitalist consumerism was charted in Alan Crawford’s study ‘C R Ashbee: Romantic Socialist’ (1985) and made visible in the V&A’s ‘International Arts and Crafts’ exhibition. 

The V&A Museum has been central to researching and displaying the Arts and Crafts tradition, in the widest sense, bringing Carl Larsson to a new British audience. In 1998, they brought the furniture and textiles of Lilla Hytnäs from Sundborn as the core exhibits in a special exhibition, ‘Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style’. This display and the exhibition catalogue were also significant in reinstating Karin’s place in the story. Her designs, weavings and embroideries were recognised as dynamic and influential works in their own right.  Increasingly, the roles of women like Karin Larsson – as designers and makers – have been brought into clearer focus.

No longer left on the margins, recent research has amplified the voices of women like Jane Morris whose letters were published by Jan Marsh and Frank L Sharp (2012). The work of her daughter May, in textiles, jewellery and wallpaper design, was brought together in a substantial exhibition in 2017. And Karen Livingstone’s recovery of the biographies of female designers and makers in ‘Women Pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement’ (2024) demonstrates that women’s experience was not monolithic. These artists followed many different paths. Arts and Crafts ideals allowed them to experiment with fresh ways of making a living.

 So where does the Arts and Crafts Movement lead us now? Increasingly, it is inspiring more intangible projects, beyond the university or the museum. There is a strong pull towards a ‘Green’ reading of William Morris. And many new readers see Ruskin as a proto-environmentalist, with his arguments about impact of industrial pollution in his devastating lecture on ‘The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’.

He encourages us to tread lightly, and yet to ask hard questions about stewardship and financial transparency. Ruskin was fierce. He was difficult. This radical edge means that his work will persist in our imaginations.   

As we look towards 2034 and the bicentenary of Morris’s birth, what remains? Is it the wallpaper, the poetry, the beautiful books? Or will it be his urgent concerns, which we still share, about waste, or impact of machines on human creativity. As Morris wrote in News from Nowhere, he envisioned a world ‘where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’. Clearly, there is much work to be done.