Art History with Anne

Live Lectures for March

The Arts and Crafts in London and Beyond

It was the generation that followed William Morris that established the Arts and Crafts movement.  The Art Workers Guild and the Home Arts and Industries Association were founded in 1884, followed by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, which provided a showcase for craftwork.  During the 1890s leading architects and designers emerged: Voysey, Ashbee, Lethaby, Gimson and the Barnsleys.  Guilds were formed and rural utopias founded in the Cotswolds and Surrey.  For a brief period, England led the way in progressive design.  The Germans even dispatch a ‘spy’ to study the phenomena of The English House.   Then around 1910 it all ended abruptly.  The British retreated into Neo-Georgian architecture, while the Dutch, Germans, and French rose to the challenge of Modernism. 

Over three lectures I will explore the development of the Arts and Crafts movement, from the founding of the Arts Workers Guild to the exodus to the Cotswolds-Chipping Camden and Broadway.  

Arts and Crafts in London: The Art Workers Guild

Tuesday 5^th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

‘Art is Unity’, Walter Crane

Although the Arts and Crafts is associated with an exodus ‘Back to the Land’, a desire to live a wholesome life in a rural idyll, its roots lie in London.  Established in 1884, the Arts Workers Guild met in Hart Street before finding a permanent home at 6, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, in 1914.  This umbrella organisation, akin to gentleman’s club (initially women were not admitted), wanted to protect the interests of the artist-craftsman and encourage higher standards in both design and manufacturing.  A guiding principle was ‘unity of all the arts’, denying the distinction between fine and applied art, and restoring the union between painters, sculptors, and architects. Many members of the Guild lived and worked in London and its environs: Lewis F. Day, Walter Crane, W.A.S Benson, John Dando Sedding, Heyward Sumner, and Charles Harrison Townsend, who constructed London’s most distinctive and daring Arts and Crafts buildings: the Bishopsgate Institute, Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Horniman Museum.  

Metalwork was W.A.S. Benson, whose workshops were in Hammersmith

Perhaps surprisingly the first Master, an office held on a yearly basis, was not William Morris but the sculptorGeorge Blackall Simonds;Morris was elected Master in 1892.  His daughter May Morris founded the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907 to provide a collective body for aspiring female artist-craftsmen.    

It soon became clear that artist-craftsmen need a venue at which to promote and sell their wares. In 1887, the Art Workers Guild spawned the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with Walter Crane the founding president. Exhibitions were held annually at the New Gallery from 1888–90, and roughly every three years thereafter.  London was the principal market for Arts and Crafts products, with retail outlets numbering Morris & Co. on Oxford Street and Liberty of Regent Street.  However, unlike Morris, Arthur Lasenby Liberty was not motivated to preserve ancient skills or alleviate the ‘plight of the worker’.  Many of his products were factory made.   His goal was to supply more affordable artistic goods to an increasingly sophisticated metropolitan clientele, commissioning designs from Archibald Knox and the Silver Studio. 

Archibald Knox for Liberty of Regent Street

Charles Robert Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft: from the Mile End Road to Chipping Campden

Tuesday 12th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

John Ruskin and William Morris inspired many initiatives, notably C.R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicrafts at Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, the first university settlement founded to encourage a direct dialogue between the ‘rich and poor’.  Ashbee, a volunteer settlement worker, optimistically aimed to educate, acculturate, and alleviate poverty in the slums.  The Guild, which grew out of a Ruskin reading class, was inaugurated in 1888 as a cooperative making furniture, handwrought metalwork and jewellery. Ashbee designed furniture and metalwork for the Guild. The Guild was supported in its endeavours by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, who commissioned custom picture frames for May Morning on Magdalen Tower (1888-9).    

John Williams, Guild of Handicraft  Late in 1888 or early in 1889.

Thus, below we have the rising sun, on either side of which are ‘frogs and fishes awakening into joyous life’.  On the upright members are growing and flowering plants, and above all birds and butterflies….a very creditable piece of craftsmanship.

Needing larger premises, by 1890 the Guild had moved to Essex House on the Mile End Road.  In 1898 the Guild was awarded another plumb commission, executing Ballie Scott’s designs for the refurbishment of rooms in the Neue Palace, Darmstadt, for the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse.

Following Morris’s death, Ashbee secured the Kelmscott Press’s Albion printing presses to set up his own Essex House press.

In search of a better life, the Guild of Handicraft moved to Chipping Campden in 1902, setting up workshops in the old Silk Mill on Sheep Street: ‘I am glad to think that the men themselves have decided on the whole it is better to leave Babylon and go home to the land.’Best known for his silver and jewellery, Ashbee developed a personal style, with curvaceous forms, elegant wire handles and semi-precious cabochon stones or enamelling. The peacock was a favourite motif. 

 

Although a critical success, the Guild ran into financial trouble in 1907.  Handcraftsmanship and competitive industry were at odds with each other.  Liberty of Regent Street exacerbated the situation, copying Ashbee’s jewellery designs. Factory produced it was retailed at lower prices, undercutting the Guild.  However, although the Guild was dissolved, several of the craftsmen stayed on. The Hart’s gold and silver workshop continues Arts and Crafts traditions to this day.

Broadway: from Artist’s Colony to Arts and Crafts Enterprise

Tuesday 19^th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

William Morris discovered the delights of Broadway in the summer of 1876, when Crom Price, his friend from his days at Oxford, took a summer lease on Broadway Tower. May Morris recalled ‘The tower was certainly absurd – the men had to bathe on the roof, when the wind didn’t blow the soap away and there was water enough… but how the clean aromatic air blew the arches out of our tired bodies, and how good it all was”.

Visiting in 1883, artist-garden designer Alfred Parsons was enchanted by Broadway’s ‘Englishness’. Spreading the word to upper-class American émigrés an artistic colony soon gathered: Francis Davis Millet, Edwin Austin Abbey and Henry James, who claimed that Parsons ‘learned so well how Americans would like England to appear’; ‘The England of his pencil… is exactly the England that the American imagination… constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the delightful testimony it inherits”.

Alfred Parsons…View towards Broadway Tower

While Abbey ‘summered’ in Broadway, Millet put down roots, firstly living at Farnham House then Russell House. It was in these gardens that John Singer Sargent painted his famed Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ (1885-86, Tate Britian).  

Mr Sargent at work on Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-86, Frank Millet

Recognizing the potential of Broadway as a tourist attraction, thanks to the motorcar, in 1904 S.B. Russell took over the Lygon Arms and aggrandized the old coaching inn into the first English ‘country house’ hotel. Realising he had a ready market to hand he opened an antiques business, repairing and selling furniture. Regular visitor Henry Ford dismantled and shipped a dilapidated Blacksmith Shop, with all its tools, to Greenfield, his museum in Michigan! As a young lad, Russell’s son Gordon learnt his skills in the workshop, soon developing an interest in furniture design. Russell and Sons was set up in 1922- a venture that became world famous.

Please join me to discover the Arts and Crafts movement in London and the Cotswolds.

Dates for your diary:

Arts and Crafts in London: The Art Workers Guild

Tuesday 5^th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

Charles Robert Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft: from the Mile End Road to Chipping Campden

Tuesday 12th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

Broadway: from Artist’s Colony to Arts and Crafts Haven

Tuesday 19^th March at 11.am and repeated in the evening at 7pm BST

The cost of each lecture is £10. Book all three lectures for £25.

You can book this live lecture for either the morning or the evening presentation.

Please state your preferred time, Morning Lecture or Evening Lecture, for the zoom link as they different codes.

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After the lecture you will be sent another private link so you can access the lecture on my YouTube Channel.

To book your place please email Susan Branfield at  susanbranfield77@gmail.com

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