Design movements from 1880 to 1920
In this course, we will try to understand the background which led to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and highlights elements in its ideology, ethos and working practices which were particularly relevant to subsequent developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth-century continental Europe.
Arts & Crafts Movement
In this course, we will try to understand the background which led to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and highlights elements in its ideology, ethos and working practices which were particularly relevant to subsequent developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth-century continental Europe.
Arts & Crafts in England
In England, the movement emerged as a response to a period of economic and social uncertainties which developed through the nineteenth century. In the fifty years between 1790 and 1840 England had changed rapidly from an agrarian to a largely industrial society. Expanding commercial activity and the rapid growth of a new urban middle class had created confidence, wealth and prosperity for a sizeable proportion of the expanding population of the country. The general view was that continual material expansion would be inevitable, straightforward and desirable. By the 1860s this conviction was coming under attack from all sides. Religious certainties were challenged by scientific and pseudo-scientific theories about the origins of life on earth propounded by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin among others.
Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent
In 1859 close friend, the architect Philip Webb, designed Morris’s first home, Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. Morris, his wife, Janey, and their friends set about decorating the house and creating its furnishings. The drawing-room was painted with a mural based on the fifteenth-century Thornton Romances. One scene included a wedding feast, with Morris and his wife providing the models for the bridegroom and bride. A large cupboard was decorated with scenes from the Arthurian legend. Elsewhere Morris painted a mural of trees and birds and, with Janey, embroidered lengths of blue serge material with a pattern of daisies for curtains. In 1904, the German architectural critic, Hermann Muthesius, described Red House as: ‘…the very first to be conceived and built as a unified whole, inside and out, the very first example in the history of the modern house.’ The home became an important symbol for the Arts and Crafts Movement in England partly because many of its leading designers were also architects. Influential figures including C. F. A. Voysey, M. H. Baillie Scott and C. R. Ashbee designed houses and interiors and promoted the concept of a complete and integrated work of art to an international audience. This approach became best known by the German term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ first used in the mid-nineteenth century. The home also took on the concept of a place of welcome and community, a refuge from the outside world. Morris’s written works include loving descriptions of homes, real and imagined.
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