Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts movement is an art movement of the 1880–1910 period. The gallery holds 38 works in this movement, including works by Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Philip Webb, William De Morgan and Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof. Browse Arts and Crafts movement paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Arts and Crafts movement was an international movement in design and the decorative arts that arose in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century and flourished until the First World War. It emerged as a reaction against industrialization, which its adherents blamed for shoddy machine-made goods and the degradation of the craftsman into a factory hand. Its intellectual roots lay in the writings of the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose chapter "The Nature of Gothic" extolled the dignity of medieval handwork, and in the Gothic Revival before it. The designer and reformer William Morris (1834–1896) gave these ideas practical form, founding the decorating firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861 (reorganized as Morris & Co. in 1875). The movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, established in London in 1887.

Visually the style favoured honest construction, truth to materials, and forms drawn from vernacular British building and the natural world. Patterns of native flora and fauna, rendered in a flatter, more rectilinear manner than the writhing line of Art Nouveau, recur across wallpapers, textiles, tiles, stained glass, metalwork, and furniture. Philip Webb's Red House (1859–60), built for Morris, became the movement's architectural manifesto, its asymmetrical, red-brick plan prizing craftsmanship over classical symmetry.

Morris and Webb anchor the canon alongside the ceramicist William De Morgan, famed for lustreware and tiles; the architect-designers C. F. A. Voysey and Ernest Gimson; and C. R. Ashbee, who founded the Guild of Handicraft in 1888. Our collection holds De Morgan's painted Plate and the firm's The Backgammon Players, attributed to Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Philip Webb.

The movement spread widely, taking distinct national forms: Carl Larsson's domestic watercolours in Sweden, Harry Clarke's stained glass in Ireland, and the Slavophile revival at Abramtsevo in Russia, where Sergey Malyutin helped originate the matryoshka doll around 1890. In America, Gustav Stickley (1858–1942) popularized its ideals through Mission furniture and his magazine The Craftsman.

Though it shared Art Nouveau's nature-worship and anti-industrial spirit, Arts and Crafts remained more restrained and structural. Its insistence on good design for everyday life fed directly into European modernism and the Bauhaus.