Arts and Minds by Howes Anton;

Author:Howes, Anton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

9.1. One of the Indian designs that so impressed visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851, in this case an embroidery in white silk on black net. Image from plate 56 of Matthew Digby Wyatt’s Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, which illustrated the exhibition’s ‘choicest specimens’. RSA/SC/EX/1/98.

Jones was not the first to note this, but his writings on the subject placed a century of assumptions on their head: the high art of painting and sculpture did not simply trickle down to manufacturers, as people like Joshua Reynolds had insisted in the 1760s; instead, good design often came from below, from the slowly accumulated traditions of uneducated craftsmen. It was essential that the people who designed things were also the people who made them. Mechanised factories, by contrast, separated the makers from their creations—they lost their feel for materials, their subtle, tacit understanding of processes that could only emerge through years of practice, if not decades of tradition passed down from generation to generation. It was no wonder, thought Jones, that British design had become ‘decadent’ and over-stylised. Because of industrialisation, Britain had lost its tradition of craftsmanship. Cole, Redgrave, and other reformers agreed, as did art critics like John Ruskin, who had already noticed the apparent superiority of ancient English craftsmanship.14 Ruskin’s writings, in turn, heavily influenced a young William Morris, who was to become an intellectual founder of the movement to reverse the decline: Arts and Crafts.

Morris reportedly attended the Great Exhibition himself: aged 17, he had got as far as the door and refused to go any further, finding its contents ‘wonderfully ugly’.15 Yet he later exhibited items from his own workshop at the Society’s 1862 International Exhibition, winning two gold medals and a special citation from the prize jury for the colour and design of his stained glass. Applying his belief in the value of craftsmanship, Morris’s workshop established a reputation for furniture, jewellery, tiles, metalware, and especially wallpapers. Most significantly, however, Morris preached what he practised, influencing many others through his speeches and writings.

The Society of Arts, too, played its role. In 1863, it aided the Society of Wood Carvers by holding an exhibition in its rooms, offering some money and a medal for the exhibition’s prizes. Soon, the Society began to offer prizes for art-workmanship, which lasted until 1870. After Owen Jones died, too, a prize was established in 1878 in his name, distributed by the Society to the best students trained by the Department of Science and Art. In the same year, with the aid of a grant from one of the guilds, the Drapers’ Company, the Society even helped establish a School of Art Wood-Carving (it eventually made its way to South Kensington, but in the early twentieth century failed due to lack of funding).16 Whereas Cole had once tried to persuade professional artists to apply their talents to manufactures, he and his allies now wished to encourage workers themselves to develop their talents as craftsmen.

The art-workmanship prizes and exhibitions were revived in the 1880s at the instigation of Cole.

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