Good Morning Friends,

First off welcome Kelly as a forum host.

Now for the quiz; In 1851 a man became disinterested in the mass produced furniture in the Queen Elisabeth style and started the Art and Crafts Movement. Who was this man?

Edited December 6, 20178 yr by Ron Dudelston
tags added

wasn't it you Ralph?

 

Just now, John Hechel said:

wasn't it you Ralph?

 

William Morris worked in the style first, in the US. But, it's origins were in England. IIRC, an architect in England first developed the style.

Enjoy the ceremony, Ralph. Take pictures please.

Edited April 8, 20179 yr by Gene Howe

Just now, Gene Howe said:

William Morris worked in the style first, in the US. But, it's origins were in England. IIRC, an architect in England first developed the style.

Any relationship to our beloved leader??

 

William Morris

 

Father of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, on March 24, 1836, William Morris was the son of a wealthy businessman. As such, he enjoyed a comfortable childhood before going to Marlborough and Exeter, Oxford.

William Morris - Arts & Crafts Movement Leader - Writer Designer ...

www.arts-crafts.com/archive/wmorris.shtml

 

 

1 minute ago, lew said:

Any relationship to our beloved leader??

 

Don't think so. Names are spelled differently. One is John, the other was William. Besides, William was a Socialist. Don't think John fits in that family.

 

EDIT: William Morris was an Englishman. Not an American. I confused him with Stickley. Getting old is dangerous.

2 minutes ago, HandyDan said:

William Morris

 

Father of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, on March 24, 1836, William Morris was the son of a wealthy businessman. As such, he enjoyed a comfortable childhood before going to Marlborough and Exeter, Oxford.

William Morris - Arts & Crafts Movement Leader - Writer Designer ...

www.arts-crafts.com/archive/wmorris.shtml

 

 

Yep. Missed that one.

Well fellows when the movement actually started by the man from the quiz Morris was only 15 years old. The movement was started in 1851 by the man in the quiz. Now can you figure out who he was? He also was an Englishman.

 

The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887,^[7] although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least twenty years. It was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), writer John Ruskin (1819–1900), and designer William Morris (1834–1896).^[1]

 

The Arts and Crafts style emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid 19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production, and was in part a response to items shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 that were ornate, artificial and ignored the qualities of the materials used. But it was as much a movement of social reform as design reform and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.

The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner has said that exhibits in the Great Exhibition showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface" and "vulgarity in detail".^[10] Design reform began with the organisers of the Exhibition itself, Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),^[11] and the dislike of excessive ornament and badly made things was not exclusive to the Arts and Crafts movement.^[12] Owen Jones, for example, declared that "Ornament ... must be secondary to the thing decorated", that there must be "fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented", and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain".^[13] Where a fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, an Arts and Crafts, like the Artichoke design illustrated above, would use a flat and simplified natural motif.

 

A. W. N. Pugin

Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by A.W.N. Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic revival in architecture. For example, he, like the Arts and Crafts artists, advocated truth to material, structure and function.^[24] Pugin articulated the tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society (such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor) unfavorably with the Middle Ages,^[25] a tendency that became routine with Ruskin, Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. His book Contrasts (1836) drew examples of bad modern buildings and town planning in contrast with good medieval examples, and his biographer Rosemary Hill notes that in it he "reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmaship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail." She describes the spare furnishings he specified for a building in 1841 - "rush chairs, oak tables" - as "the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo."^[25]

John Ruskin

The Arts and Crafts philosophy derived in large measure from Ruskin's social criticism, which related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of work. Ruskin considered the sort of mechanized production and division of labour that had been created in the industrial revolution to be "servile labour" and he thought that a healthy and moral society required independent workers who designed the things they made. His followers favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about the loss of traditional skills, but they were arguably more troubled by effects of the factory system than by machinery itself^[22] and William Morris's idea of "handicraft" was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery.^[26]

William Morris

 

Morris, the towering figure in late 19th century design, was the main influence on the Arts and Crafts movement. The aesthetic and social vision of the Arts and Crafts movement derived from ideas he developed in the 1850s with a group of students at the University of Oxford, who combined a love of Romantic literature with a commitment to social reform.^[27] By 1855 they had discovered Ruskin and, believing there to be a contrast between the barbarity of contemporary art and the painters preceding Raphael (1483-1530), they formed themselves into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to pursue their artistic aims. The medievalism of Mallory's Morte d'Arthur set the standard for their early style.^[28] In Edward Burne-Jones' words, they intended to "wage Holy warfare against the age".^[29]

 

Morris began experimenting with various crafts and designing furniture and interiors.^[31] He was personally involved in manufacture as well as design,^[31] which was to be the hallmark of the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin had argued that the separation of the intellectual act of design from the manual act of physical creation was both socially and aesthetically damaging; Morris further developed this idea, insisting that no work should be carried out in his workshops before he had personally mastered the appropriate techniques and materials, arguing that "without dignified, creative human occupation people became disconnected from life".^[31]

 

In 1861 Morris began making furniture and decorative objects commercially, modeling his designs on medieval styles and using bold forms and strong colors. His patterns were based on flora and fauna and his products were inspired by the vernacular or domestic traditions of the British countryside. In order to display the beauty of the materials and the work of the craftsman, some were deliberately left unfinished, creating a rustic appearance. Truth to materials, structure and function became characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Edited April 8, 20179 yr by Stick486

Great reply Stick for you are correct as the name I was looking for was indeed John Ruskin.

 

Thank you all for your support.

 

See you all in two weeks if not sooner with some pictures.

3 hours ago, Ralph Allen Jones said:

Great reply

 

thanks to Wikipedia...