What is Arts And Crafts Movement?
The Arts and Crafts Movement is an international design reform movement that emerged in Britain during the 1860s and flourished through the early 20th century. It arose as a reaction against the perceived decline in standards associated with machinery and factory production, advocating instead for traditional craftsmanship, honest use of materials, and the integration of beauty into everyday objects. Core characteristics include a belief in craftsmanship which stresses the inherent beauty of the material, the importance of nature as inspiration, and the value of simplicity, utility, and beauty. Unlike many art movements, there was no single manifesto and no one style to which it adhered, but rather a shared philosophical commitment to elevating decorative arts and reuniting the designer with the maker.
Origins & lineage
The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least 20 years. The movement’s emergence in the 1860s was inspired by William Morris’s vision that people should be surrounded by beautiful, well-made things.
The philosophical foundation rests primarily on the writings of three figures. The designer A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), whose early writings promoting the Gothic Revival presaged English apprehension about industrialization, provided early critique. Art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) wrote The Stones of Venice, an architectural history that contains a powerful denunciation of modern industrialism to which Arts and Crafts designers returned again and again. Ruskin considered the sort of mechanised 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 that they made.
William Morris (1834–1896), the movement’s figurehead and ardent socialist, believed that industrialization alienated labor and created a dehumanizing distance between the designer and manufacturer. Morris’s lectures and essays on art and his rediscovery of traditional craft techniques helped spread the movement, as did the decorative designs and products from his company: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
In 1887, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which gave its name to the movement, was formed with Walter Crane as president, holding its first exhibition in the New Gallery, London, in November 1888. In 1884, the Art Workers Guild was initiated by five young architects, William Lethaby, Edward Prior, Ernest Newton, Mervyn Macartney and Gerald C. Horsley. Between 1895 and 1905 this strong sense of social purpose drove the creation of over a hundred organisations and guilds that centred on Arts and Crafts principles in Britain.
The movement spread internationally. It spread rapidly throughout America and Europe until reaching Japan. In Scotland, it is associated with key figures such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In America, the movement took distinct form, with Chicago promoting the machine as a way to assist workers, unlike the movement in England.
How it’s practiced
Arts and Crafts practice centers on handwork across multiple disciplines. Most Arts and Crafts designers worked across an unusually wide range of different disciplines—in a single career someone could apply craft-based principles to the design of things as varied as armchairs and glassware.
In textiles and surface design, practitioners employed traditional techniques such as hand-block printing and natural dyes. William Morris was well-known for his wallpaper, designing over 50 unique patterns during his lifetime, and was very involved in the manufacturing process of his designs to help ensure the quality of the items. Patterns drew heavily from natural forms—plants, flowers, birds—rendered in stylized, often symmetrical compositions.
Architecture exemplified the movement through buildings like Red House, in Bexleyheath, London, designed for Morris in 1859 by architect Philip Webb, with its well-proportioned solid forms, wide porches, steep roof, pointed window arches, brick fireplaces and wooden fittings. Webb rejected classical and other revivals of historical styles based on grand buildings, and based his design on British vernacular architecture, expressing the texture of ordinary materials, such as stone and tiles.
Furniture making emphasized visible joinery, exposed construction, and unadorned, plain surfaces enlivened by the careful application of colorants; structural qualities emphasized through exposed mortise and joinery; handmade qualities emphasized through the use of hammered metal hardware. Craftspeople also worked in metalwork, ceramics, jewelry, bookbinding, and stained glass.
C. R. Ashbee founded the Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End of London in 1888—a craft co-operative modelled on the medieval guilds and intended to give working men satisfaction in their craftsmanship. These guilds provided both training and community.
Arts And Crafts Movement today
The movement’s direct organizational presence diminished after World War I. Under the control of older artists it had begun to withdraw from productive relationships with industry and into a purist celebration of the handmade. In 1960, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society merged with the Cambridgeshire Guild of Craftsmen to form the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which is still active today.
Contemporary encounter with Arts and Crafts occurs primarily through historic house museums like Red House and Wightwick Manor, museum collections at institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum, and through surviving Morris & Co. patterns still produced today for textiles and wallpapers. The movement’s aesthetic influences contemporary studio craft, furniture making, and the maker movement. Arts and Crafts principles inform current critiques of fast fashion and mass consumption, resonating with sustainability advocates and artisan communities.
The Arts and Crafts philosophy was perpetuated among British craft workers in the 1950s and 1960s, long after the demise of the Arts and Crafts movement, notably through British artist potter Bernard Leach, who brought ideas he had developed in Japan with social critic Yanagi Soetsu about the moral and social value of simple crafts and expounded them in A Potter’s Book, published in 1940.
Common misconceptions
The movement is often misunderstood as entirely anti-machine. While Ruskin and Morris critiqued industrialization, Morris said that production by machinery was “altogether an evil” at one point, but at other times was willing to commission work from manufacturers who were able to meet his standards with the aid of machines, and said that in a “true society” machinery could be improved and used to reduce the hours of labour. The American Arts and Crafts movement explicitly promoted the machine as a way to assist workers, unlike the movement in England.
Another misconception is that Arts and Crafts was exclusively male. Women designers guided this grassroots Arts and Crafts Movement for nearly two decades before the movement’s major male figures arrived. May Morris, daughter of William Morris, is especially known for her embroidery designs and became manager of the Morris & Co. embroidery department in 1885 when she was only 23 years old.
The movement is also wrongly assumed to have been affordable. Despite Morris’s socialist ideals and desire to make beautiful objects accessible, the labor-intensive handcraft methods often made Arts and Crafts goods expensive, limiting their reach to middle and upper classes—a contradiction that troubled many practitioners.
How to begin
For those seeking to understand the movement, begin with primary sources: William Morris’s essays, particularly “The Lesser Arts” (1877) and “Useful Work versus Useless Toil” (1884), articulate the core philosophy. John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice profoundly influenced the movement by advocating a return to traditional craftsmanship and authenticity in artistic creation.
Visit the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which holds the world’s most comprehensive Arts and Crafts collection, or Red House in Bexleyheath, Morris’s family home. In the United States, the Gamble House in Pasadena exemplifies American Arts and Crafts architecture.
For practical engagement, seek out workshops in traditional crafts—hand bookbinding, natural dyeing, woodworking with hand tools, or block printing. Organizations like the Society of Designer Craftsmen continue the tradition. Study Morris’s pattern designs to understand how natural forms translate into stylized decoration. The movement’s core lesson remains timeless: that how something is made matters as much as what is made, and that beauty and utility need not be separated.