Started in England in the late nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement affected nearly every aspect of household design, from architecture to pottery, and continues to do so.

It was a reformist movement that influenced British and American architecture, decorative arts, cabinet making, crafts, and even the "cottage" garden designs of William Robinson or Gertrude Jekyll.

In the United States, the terms Arts and Crafts movement, American Craftsman, or Craftsman style are often used to denote the style of architecture, interior design, and decorative arts that prevailed between the dominant eras of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, or roughly the period from 1910 to 1925.

In Nutshell

Terminology
Name derives from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded in 1888, although the movement has its roots in the earlier writings of John Ruskin.
Artists
William Morris, Walter Crane, Norman Shaw, and Philip Webb.
Timeline
1861-1914.
Started In
Great Britain.
About
Movement whose artists were in reaction against the sub-standard quality of mass-produced goods of the Industrial Age. Instead, they advocated a return to the excellent craftsmanship that was characteristic of medieval guilds. The writer John Ruskin wrote about the detrimental effects (aesthetic and social) of industrialization, but it took William Morris to translate these ideas into practical activity. Items turned out were hand-printed, hand-woven, hand-dyed designs. The movement also included a very humane, inclusive view toward workers and labor. Morris' goal of art for the masses was unrealized due to the expensive nature of the process.
Theme
Designs on textiles, books, wallpaper and stained-glass, as well as furniture.
Art Style
Hand-made quality that may be reflected in a kind of medieval, rough-hewn oak furniture, or finely crafted textile or wallpaper designs. Stylistically similar to medieval art: linear; opaque colors; angular, simplified quality; intricate, sometimes geometric, detail.
Known Work
MORRIS, Green Dining Room, 1867.
Inspiration
Medieval art, and Pre-Raphaelites.
Become Inspiration Of
Art Nouveau, and Bauhaus.

Artists & Arts and Crafts Movement

Its best-known practitioners were William Morris, Charles Robert Ashbee, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, Nelson Dawson, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Herbert Tudor Buckland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Christopher Dresser, Edwin Lutyens, Ernest Gimson, William Lethaby, Edward Schroeder Prior, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, and artists in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Exploring Art Style

The Arts and Crafts movement is a major English and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, it was at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910.

The movement was a response to the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution and the excesses of the Victorian Age, during which the middle classes collected frilly, mass-produced knickknacks. Arts and Crafts embraced simplicity of line, good, durable materials, and the human touch. Proponents were divided over the use of machines for production.

Morris, Ruskin & Arts and Crafts Movement

The English poet and artist William Morris, widely considered the movement's founder, articulated its philosophy, stressing the importance of the dignity and humanity of the work of craftsmen: "every thing made by man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her.

Red House, Bexleyheath, London (1859), by architect Philip Webb for Morris himself, is a work exemplary of this movement in its early stages. There is a deliberate attempt at expressing surface textures of ordinary materials, such as stone and tiles, with an asymmetrical and quaint building composition.

Morris formed the Kelmscott Press and also had a shop where he designed and sold products such as wallpaper, textiles, furniture, etc. Morris's own ideas emerged from the thinking that had informed Pre-Raphaelitism, especially following the publication of Ruskin's book The Stones of Venice and Unto this Last, both of which sought to relate the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and designs.

 The decline of rural handicrafts, corresponding to the rise of industralised society, was a cause for concern for many designers and social reformers, who feared the loss of traditional skills and creativity.

For Ruskin, a healthy society depended on skilled and creative workers. Morris and other socialist designers such as Crane and Ashbee looked forward to a future society of free craftspeople.

The Aesthetic movement, which emerged at the same period, fed into these ideas.

Societies & Associations

Home Arts and Industries Association

In 1881 the Home Arts and Industries Association was set up by Eglantyne Louisa Jebb in collaboration with Mary Fraser Tytler (later Mary Watts) and others to promote and protect rural handicrafts. A group of reformist architects, followers of Arthur Mackmurdo, later established the Art Workers Guild to promote their vision of the integration of designing and making. Crane was elected as its president.

In America in the late 1890’s, a group of Boston’s most influential architects, designers, and educators, determined to bring to this country the design reforms begun in England by William Morris, met to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects. The first meeting was held on January 4, 1897, at the Museum of Fine Arts to organize an exhibition of contemporary crafts.

When craftsmen, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts, the process of design reform in Boston started. Present at this meeting were General Charles Loring, Chairman of the Trustees of the MFA; William Sturgis Bigelow and Denman Ross, collectors, writers and MFA trustees; Ross Turner, painter; Sylvester Baxter, art critic for the Boston Transcript; Howard Baker, A.W. Longfellow Jr.; and Ralph Clipson Sturgis, architect.

Roy croft - King's Craft Community

In 1895, a group of artisans established "Roy croft" ("King's Craft"), in East Aurora, N.Y., a community (which is again functioning) whose mission was to evoke images of medieval craftsmanship.

The Society of Arts and Crafts & Exhibitions
The first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened on April 5, 1897, at Copley Hall featuring over 1000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were women. Some of the supporters for the exhibit were Langford Warren, founder of Harvard’s School of Architecture; Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead, social reformers; and Will Bradley, graphic designer.

The huge success of this exhibition led to the incorporation of The Society of Arts and Crafts, on June 28, 1897, with a mandate to “develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts.” The 21 founders were interested in more than sales, and focused on the relationship of designers within the commercial world, encouraging artists to produce work with the highest quality of workmanship and design.

This consent was soon expanded into a credo, possibly written by the SAC’s first president, Charles Elliot Norton, which read: This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own.

It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it.

Bibliography

Cathers, David M. Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The New American Library, Inc., 1981. ISBN 045303974.

London, Neil, and Chris Wheeler. The Arts and Crafts Legacy. Home and Garden Television, 2001.

Morris, William. Hopes and Fears for Art. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882.

Kaplan, Wendy. "The Art that is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1987.

Stansky, Peter. Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Online Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement
www.arts-crafts.com/
www.artsandcraftsmuseum.org.uk
www.answers.com