Arts and Crafts

England, the middle of the 19th century. The factories turn out goods at a pace no one has seen before. But something has been lost. The person who designs a chair no longer builds it, and the person who builds it has never designed anything.

The critic John Ruskin puts the unease into words. A nation's health is tied to how its things are made, he argues. Separate design from making – and both the object and the maker suffer.

William Morris turns theory into practice. His friend Philip Webb designs him a house in the Kent countryside. The drawing is dated 1859. The year after, Morris and his wife Jane move in. It is called Red House, and the friends furnish it together – a joy in shared work that Morris never forgets.

Out of that joy grows a firm. In 1861 he founds Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. First wall paintings and embroidered hangings. Then stained glass. In 1875 it becomes Morris & Co., and two years later the shop on Oxford Street opens. Morris's own rule is simple: keep nothing at home that is neither useful nor beautiful.

The name comes late. In 1884 young architects and designers form the Art Workers' Guild, where the fine arts and the crafts meet on equal terms. In 1887 the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society is founded in London, with Walter Crane as its first president. The year after, it holds its first exhibition. It is the society that gives the movement its name.

Many of the leading figures are trained architects. They want the whole: house, furniture and decoration as one coherent work. Philip Webb, Charles Voysey, William Lethaby and Edwin Lutyens redraw the English house – starting from the building tradition of the place.

Then it spreads. Between 1895 and 1905 more than a hundred guilds and societies are founded in Britain. Workshops settle in the countryside, in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. The ideas cross the seas. In the Nordic countries they become one of the roots of National Romanticism. In the United States they become Craftsman.

After the First World War the momentum fades. But the honesty lives on, in an unexpected place. It is what inspires the radical forms of Modernism.

National Romanticism. Children of the same idea. Honest materials, visible craft, the building tradition of one's own country. The difference is where they look. The English find their ideal in the country house. The Swedes find theirs in the Vasa castles and the log cottage.

Art Nouveau. The same years, the same longing for the whole. But Art Nouveau wants to create something new and lets the line loose in soft plant forms. Arts and Crafts looks back, to the craft before the factory.