The simple life: The arts and crafts movement in Great Britain

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Wendy Kaplan

In 1899 Mary Watts was asked to design rugs in the Celtic style for Alexander Morton, a carpet company that had established a workshop to employ local women in Donegal, Ireland, in cooperation with the Congested Districts Board. Watts's first effort for Morton was the hearth rug shown in Plate XII, which was shown in a 1903 exhibition entitled Founding a National Industry - Irish Carpets, sponsored by the London department store Liberty and Company. In an unusual alliance of philanthropy and commerce, Liberty's also marketed the Donegal rugs.

Mary Watts explained the complex symbolism of her hearth rug in a long letter to the Donegal weavers. After discussing the meaning of the hearth as the center of the home and the symbolism of the heart and cross, she described the pelican as a bird that supposedly drew "blood from her own breast to feed her young. ... a sign of the love which will give its own heart's blood to help those who suffer or are in need."(16) Watts's letter is a testament to the combination of romanticism, reverence for beauty, and an earnest (if somewhat patronizing) desire to improve the lot of others that characterized the arts and crafts movement.

Liberty's occupies an unusual place in the arts and crafts movement. Best known for its fabrics, the hugely successful Regent Street store in London also sold a wide range of furniture, metalwork, even entire interiors that had been made in the company's workshops, commissioned from well-known designers, or bought from other manufacturers. Despised and resented by purists such as Ashbee, Liberty's nonetheless provided a plausible response to the quest for a more democratic art. However, it did so by jettisoning small-scale production and the recognition of designers and craftsmen, since company policy dictated that artists remain anonymous so the product would be associated only with Liberty. Its entrepreneurial success enabled the company to reach a far larger audience than a workshop like Ashbee's, and mass, or at least serial, production enabled the consumer to purchase goods at more affordable prices.

Judging solely by appearance it is often difficult to distinguish between a workshop arts and crafts piece of furniture and a piece sold by Liberty, since they could very well share not only the same design vocabulary but also incorporate a great deal of handwork. The armchair shown in Plate VII was marketed by Liberty as an adaptation of a traditional chair from the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The Liberty sideboard in Plate XIII was described in the Studio as "of oak, with specially designed wrought copper hinges and handles... leaded glass cupboards [and] a copper sconce, hammered, with a medieval ship in the center."(17) The sideboard provided the quintessential opportunity for arts and crafts rhetoric, down to the carved motto on the frieze by Ben Jonson, the Elizabethan poet.

The furniture company of Ambrose Heal exemplified an honorable compromise between the craft ideal and factory production. In 1899 Heal and Son marketed the chest of drawers shown in Plate X, which closely resembles one for a workingman's cottage designed by Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) some forty years earlier, when Brown worked with Morris. According to an appreciative article written a year before Heal introduced this chest, Brown designed the chest for his own bedroom. Then, because "the furniture that he designed for himself was all so simple that it would not have been out of place in a workingman's dwelling," he displayed it as such at the 1887 Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester.(18) Browns furniture remained on the market for decades, but it was Heal's version that took it beyond limited production and display to wider accessibility at arts and crafts shows. Straightforward construction, the lack of ornamentation, and the use of an inexpensive wood that was then painted made it suitable for mass production.