John Ruskin and Williams Morris were the main proponents of Arts and Crafts. Ruskin was primarily concerned with the social and theoretical aspects of Arts and Crafts and was not an artist or designer and an idealised view of the life of medieval craftsmen. Morris was a designer, a poet and an architect who also commissioned others to design work.
Ruskin and Morris focused on the plight of the lives of those working in the factories in the "dark Satanic mills" (Eskilson, 2012) . They wanted to improve the quality and artistic merit of utilitarian objects, and by also focusing on the social aspect of the craftspeople, they could improve the lives of their countrymen in both ways. Williams Morris said "have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
It was a rebellion against the dawning of the industrial age in Britain, where commercialism was at the fore. Morris saw that workers were being exploited to produce cheap mass produced goods, and wanted to his idealised version of the past. This was the naive idea of someone who considered that factory workers had a much better life in rural communities before industrialisation, and he came from a wealthy family himself (Eskilsson, 2012). Morris wanted to produced functional objects that were pleasing to use. However, with handcrafted items, there was an increased cost associated with them, which meant the products were out of the reach of the people Morris wanted them to be for. This was something that troubled Morris but there was little he could do about it. The people who bought his products did not understand that wanting to return to a simpler time, when workers lived in the green and pleasant land, was actually a very idealised view of the working classes. Those who bought these products had little insight in the lives of workers, and whether what would make their lives better or worse, as they were so far removed from the manufacturing classes. In fact there lives had always been hard before and after the industrial revolution.
It was primarily a British movement, but had a global impact, spreading to the US and becoming popular from 1890-1916. The American constitution and politics meant that they didn't have the same scruples about poor working conditions as the (slightly) more socialist Britain.
Arts and Crafts was strongly influenced by Mediaeval and Gothic design. Its imagery was plant based, and of stylised florals, and mostly in muted colours. The block repeats were organic and integrated, compared the more gappy ones from their competitors, who also used the newly invented chemical dyes. They only produced function items, and not art or paintings for display. It was a design movement, not art. Examples of their products included stained glass, furniture, wallpaper, and architecture. He owned Kelmscott Press, making books and designing type.
The Arts and Crafts exhibition of 1888 cited itself as being "for the homes of simple and gentle folk". The Art Workers Guild wanted to raise the standards of decorative arts and the craftsmen, and they wanted to work with the commercial word. The products were designed and made in cities, for city dwellers.
In 1993, Morris was critisized as being "the work of a few, for the few", which was something that Morris was never able to overcome.
This movement has much in common with today - a desire to look back to traditional methods of the past, when the world around us is changing at an exponential rate. We now see the rise of websites such as Etsy, Folksy, Not on the High Street, etc, who champion the handmade and the individual, just like Ruskin and Morris. Sections of modern day British society put high values on unique handcrafted items and are willing to pay for them, and the availability of such products is huge. There has been a huge backlash from the public against companies who have been found to exploit there workers, and there in an increase in wanting to understand the provenance of the products we consume - whether they are food, clothing, electronics, or any other products. The the idea of social utility of good design is also relevant to graphic design today.
Eskilson, S (2012) Graphic Design A History.
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