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Of all the design movements that ever crossed a British threshold, none has worn better than Arts and Crafts. Born in the second half of the nineteenth century as a revolt against the machine, it filled homes with honest oak, hammered silver, hand-blocked textiles and lustrous pottery, and those same objects now anchor one of the most dependable collecting fields we handle. This guide covers where the movement came from, who made its finest things, and what they are worth at auction.
The movement began as an argument. John Ruskin, the most influential critic of the Victorian age, held that industrial production degraded both the object and the person who made it. William Morris turned that conviction into a way of working: honest materials, visible construction, ornament rooted in nature, and dignity for the maker. From the 1860s onwards, through his firm and his lectures, Morris made the handmade a cause, and by the 1880s, when the movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, workshops and guilds inspired by his example were spreading across Britain.
Arts and Crafts objects announce themselves quietly. Look for solid native timbers, above all oak, with exposed joints and pegs worn as a badge of honesty; hand-raised copper and silver with the hammer marks left showing; pattern drawn from English hedgerow and garden rather than French ornament; and a general preference for sturdiness over show. The movement's rule was Morris's own: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
The movement has a birthplace: Red House at Bexleyheath, built for Morris by the architect Philip Webb in 1859. Plain red brick, honest and unpretentious, it was furnished and decorated by Morris and his friends because nothing they could buy was good enough, and out of that frustration came Morris's firm, later Morris & Co., whose wallpapers, textiles and furniture defined the look of the enlightened English interior for two generations.
Designer, poet, printer, weaver, dyer and campaigner, Morris remains the movement's presiding spirit. His flat-pattern designs, Strawberry Thief, Willow Bough, Acanthus among them, have never been out of production, and his Kelmscott Press books stand at the summit of English printing. His conviction that beautiful things should be honestly made runs through everything the movement produced, and through much of how we think about design still.
The movement's strength was its breadth. C.R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft took silversmithing from the East End to the Cotswolds and made some of the era's most elegant metalwork. Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers, the Cotswold School, raised plain English furniture to something close to sculpture. William De Morgan's lustre pottery and tiles brought Persian colour to English walls. Liberty & Co. carried the style to the high street through its Cymric silver and Tudric pewter, much of it designed by Archibald Knox, and in silver the tradition ran on into the twentieth century through makers such as Omar Ramsden. In Scotland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh took the movement's principles somewhere entirely his own.
Mackintosh fused Arts and Crafts honesty with a geometry all his own, in the Glasgow School of Art, the Hill House at Helensburgh and the Willow Tea Rooms, and in furniture whose ladder backs and lattices are recognised at a glance. His work forms the bridge between this movement and continental Art Nouveau, and original pieces are now of museum rarity.
The movement's ideas travelled far beyond Britain, to Gustav Stickley's Craftsman furniture in America and onwards into twentieth-century design teaching everywhere. At home, its principles passed to a later generation of craftsmen, Robert 'Mouseman' Thompson's Yorkshire oak workshop carried them deep into the twentieth century, and its sensibility flows into both the Art Nouveau that followed abroad and the taste of the Pre-Raphaelite circle that fed it at the start.
Demand for good Arts and Crafts pieces has stayed remarkably steady while much brown furniture has struggled, because the movement offers exactly what today's buyers want: craftsmanship, honesty and a story. Cotswold School furniture and anything with a firm attribution to a named designer command the strongest prices. Liberty Cymric silver and Tudric pewter, especially to Knox's designs, sell well in every sale. De Morgan tiles and lustre wares, Ruskin pottery, Guild of Handicraft silver and good hammered copper all have devoted followings. As ever, the cautions are attribution and condition: much anonymous oak of the period survives, and the difference between 'in the manner of' and a documented maker is measured in multiples.
Pieces from this movement sit quietly in Surrey and London houses everywhere, a Liberty clock on a mantelpiece, an oak sideboard in a hallway, a drawer of hammered silver spoons. Our furniture, silver and decorative arts specialists offer a free valuation from photographs or at home, and can identify a maker from a mark, a joint or a pattern.
