How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.
Look around your home. Is there a cushion, a mug or a curtain with a pattern you love, made by someone who cared? The Arts and Crafts movement would approve. In Victorian Britain, as factories filled shops with cheap ornament, a group of designers argued that beauty and honest work belong together. Their leader, William Morris, left us wallpapers we still buy, books we still treasure, and an idea we still argue about.
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Period | About 1860 to 1920 |
| Key media | Wallpaper, woven and printed textiles, embroidery, books, furniture, stained glass, metalwork |
| Key artists | William Morris, May Morris, Philip Webb, Edward Burne-Jones, C. R. Ashbee, Phoebe Anna Traquair |
| The big caution | Handmade goods were expensive, so the movement’s own customers were mostly wealthy |
| See them | London (the V&A, the William Morris Gallery), Kelmscott Manor, Glasgow, the Met |
Three layers
Historical What the works and writings show. Later tradition What later designers made of them. Modern How the ideas live in craft and witchcraft today.
Ruskin and the honest workman
Historical The critic John Ruskin argued in “The Nature of Gothic” (1853) that medieval builders had been free to carve with joy, while factory workers were reduced to machines. William Morris read it as a student at Oxford and never forgot it.
Morris and the firm
William Morris, Jasmine, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (23.163.4j). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).
Historical In 1859 and 1860 the architect Philip Webb built the Red House for Morris and his wife Jane, and friends decorated it together. In 1861 Morris and his partners founded a firm, later Morris and Co., that made stained glass, furniture, textiles and wallpaper. Jasmine, designed in 1872, winds its flowers over the wall like a garden in summer. In an 1880 lecture he gave the movement its motto: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris, Bird, designed 1878. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (23.163.15). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).
His woven Bird textile, designed in 1878, hung in his own drawing room. Morris taught himself dyeing with natural dyes like indigo and madder, often ending the day with blue hands.
Books and women’s work
Historical In 1891 Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, and in 1896 it printed the great Kelmscott Chaucer with woodcuts after Burne-Jones. His daughter May Morris ran the firm’s embroidery department from 1885, designed some of its best-known patterns and lectured on embroidery in Britain and America. In Edinburgh, Phoebe Anna Traquair painted murals and illuminated manuscripts. In Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art, built between 1897 and 1909, while Margaret Macdonald, his wife and partner, made gesso panels of dreamlike, elongated women. Their tall, straight-backed chairs and stylized roses sit halfway between Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau, and Vienna’s Secession artists invited them to exhibit in 1900.
Finland and the North
Historical In Finland, the Friends of Finnish Handicraft was founded in 1879 by the painter Fanny Churberg to preserve and renew textile traditions. Finnish rugs and woven wall hangings became part of a shared Nordic love of craft.
The esoteric angle
Historical Morris was a socialist, not an occultist. Yet the movement’s world shaped the most famous tarot deck. Pamela Colman Smith studied design at the Pratt Institute with Arthur Wesley Dow, who taught flat color and strong lines, and in 1903 she published her own small press magazine, The Green Sheaf. Her 1909 tarot, which this site shows in its original printing, has the bold outline and handmade feeling of that design culture. See Pamela Colman Smith.
Later tradition Morris’s dream of the Middle Ages and his translations of Icelandic sagas fed later fantasy, and through it much modern pagan imagery.
Modern The craft revival, hand-dyeing, embroidery and bookbinding, is part of many witches’ practice.
Try it yourself
Take one object in your home that you love. Ask Morris’s two questions: do I know it to be useful, do I believe it to be beautiful? Then ask a third of your own: who made it, and how?
Before and after
Before this: Art Nouveau.
After this: Fauvism.
See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.
Questions
What did the Arts and Crafts movement believe?
That handmade, honest design could make life better, for the worker who made a thing and for the person who used it. It rejected cheap machine-made goods and the split between fine art and craft.
Where does the name come from?
From the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in London in 1887, which held its first exhibition in 1888. The bookbinder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson suggested the name.
Get the free Mini-Grimoire
A short printable starter guide to tarot and everyday witchcraft, plus my newsletter. Unsubscribe any time.
Opens Substack in a new tab to confirm. More about the newsletter · Privacy