What falls under arts and crafts today? Generally we mean anything made by hand as a hobby. The term Arts and Crafts Movement, though, was coined in the late nineteenth century and meant something rather more specific.
The guild background
Craftsmen made things and strove for excellence in the work. These activities were called crafts because many of them were professions under the guild system then in place. Children were apprenticed, learned a trade over years, and eventually practised it as masters.
Craft in that sense was not a hobby at all. It was how objects were made and how people earned a living.
What the movement was reacting to
The Arts and Crafts Movement emerged as industrial manufacturing took over. Factory production could make objects faster and more cheaply than any workshop, and the objects it made were – to the movement’s founders – badly designed and badly made.
The argument was not merely aesthetic. It was that dividing work into repetitive fragments took the satisfaction out of making things, and that this was bad for the people doing it as well as for the objects.
The response was to insist on the value of the whole craftsman: someone who designed and made the same object, understood the material, and took responsibility for the result.
What it produced
Furniture, textiles, wallpaper, metalwork, pottery, bookbinding and architecture, made to be honest about their materials and their construction. Visible joinery rather than hidden. Simple forms rather than applied ornament.
Its influence outlasted the movement itself and runs through a great deal of twentieth-century design.
How the meaning shifted
The phrase has drifted a long way. Today “arts and crafts” usually means hobby making – often the materials aisle in a shop, or an activity for children.
That is not a corruption exactly, but something has been lost. The original term meant work done to a professional standard by someone who understood it completely.
Where craft sits now
The interesting thing is that a good deal of contemporary craft has moved back toward the original meaning.
Independent designers who write their own patterns, dyers producing yarn in small batches, makers selling directly to the people who use what they make – that is much closer to the guild model than to the hobby shop.
The internet did most of it, by letting individual makers reach buyers without needing a manufacturer in between. The movement’s founders would recognise a good deal of it.
