The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.
Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to create unusual forms and larger open spaces. It was popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Époque period, and was a reaction against the academicism, eclecticism and historicism of 19th century architecture and decorative art.
Samuel Siegfried Bing, who usually gave his name as S. Bing, was a German-French art dealer who lived in Paris as an adult, and who helped introduce Japanese art and artworks to the West and was a factor in the development of the Art Nouveau style during the late nineteenth century.
Charles Locke Eastlake was a British architect and furniture designer.
Henry Clemens van de Velde was a Belgian painter, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. Together with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he is considered one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium. He worked in Paris with Siegfried Bing, the founder of the first gallery of Art Nouveau in Paris. Van de Velde spent the most important part of his career in Germany and became a major figure in the German Jugendstil. He had a decisive influence on German architecture and design at the beginning of the 20th century.
Gustav Stickley was an American furniture manufacturer, design leader, publisher, and a leading voice in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Stickley's design philosophy was a major influence on American Craftsman architecture.
Selwyn Image was a British artist, designer, writer and poet associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. He designed stained glass windows, furniture and embroidery, and illustrated books. He was the seventh Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford from 1910 to 1916.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a Arts and Crafts style and he made important contribution to the Modern Style, and was recognized by the seminal The Studio magazine. He is renowned as the architect of several country houses.
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo was a progressive English architect and designer, who influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement, notably through the Century Guild of Artists, which he set up in partnership with Herbert Horne in 1882. He was the pioneer of the Modern Style and in turn global Art Nouveau movement.
William Richard Lethaby was an English architect and architectural historian whose ideas were highly influential on the late Arts and Crafts and early Modern movements in architecture, and in the fields of conservation and art education.
Ernest William Gimson was an English furniture designer and architect. Gimson was described by the art critic Nikolaus Pevsner as "the greatest of the English architect-designers". Today his reputation is securely established as one of the most influential designers of the English Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Anglo-Japanese style developed in the United Kingdom through the Victorian era and early Edwardian era from approximately 1851 to the 1910s, when a new appreciation for Japanese design and culture influenced how designers and craftspeople made British art, especially the decorative arts and architecture of England, covering a vast array of art objects including ceramics, furniture and interior design. Important centres for design included London and Glasgow.
The Modern Style is a style of architecture, art, and design that first emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1880s. It was the first Art Nouveau style worldwide, and it represents the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement which was native to Great Britain. The Modern Style provided the base and intellectual background for the Art Nouveau movement and was adapted by other countries, giving birth to local variants such as Jugendstil and the Vienna Secession. It was cultivated and disseminated through the Liberty department store and The Studio magazine.
John Henry Dearle was a British textile and stained-glass designer trained by the artist and craftsman William Morris who was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dearle designed many of the later wallpapers and textiles released by Morris & Co., and contributed background and foliage patterns to tapestry designs featuring figures by Edward Burne-Jones and others. Beginning in his teens as a shop assistant and then design apprentice, Dearle rose to become Morris & Co.'s chief designer by 1890, creating designs for tapestries, embroidery, wallpapers, woven and printed textiles, stained glass, and carpets. Following Morris's death in 1896, Dearle was appointed Art Director of the firm, and became its principal stained glass designer on the death of Burne-Jones in 1898.
École de Nancy, or the Nancy School, was a group of Art Nouveau artisans and designers working in Nancy, France between 1890 and 1914. Major figures included the furniture designer Louis Majorelle, ebonist and glass artist Jacques Grüber, the glass and furniture designer Émile Gallé, and the crystal manufactory of Daum. Their work was largely inspired by floral and vegetal forms found in the region. The goal of the group was to produce in series ordinary objects, such as furniture, glassware, and pottery, with fine craftsmanship and in original forms, making art objects available for people's homes.
The Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, was an Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass. It was active from 1980 to 1987. The group designed postmodern furniture, lighting, fabrics, carpets, ceramics, glass and metal objects.
The British literary figure and designer William Morris (1834-1896), a founder of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, was especially known for his wallpaper designs. These were created for the firm he founded with his partners in 1861, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, and later for Morris and Company. He created fifty different block-printed wallpapers, all with intricate, stylised patterns based on nature, particularly upon the native flowers and plants of Britain. His wallpapers and textile designs had a major effect on British interior designs, and then upon the subsequent Art Nouveau movement in Europe and the United States.
William Morris (1834-1898), a founder of the British Arts and Crafts movement, sought to restore the prestige and methods of hand-made crafts, including textiles, in opposition to the 19th century tendency toward factory-produced textiles. With this goal in mind, he created his own workshop and designed dozens of patterns for hand-produced woven and printed cloth, upholstery, and other textiles.
The Guild and School of Handicraft was established in 1888 in London, later moving to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, England, as a community of artists and craftspeople by the arts and crafts architect Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942). According to Historic England it "became one of the foremost Arts and Crafts workshops of its period .. formed the focus of the communal life which, as a pioneering social experiment, formed the most bold and important expression of Arts and Crafts principles".
