Craftsman

The American Craftsman Style, or the American Arts and Crafts Movement, is an American domestic architectural, interior design, and decorative arts style popular from the last years of the 19th century through the early years of the 20th century. more...

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As a design movement, its popularity remained strong until the 1930s, although in the decorative arts it continues to experience numerous revivals until the present day.

British origins

The American Craftsman style has its origins in the earlier British Arts and Crafts movement which dates back to the 1860s. The British movement, which spawned a wide variety of related but conceptually very distinct design movements throughout Europe, was a reaction to the degradation of the dignity of human labor resulting from the Industrial Revolution. In many ways it was a reaction against the over-decorated aesthetic and disregard for the worker of the Victorian era. Seeking to ennoble the craftsman once again, the movement emphasized the hand-made over the mass-produced. While the British movement still contained some of the over-done decoration of its Victorian precursor, it was almost anti-Victorian in philosophy; the movement's founder, William Morris, was a staunch socialist and as such the philosophy behind the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK is clearly part of the materialist dialectic. However, the expensive materials and expensive hand-made techniques meant that the movement was in fact serving the wealthiest clients, a seeming contradiction to its roots in socialist philosophy.

American developments

While the British movement was a Victorian-era phenomenon, its translation to the American setting took place precisely at the moment when that era was coming to a close. It can be said that the American movement that also emphasized craftsmanship was also a design reform movement that encouraged originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of handicraft, and was concerned with ennobling the more modest home of the rapidly expanding American middle class.

Interior design developments

Boston exhibitions

In the late 1890s, a group of Boston’s most influential architects, designers, and educators, determined to bring to America the design reforms begun in England by William Morris, met to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects. The first meeting was held on January 4, 1897, at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) to organize an exhibition of contemporary crafts. When craftsmen, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts, the process of design reform in Boston started. Present at this meeting were General Charles Loring, Chairman of the Trustees of the MFA; William Sturgis Bigelow and Denman Ross, collectors, writers and MFA trustees; Ross Turner, painter; Sylvester Baxter, art critic for the Boston Transcript; Howard Baker, A.W. Longfellow Jr.; and Ralph Clipson Sturgis, architect.

Read more at Wikipedia.org