Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, Chair, 1882

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In 1882 Mackmurdo, who had traveled in Italy with John Ruskin and worked with William Morris, formed the Century Guild. Bringing together craftsmen in different media, the guild hoped, it said, to "restore building, decoration, glass-painting, pottery, wood-carving and metal to their rightful places beside painting and sculpture."

This chair is one Mackmurdo designed for the guild's dining hall. The back splat translates into three dimensions the kind of asymmetrical linear pattern Mackmurdo had already used on the title page illustration for Wren's City Churches, published in 1893.

The rhythm and movement of these plant tendrils--they have been compared to seaweed tossed by opposing currents--are among of the earliest expressions of what would become the essentials of art nouveau design. They were quite different from anything being produced elsewhere at that time. Mackmurdo's works, shown in exhibitions in several European cities, were one of the major conduits by which arts and crafts style made its way to the continent.

Learning Activities

Art

• Discuss symmetrical versus asymmetrical design.

• Discuss the role of arts and crafts in evolution of art nouveau.

• Research Morris and Co., and find more examples of arts and crafts designs for wallpaper or fabric.

Social Science

• Discuss different effects of industrialization.

• Research Ruskin and Morris to learn more about the aims of art reformers in nineteenth-century England.

• Compare the renewal of interest in handcraft at the end of the twentieth century.

Design Reform Mackmurdo's chair back and woodcut follow, consciously or not, design rules outlined in Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament, first published in 1856. An influence on the arts and crafts movement, Jones was an early advocate of design reform, hoping to offer a way out of reliance on historical styles by discovering universal principles of design. His Proposition XI, "a law derived from the study of the Orient," instructed: "In surface decoration all line should flow out of a parent stem. Every ornament, however distant, should be traced to its branch root." Proposition XIII: "Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate."

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