The Arts and Crafts Movement

In the 1890s Edinburgh became an artistic centre where ideals of integration and accessibility were important. British designer William Morris considered mural decoration to be the most democratic form of painting, with a power to transform the lives of all classes of society. In Edinburgh in October 1889 he addressed an Arts and Crafts congress by saying that painting and sculpture were ‘of little use … except where the works are part of the architecture’. The Catholic Apostolic Church was at the heart of a local school of mural painting that realised Morris’s democratic ideals.

The Edinburgh Social Union implemented the decoration of mission halls, orphanages and hospitals. Scottish botanist and sociologist Patrick Geddes, its founder, rejected the concept of art that simply flapped ‘idly on rich men’s walls’. During the 1890s, he independently spearheaded a programme of building restoration in the Lawnmarket where new building including apartments and a student hall of residence at Ramsay Garden. These were decorated by artists Charles Mackie, Mary Rose Hill Burton, Helen Hay and John Duncan, who also directed The Old Edinburgh School of Art, with classes in art and the crafts. A more ‘official’ School of Applied Art was directed at the Royal Institution by Robert Rowand Anderson, architect of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Anderson taught equality across architecture, art and design and stressed the importance of the crafts and national identity. His influence here was to lead directly to the opening of the Edinburgh College of Art in 1908.

After 1900 Arts and Crafts designers and theorists were generally less involved with social issues. Craft design was dominated by the Scottish revivalist architect Robert Lorimer who employed a number of independent craftspeople, including Phoebe Anna Traquair, to work with him. For Lorimer, who commissioned her jewellery, Phoebe Anna Traquair fashioned the first enamelled stall plates at the Thistle Chapel (St Giles Cathedral) and decorated a grand piano (Royal Museum, Edinburgh) both in 1909-11, and painted three First World War memorials for Glasgow churches.

More information about the Arts and Crafts movement is available at Wikipedia.