Art & Craft Movement

Painted box with printed pattern from Germany

With the advance of industrialisation and urban living building and craft traditions were changing and disappearing throughout Britain. Traditional techniques and the use of local materials were central to the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement so architects and designers were particularly keen to record country crafts. As an architectural student Gimson watched traditional craftsmen at work. In Devon, for example, he spoke to a thatcher, drew his tools and noted the techniques of the craft. He also bought examples of traditional country pottery, leatherwork and turned chairs to use in his home. The garden designer, Gertrude Jekyll, also recorded the homes and possessions of country people. Old West Surrey, the first of two volumes of these records illustrated with her photographs, was published in 1904.

In Haslemere, Surrey, two couples, Joseph and Maude King and Maude's sister, Ethel, and her husband, Geoffrey Blount, set up the Haslemere Peasant Art Society in 1897. This group of craft workshops and weaving houses which became known as Halsemere Peasant Industries was their attempt to use traditional crafts to combat the growing materialism of society. They built up a collection of European craft items to provide inspiration working with the Rev. Gerald Stanley Davies, master of Charterhouse School, Godalming. It began very much as a collection of curiosities but also a way of preserving the material products of a simpler life. Their interest was reflected in a series of special features on peasant art produced by The Studio magazine in 1901. The same enthusiasm was reflected museums and exhibitions throughout Europe with traditional craft objects and room settings in the Paris expositions of 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900 and the establishment of ethnographic museums and open air museums. Peasant-inspired embroidery patterns and fancy dress were popular from the 1880s. It even had an impact on couture fashion through the work of designers such as the Frenchman, Paul Poiret.

Wooden cock, carved by Miss A B Ellis for Dryad