The Century Guild

These notes were written over twenty years ago when I was endeavouring to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mackmurdo with a small exhibition at Forty Hall Museum, Enfield, & now urgently need revision. I place them in this blog for their, however remote, connection to the reception of William Blake.

Mackmurdo saw, just as Morris had seen before him, that it was impossible to buy well-designed & decently made objects through the ordinary channels. So he combined with a group of artists & craftsmen to produce what they regarded as good quality work & offer it to the public. The enterprise was started in 1882 & called the Century Guild - indeed significantly called a "Guild" in emulation of medieval forerunners. The Guild produced furniture, fabrics, metalwork & cloisonné enamels; & a magazine The Century Guild Hobby Horse was issued intermittently between 1884 & 1892.

The declared aim of the Century Guild was

... to render all branches of art the sphere no longer of the tradesman but of the artist. It would restore building, decoration, glass-painting, pottery, wood carving and metal to their right place beside painting and sculpture.

Mackmurdo's chief interest was always in detail, & he was particularly taken by the notion that all the contents, furnishings & décor of a building should be of a piece. The Century Guild was to be a society where craftsmen in all of the relevant skills could come together & work jointly. It sought to  place the applied arts or crafts on the same level as the "free" arts of painting or sculpture. In friendly competition with the Morris Company, the Century Guild pursued similar aims, though its forms owed much less to the Gothic Style.

In practice the Guild never had more than two or three members, but there were many associates & friends. Herbert Horne, Clement Heaton & Selwyn Image were among the founders; the potter William De Morgan, & the many-sided Heywood Sumner were also associated with the Guild. Mackmurdo's collaborators included Christopher Whall, the stained glass designer, whose mother had lived at Hyde Side in Edmonton; Benjamin Creswick the sculptor, who lived at Holly Place, Enfield; & Charles Winstanley, a very gifted worker in wrought-iron who maintained a forge at his home in Wellington Road. Clement Heaton specialised in cloisonné; Heywood Sumner in stencilled decoration; George Esling in copper, brass & pewter work.



Mackmurdo was thirty-one when he founded the Century Guild, & Selwyn Image, whose powers of design Mackmurdo deeply admired, was thirty-three. Other members of the Guild were younger; Herbert Horne was only eighteen & had joined Mackmurdo as a pupil after two yeas in a surveyor's office; Clement Heaton was twenty-one, & Benjamin Creswick the self-taught sculptor who as a boy had worked in a Sheffield knife factory, was also in his early twenties. The only "established" designers associated with the Guild at the outset were William De Morgan & Heywood Sumner. They all worked to their own as well as to Mackmurdo's designs.

Mackmurdo created many textile designs in the 1880s. They all have the same whirling, flame-like movement, based on floral motifs. Often the colours are brown, shading into violet at one extreme & pale beige at the other, heightened with accents of blue. Mackmurdo's designs, with their flaring leaves & petals, are almost expressionist in their harshness, vigour & movement. The colours too - yellow ochres, coral pinks, purples & acid greens - are new in English design.

Mackmurdo's designs depended on a complicated counter-charge system where the rhythm of a pattern, as it gathered strength & momentum in one direction, would suddenly switch course & move mysteriously in the other. Bold pattern plays against delicate, sharp against soft, strong against weak. Space shifts from foreground to background, & figuration cannot be placed in either, but rests, or rather moves, on the surface of what is decorated. Mackmurdo's brilliance as a designer of fabrics is shown by the manner in which he could take a plant prototype & abstract it beyond recognition, so that the flame-like, moving undulations were totally independent of the model from which they were originally borrowed. They remind one of much surface patterning in formal abstract art, which is on the surface of the picture plane & is not meant to relate to any recognisable form.

Less iconoclastic than his pattern-making, Mackmurdo's Century Guild furniture is severe in form, simple & carefully proportioned: 'classical' in its detailing. Most Century Guild furniture was manufactured by Collinson & Lock of London or Goodall's of Manchester. The style of the furniture designed for the Guild was derived from eighteenth-century architecture & furniture. In his furniture, Mackmurdo made a special feature of the wide cornice which had been used extensively in architecture by Wren & his followers, but he pared it down until it became a flat, horizontal element, which he often incorporated as the terminal to an upright. This device was widely used by designers of Arts and Crafts furniture over the next twenty-five years.

Mackmurdo & Herbert Horne both designed objects in copper & brass. Candlesticks, light fittings, plaques, dishes & fenders were made in brass by George Esling, a member of the Guild; Kellock Brown, another member, executed designs for wall-sconces & panels in copper. These objects were sometimes pierced for decoration, but were more often repoussé (hammered into relief), a technique which became popular during the 1880s.

Although the pioneering spirit of Morris was behind the activities of the Century Guild, & Morris's designs were admired, his social strictures were found irksome. Reservations on these lines appeared in the preface to the Century Guild's magazine, the Hobby Horse, which first appeared in 1884

As an art craftsman he is our master; but we hesitate to follow him in his endeavour to agitate for state intervention as a possible panacea of poverty; or to accept his belief in parliament as an apportioner of poverty. Poverty, injustice and crime are to us the natural result of class character, and class character like individual character acts automatically according to its bulk of higher human elements; which bulk cannot be increased artificially.

These are traditional Victorian sentiments but they did not prevent the work of the Century Guild from following the Morris pattern reasonably closely, for in addition to the products of their workshops, the members of the Century Guild made a determined effort to redefine cotemporary art & its function in society.

Museums with Century Guild collections

Hollytrees Museum, High Street, Colchester. Copper & brass items, woodwork, designs, water colours.
Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL. Furniture, textiles, wallpaper designs.
William Morris Gallery, Water House, Lloyd Park, Forest Road, Walthamstow, London E17 4PP. Furniture, textiles, Century Guild designs, books & manuscripts. Many pamphlets (especially from Mackmurdo's collection); Mackmurdo's typescript History of the Arts and Crafts Movement & "Autobiographical Notes". Material of & on Selwyn Image.