The Century Guild Hobby Horse

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.

In April 1884 the first issue of the Century Guild Hobby Horse was published: an elaborately designed & finely printed magazine. It was to run till 1892, changing to a larger format in 1886. In its freshness of approach to typography, its use of original illustrative material, & in the combination of stories, drawings by new artists, advanced poetry, & essays on music & other cultural aspects catching the fancy of the editors, it was the first of a succession of artistic & literary magazines which were to be the most striking manifestation of the English decadent school in the 1890s.

Mackmurdo found in the Chiswick Press a printing press of unusually high standard, in Emery Walker a man to whom the reproduction of drawings & other works of graphic art could be safely entrusted, & the ideal book-decorators in Selwyn Image & Herbert Horne. By printing the Hobby Horse on hand-made paper, by carefully choosing a good traditional type, & by conscientiously setting & spacing the type, a production was achieved far above anything available at the time. The cover used a design by Selwyn Image in which the wealth of ornithological & animal motifs set the style for much later English Art Nouveau design. From 1886 onwards Mackmurdo & his colleagues published articles by contributors including Ruskin, Burne-Jones, William & Christina Rossetti & Oscar Wilde.

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.