Mackmurdo: the Final Years

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.

But more and more I was conscious of an influence drawing me aside from architecture and planning of buildings to study problems connected with the Social Structure.

 - MACKMURDO

At the beginning of the new century Mackmurdo left London & settled in Essex where he had bought an estate. In 1904 he started building the large house of Great Ruffins, Wickham Bishops, symbolically surmounting it with a large tower to enable him to gaze at the stars. Great Ruffins was everything that Mackmurdo had dreamt of. It had seven bathrooms & as many changes of floor-level between what, from the outside, are the ground & first floors. Every room is approached either up or down several steps. The lantern overlooks the estuary of the Blackwater for miles.

Mackmurdo: Letter of 10 November 1883

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.

Proposed Local Art Exhibition in Enfield.

To the Editor of "Meyer's Observer."

SIR, - There are few forces more powerful in kindling the highest social sympathies, no agencies better able to excite the best ambition - that one's own people may excel - than those that are generated in the home soil, those that emanate from, and are maintained by, local feeling. And if to those interests that men enjoy - the best cherishing best - these interests that touch the life of those living and working around our own houses, there are added those sentiments that centre round and vitalize each art, we get indeed a force that should be so strong in its appeal as it is wide in its range of activity. An exhibition of local art of the kind I propose to hold at Enfield, by such help as I get from those interested in its formation, is an agency that cannot but widely awaken these interests and sympathies, and on this account will doubtless receive that hearty support which in parishes and towns less large than Enfield has been given to exhibitions of especial local interest. Within the last year I have been pleased to find that there is a great deal of work done in Enfield of an artistic character, unknown to even those who are close neighbours of the artists and artisans. The work goes

Mackmurdo: the Enfield Art Exhibition 1884

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.

To interest people in the art of their own neighbourhood as the starting point of a wider interest in art, I organised an Art and Crafts Exhibition at Enfield, in 1883 [sic], one year before the formation of the Art Workers' Guild. I chose Enfield because I was living there, and had workshops there. I hoped that by showing what work was being done here, it might stimulate local effort and encourage some at least among residents to make beautiful things for their own homes. In this exhibition each exhibit had to be either the design or the work of a person resident within the parish, and the names of designer and executant were to be bracketed as authors of the exhibit.

MACKMURDO. Autobiographical notes (William Morris Gallery)

Mackmurdo & the influence of William Blake

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, and now urgently need revision. I place them in this blog for their connection to the reception of William Blake.

The search for the origins of Art Nouveau leads back to the late eighteenth century, to the visionary painter-poet William Blake (1757-1827), who anticipated many of its dominant motifs. The swirling S-patterns of many of Blake's compositions, as well as the manner in which text is juxtaposed with illustration in the Illuminated Books, foreshadow much that was to become characteristic of Art Nouveau design and book illustration.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the first to rediscover Blake's genius. From the first, Rossetti felt Blake's art confirmed his own convictions. Blake's violent rejection of Baroque painting and his fierce attacks on Rubens, Rembrandt, and Reynolds were "balsam to Rossetti's soul, and grist to his mill". Blake's sketches may have helped Rossetti form his own conception of a style entirely opposed to Baroque, his forms developing upon a flat surface, their outlines firmly indicted. Just as a strong influence of Blake's poetry is to be felt in Rossetti's The Blesséd Damozel 1847, so do his early paintings reveal analogies to Blake's style and subjects. Blake's way of disposing the profile and the axis of an inclined head horizontally became typical of Rossetti's art too. This bend of the head in a strange and almost gliding movement was then considered essentially Pre-Raphaelite until it was adopted by Art Nouveau artists in continental Europe.

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.

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo

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.

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, English architect, designer, & socio-economic theorist was an extraordinarily complex man whose life spans over ninety years.

He was born at Hyde Side, Edmonton on 12 December 1851, the son of Edward Mackmurdo & his wife Anne (formerly Jones). His father, who was an independent-thinking Scot, owned & ran a company manufacturing & supplying chemicals.

He was educated at Felsted School in Essex & in 1869 was apprenticed to the architect T. Chatfield Clark. He left Clark in 1873 to work under the Gothicist James Brooks as an Improver. In 1876 or thereabouts Mackmurdo set up in practice as an architect at 28 Southampton Street, London.

A.H. Mackmurdo: Prelude to Art Nouveau

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.

During the 1850s a number of artists were exploring the possibilities of new expressive means in the graphic arts. Combining both the symbolism of the Pre-Raphaelites & a wish to reform design, the first designer who could be said to have converted his sense of style to the new objectives of symbolic patterning, curvilinear motif & structural simplicity was Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo.

Mackmurdo's work embraced many aspects of design: furniture, textiles & the graphic arts. It anticipated many of the characteristics of continental art nouveau. In his furniture, Mackmurdo relied on the well-proportioned shape of the Renaissance, & used light-coloured mahoganies & a new sense of structure borrowed from the East. Mackmurdo's importance cannot be underestimated, since by 1886 his work was hailed at the Liverpool exhibition, which many foreigners visited, as the most advanced & unusual in Europe.