Hilary and Joanna Bourne lecture: The Arts and Crafts
Movements in
Tanya Harrod:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/ceramics/points_of_view/people/harrod/
http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/study/dr_tanya_harrod_652.html
The Hilary and Joanna Bourne lecture is held annually on the Sunday nearest to Hilary’s birthday, November 27, to celebrate the remarkable lives of the founders of the museum.
Introduced by Roger Broadbent, one of the trustees of the Ditchling Museum, and nephew of the weaver Hilary Bourne and her sister Joanna Bourne, who founded the museum in 1985, in whose honour the lecture is held annually, Tanya began by saying that she had had the privilege of meeting Hilary Bourne, interviewing her in 1999 for the British Library’s Crafts Lives project.
Her lecture, she said, would discuss the geographies of the Arts and Crafts movement, how places like Ditchling came to be so important, and the relationship at that time between English and Japanese craftsmen.
She began, as one must, at the beginning, that is to say with William Morris and Ruskin, and their belief that the distinction between handwork and brain work should be removed, and that gentlemen should master craft processes ‘… we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the working man ought to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working; and both should be gentlemen in the best sense’.
Morris’s work, his writing, his involvement with industry, his founding of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and his interest in European peasant art, in particular that of Iceland, dictated the concerns and outlook of the movement in its earliest stages. However in Britain agricultural production, highly proletarianised, had done away with the peasantry long ago, and the high degree of penetration of manufactured goods in rural houses was in contrast to continental Europe, where in Switzerland for example many communities still made everything they used, wore and lived in.
Ditchling was not the only artistic community: C R Ashbee brought his Guild of Handicrafts to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds; the Rev Gerald Davies, master at Charterhouse school, established one near the school, now exhibited in the Haslemere Collection of Peasant Art while, also in Surrey, Mary Watts designed the Watts chapel, a memorial to her painter husband G.F.Watts. Eglantyne Louisa Jebb founded the Home Arts and Industries Association with the aim of encouraging rural people to preserve traditional skills, while elsewhere in the Cotswolds at Sapperton Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers made furniture.
Gardens were important to craftswomen such as the embroiderer, Eve Simmonds, who lived at Far Oakridge from 1919 and the hand-block printers of textiles Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. The flowers in their garden at Painswick were an inspiration for their patters and for Larcher's exquisite paintings.
Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie pioneered modern British pottery, her interest in pottery beginning when she visited Roger Fry at his Omega Workshops. In 1924 she was taken on by Bernard Leach at his pottery in St. Ives. She remained at the Leach Pottery for a year and learnt alongside Michael Cardew, Shoji Hamada and Tsuronosuke Matsubayashi.
Ethel Mairet began her work with vegetable dyes at Ditchling, while the neo-primitives, influenced by Roger Fry, were emphasising truth to materials and authenticity
Eric Gill, the most famous of the Ditchling community, believed that the arts and crafts movement had failed politically. Others went to fascism. Rolf Gardiner, landowner at Springhead in Dorset, and father of the conductor john Eliot Gardiner, admired and tried to emulate German right-wing youth movements, while his neighbour George Pitt-Rivers went even further and found himself interned with Mosley and other fascists during the Second World War. H.J.Massingham influenced the ‘deep England’ movement and was member with Gardiner of the Kinship of Husbandry, though he was said to be unhappy with the pro-German tendencies of this group (which later became the Soil Association).
The Japanese influence on the arts and crafts movement was strong. While modernists were more interested in China, and Japanese art had previously only known in Britain as high-end, luxury items, under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement everyday articles, particularly those form the tea ceremony, became known and admired.
Shohji Hamada was important in promoting this mingei, folk art, and an interest in anonymous art was not entirely unknown in the European avant -garde for example the Blaue Reiter. Hamada visited Ditchling, meeting Ethel Mariet, Eric Gill and Edward Johnston, and exhibited in Britain, for example in 1929
Hilary Bourne made the fabrics for the Royal Festival Hall, though some of the curtains Tanya showed have not survived.
At this point, with the contribution of the movement to the post-war new Jerusalem, Tanya stopped.
Questions included ones about the absence of peasant art in England and the influence this had on the movement, about the blacksmith and rural industry, about Morris dancing, the present state of crafts in Japan and the implosion of the Crafts Council.
Further reading:
Bourne, Hilary
Spinning the thread
Ditchling: Lucy Bruno Press, 1999
I’ve discovered a wealth of material here at the University: here in the language learning centre we have a 1999 documentary the Ditchling Set, while the university library has all five episodes of a 2005 programme, a Very English Village
