The British Arts and Crafts Movement

The generally negative view of the artistic creations of the Victorian Age presented in many studies of modern architecture has not always been shared by critics, especially those writing closer to the time. For instance, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the architect Robert Kerr saw the Victorian Age as the start of the great “popularising of art,” whereby artistic design for the first time became a middle-class pursuit. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, Kerr argued, the formerly pedantic “Fine Art of Architecture” stepped down from its pedestal in order to merge with the “Minor Arts” and become the new “Industrial Art of Architecture.” The arts and crafts, once deemed ornamental and inferior, were thus embraced by architecture as “no longer of unequal dignity with herself, but of altogether equal and similar comeliness of grace.”

Kerr's assessment makes a very salient historical point. The Great Exhibition of 1851 did indeed represent a turning point in European theory, in the sense that critics of the event were nearly universal in their realization that the artistic principles recognized over centuries had become estranged in their adaptation to the industrial practices of fabrication.