Arts and Crafts – the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, and the renaissance of craftsmanship

The Arts and Crafts movement is the art movement that, more than any other, changed the way we view what art in an ordinary living space can be. When the movement emerged in Britain during the 1860s, its starting point was not the museum but the dining room, bedroom and stairwell: a painting, wallpaper, chair and textile were to have the same artistic quality and be made by people who could take pride in their work. Behind the idea were the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and the designer, poet and socialist William Morris (1834-1898), who together formulated a critique of industrial mass production that still shapes how we think about quality, craftsmanship and interior design.

The movement did not get its name until 1887, when the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was founded in London, and from there it spread to Scotland, Germany, the United States, Japan and the Nordic countries. In Sweden, these ideas met an already ongoing discussion about handicrafts and popular education, and found their clearest expression in Ellen Key's 1899 polemic Beauty for All and in Carl and Karin Larsson's home, Lilla Hyttnäs, in Sundborn. This page covers the movement's history, its most important works, techniques and characteristics, its Swedish branch, and how to use Arts and Crafts motifs as wall art today.

Contents
↓ What is the Arts and Crafts movement?
↓ The history: from Ruskin to Morris & Co
↓ The movement's most important works and pattern forms
↓ Techniques, materials and visual language
↓ Arts and Crafts in Sweden and the Nordic countries
↓ Legacy, influence and the movement's afterlife
↓ Arts and Crafts as wall art in the home
↓ Timeline
↓ Related art movements and artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about Arts and Crafts

What is the Arts and Crafts movement?

The Arts and Crafts movement was an international reform movement in art, craft and architecture that was active from around 1860 into the 1920s. At its core was the conviction that beauty and utility belong together, that the designer and craftsperson should ideally be the same person, and that the industrial division of labor both made objects ugly and degraded the people who made them. The movement was therefore as much a critique of society as an artistic style - Morris was an active socialist from 1883 and wrote the utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) about an England where work had regained its joy.

Unlike most art movements, Arts and Crafts had no dominant painting style. Instead, the emphasis was on textiles, wallpaper, furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, book arts and architecture. As a result, the movement's visual world most often reaches us today as patterns and ornaments: trailing acanthus leaves, bird motifs, pomegranates, willow leaves and winding vines in a flat, symmetrical and rhythmic visual language. This visual world works exceptionally well as wall art, which is why Morris's designs are among the world's best-selling art motifs more than 125 years after his death.

Quick facts: Active approximately 1860–1920. Emerged in Britain. The name was coined in 1887 by the bookbinder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson ahead of the founding of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which held its first exhibition at the New Gallery in London in 1888. Central figures: John Ruskin (1819–1900), William Morris (1834–1898), Philip Webb (1831–1915), C. R. Ashbee (1863–1942), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928). Key building: Red House in Bexleyheath, built 1859–1860. Key firm: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, founded in 1861 and reorganized as Morris & Co in 1875. Main collections: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.

The history: from Ruskin to Morris & Co

John Ruskin and the moral argument for Gothic

In intellectual history, the movement begins in a single chapter. In the second volume of The Stones of Venice (published 1851–1853), John Ruskin wrote the section “The Nature of Gothic,” in which he argued that the irregularities of the medieval cathedral were not flaws but traces of free craftspeople. In his view, the perfect surfaces of the modern factory had been bought at the cost of reducing the worker to a machine. The chapter became the movement's foundational text to such an extent that forty years later Morris reprinted it as a separate book through his Kelmscott Press in 1892 and, in the preface, called it one of the few indispensable chapters written during the century.

Red House and the company that became a movement

In 1859, the 25-year-old Morris commissioned the architect Philip Webb to design a home for him in Bexleyheath outside London. Red House, completed in 1860, was built of untreated red brick without a rendered facade and without the classical decorations that the period demanded. Since the Morrises could not buy furniture and textiles of sufficient quality, their friends had to make them: Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted, Webb designed furniture, and Jane Morris embroidered. This experience gave rise in 1861 to the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, which marketed itself as “fine art workmen” and took on commissions in painting, stained glass, woodwork, metalwork, and textiles. In 1875, Morris took over alone and the name became Morris & Co. Red House is now owned by the National Trust and is open to visitors.

1887–1888: the movement gets a name

During the 1880s, a network of guilds and societies emerged around Morris's circle: the Century Guild in 1882, the Art Workers' Guild in 1884, and C. R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft in 1888, which in 1902 moved its entire workshop from London's East End to the small town of Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. In 1887, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was founded with the explicit aim of allowing decorative arts to be exhibited on equal terms with painting and sculpture, with the craftspeople's names in the catalogue - something that was controversial because firms had until then tended to conceal who had actually carried out the work. The society's first exhibition opened in 1888 at the New Gallery in London, followed by exhibitions in 1889 and 1890 and thereafter approximately every three years. It was only then that the movement acquired the name we use today.

The movement's most important works and pattern forms

Strawberry Thief (1883)

The best-known individual design from the movement is Morris's textile pattern Strawberry Thief, registered in 1883. The design depicts song thrushes stealing strawberries, a scene Morris observed in the kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Technically, it was his most difficult work to date: he wanted to print using indigo discharge, a method in which the fabric is first dyed completely blue and the pattern is then discharged, and it took several months to achieve a result that would support red and yellow over the blue background. The fabric became one of the firm's greatest commercial successes despite its high price, and the original is now held in the collections of both the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The wallpaper patterns: Trellis, Daisy, Willow Bough and Pimpernel

Morris's first wallpaper, Trellis, was designed in 1862 with birds drawn by Philip Webb, and was followed by Daisy and Fruit. During the 1870s and 1880s came the designs now most widely found as wall art: Willow Bough (1887), with its tranquil covering of willow leaves, Pimpernel (1876), Acanthus (1875), and Golden Lily. Morris designed just over fifty wallpapers in total, and they were printed with hand-carved pearwood blocks at the firm Jeffrey & Co in Islington - a wallpaper could require more than thirty separate blocks for a single repeat. The designs remain in production through Morris & Co, which has been part of the Sanderson Design Group since the 2000s.

Kelmscott Press and the Kelmscott Chaucer (1891-1896)

In 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith to reclaim the book as an art form. He designed three typefaces of his own, had handmade paper produced after 15th-century Italian models, and ordered ink from Germany. The workshop's masterpiece is The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, completed in June 1896 after four years of work, with 87 woodcuts based on drawings by Edward Burne-Jones and borders and initials by Morris himself. The edition consisted of 425 copies on paper and 13 on vellum. The book is routinely considered one of the most beautiful printed books ever made, and copies command high sums at auction - one paper copy was sold by RR Auction for 68,750 dollars. Morris died four months after the book was completed.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris, lecture “The Beauty of Life,” Birmingham 1880

Technique, materials and style

Natural dyes and older methods

One of the movement’s most concrete contributions was the revival of vegetable dyeing. When Morris began working with textiles in the 1870s, aniline dyes, invented in 1856, had already taken over the industry, and he considered their shades harsh and their lightfastness poor. He therefore learned to use indigo, madder root, woad and yellowwood from the dyer Thomas Wardle in Staffordshire, and in 1881 moved the entire production operation to Merton Abbey by the River Wandle, where the soft water improved the dye baths. The result is the muted, earthy palette still recognized today: olive green, indigo blue, terracotta, mustard yellow and madder red. This is also why the designs are unusually easy to combine with modern interiors in clay, sand and green tones.

The repeat as a compositional principle

The grammar of Arts and Crafts patterns is based on the repeat, that is, the unit repeated horizontally and vertically. Morris generally worked with mirror symmetry around a vertical central axis and layered two or three plant systems at different depths: a strong stem that carries the composition, a middle layer of leaves, and a top layer of small flowers or birds. The pattern thus becomes deliberately flat – the movement rejected illusionistic depth in decorative art – but never monotonous, because the eye continually discovers new levels. This dense, calm rhythm is precisely why the designs work equally well in small and large formats on the wall.

Architecture and furniture: honesty in materials

In built form, the ideals were expressed as “truth to materials”: brick should look like brick, oak like oak, and the construction should be legible rather than concealed behind veneer and moldings. Philip Webb, Charles Voysey and later Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow developed an architecture with pitched roofs, deep window reveals, exposed beams and masonry hearths. Furniture followed the same logic with through tenons, wrought-iron hardware and unfinished surfaces. The style became extremely influential in the United States, where Gustav Stickley (1858–1942) published the magazine The Craftsman between 1901 and 1916 and launched the American Craftsman style, while the young Frank Lloyd Wright applied the same principles in Prairie School houses.

Arts and Crafts in Sweden and the Nordic countries

The Arts and Crafts Association, Friends of Handicraft, and the Röhsska Museum

Sweden had fertile ground for the British ideas. The Swedish Arts and Crafts Association, today Svensk Form, was founded as early as 1845 to improve the quality of domestic manufacturing, and in 1874 Sophie Adlersparre founded the association Friends of Handicraft with the dual aim of developing Swedish textile crafts and giving women an income of their own - a clear parallel to the British guilds. Konstfack, which traces its roots to 1844, became the institution where designers and craftspeople were educated under the same roof. In 1916, the Röhsska Museum opened in Gothenburg as Sweden's only museum entirely focused on design and decorative arts, with a collection that today comprises more than 50,000 objects.

Ellen Key, Carl Larsson, and the Swedish ideal of the home

The Swedish translation of the movement's ideas is called Beauty for All and was published in 1899 by Ellen Key (1849–1926). The pamphlet argued for light-colored walls, simple furniture, fewer but better objects, and art on the wall even in a working-class family's rooms - Morris's democratic ambition brought directly into the Swedish housing debate. The title page was designed by Carl Larsson, whose home, Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, Ellen Key highlighted as the model: a total work of art in which Karin Larsson's textiles, painted furniture, and curtains were as important as the watercolors. When Carl Larsson's album series A Home was published in 1899, the images spread throughout Europe and became, together with Morris's patterns, one of the most influential depictions of what a living room can be. Twenty years later, Gregor Paulsson reformulated the idea in the Swedish Arts and Crafts Association's publication More Beautiful Everyday Goods (1919), which laid the foundation for Swedish functionalism and thus for the entire modern Swedish design tradition.

Legacy, influence, and the movement's afterlife

From Art Nouveau to Bauhaus

Arts and Crafts became the starting point for almost everything that happened in design over the following fifty years. The Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, were explicitly based on Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft. The German Deutscher Werkbund was founded in 1907, and when Walter Gropius wrote the Bauhaus's first manifesto in 1919, he did so in terms that could have come straight from Morris's pen: the dividing wall between artist and craftsperson was to be demolished, and everyone was to unite around the building. The difference was crucial - Bauhaus accepted the machine that Morris had rejected - but the goal, to design an entire everyday life, was the same.

The movement today: museums and exhibitions

Interest in Morris has not waned. William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in northeast London, housed in the artist's childhood home, celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2025 with the exhibition Morris Mania (5 April–21 September 2025), which explored how the patterns have entered popular culture - from films such as My Fair Lady to British soap operas. In October 2025, Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textile Designs followed. Watts Gallery in Surrey is showing The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. from May 2026 to January 2027, with more than thirty original wallpapers from the firm's archive. The Victoria and Albert Museum has the movement's largest permanent collection, and for anyone who wants to delve deeper, the museum's introductory article is a good starting point: Arts and Crafts at the V&A. A general introduction in Swedish can be found in Wikipedia's article on Arts and Crafts.

Arts and Crafts as wall art in the home

Decorating with Arts and Crafts rarely means wallpapering the entire room. The most common and enduring solution today is to bring in the pattern as framed art on a calm wall, where it works as a defined area rather than enclosing the space. A single design in 50×70 or 70×100 centimeters above a sofa or chest of drawers gives the dense botanical rhythm enough room to be appreciated, while three smaller 30×40-centimeter designs in a row work well above a bed or along a hallway. Because the palette is muted and earthy, the designs coexist easily with wood, linen, rattan, and limewashed walls.

The frame choice makes more difference than you might think. Oak and walnut in a simple profile are closest to the movement's own furniture tradition and enhance the warmth of the colors, while a black frame sharpens the design and works better in a more austere interior. Avoid wide, gold-ornamented frames - they belong to precisely the 19th-century taste that Morris and Ruskin opposed. Our guide to choosing the right frame for the right poster goes through the combinations in detail, and for those who want to create a complete composition, we have our guide to creating a gallery wall.

Tips: Pattern-dense designs need breathing room. Hang a Morris-inspired print on a wall without competing decor and leave at least 15–20 centimeters of clear space around the frame. If you already have patterned textiles in the room - curtains, rugs, or cushions - choose a design in the same color family but with a clearly larger or smaller scale, so the two patterns do not fall into the same size range and start competing.

The choice of motif can also be guided by the room. Willow leaves, acanthus and green and blue tendrils are calm enough for bedrooms and studies, while pomegranates, birds and strawberries in warmer tones bring more life to dining areas and hallways. If you want to stay with botanical themes without limiting yourself to a single artist, you will find more options among our botanical posters and posters with floral motifs. For a deeper look at motif selection, see our guide to botanical posters, and anyone who wants to fully embrace a richly patterned style can read about the return of maximalism in 2026.

Timeline

1834 – William Morris is born in Walthamstow outside London on 24 March.
1851–1853 – John Ruskin publishes The Stones of Venice; the chapter “The Nature of Gothic” becomes the movement's foundational text.
1859–1860 – Philip Webb designs and builds Red House in Bexleyheath for William and Jane Morris.
1861 – Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co is founded in London.
1862 – Morris designs his first wallpaper, Trellis, featuring birds by Philip Webb.
1874 – Sophie Adlersparre founds Handarbetets Vänner in Stockholm.
1875 – The firm is reorganized and becomes Morris & Co under Morris's sole leadership.
1881 – Production moves to Merton Abbey on the River Wandle south of London.
1883 – Strawberry Thief is registered as a pattern.
1887–1888 – The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society is formed and holds its first exhibition at the New Gallery.
1891 – Kelmscott Press is founded in Hammersmith.
1896 – The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is completed in June; Morris dies on 3 October.
1899 – Ellen Key publishes Skönhet för alla, with a title page by Carl Larsson.
1901 – Gustav Stickley starts the magazine The Craftsman in the United States.
1916 – Röhsska Museum opens in Gothenburg.
1919 – Gregor Paulsson publishes Vackrare vardagsvara; Bauhaus is founded in Weimar.
2025 – William Morris Gallery celebrates 75 years with the exhibition Morris Mania.

Related art movements and artists

Arts and Crafts is closely connected with several other movements and artists that we cover on dedicated fact pages. Most closely associated are William Morris himself, the movement's central figure, and the Pre-Raphaelites, the British group of painters that Morris belonged to in his youth and whose members Burne-Jones and Rossetti worked at the firm. On the continent, the ideas were further developed in Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, and in Vienna in Gustav Klimt's Secession. You can find the Swedish branch on the fact pages about Carl Larsson and National Romanticism, and the movement's continuation in the twentieth century on the page about Bauhaus. William Morris's plant ornamentation is directly rooted in the tradition of botanical art, in which plants have been depicted with scientific accuracy since the sixteenth century. All our fact pages about artists and art movements are collected in the Knowledge Bank.

Frequently asked questions about Arts and Crafts

If you want to bring the movement's visual world onto your own wall, you can find our full selection of Morris designs in the collection paintings and posters by William Morris, and more works from art history among artworks by famous artists. Our guide to Morris patterns and interior design will help you further with choosing designs and placement.