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The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid 19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used.

The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner has said that exhibits in the Great Exhibition showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface" and "vulgarity in detail".[9] Design reform began with the organisers of the Exhibition itself, Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),[10] who deprecated excessive ornament and impractical and badly made things.[11] The organisers were "unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits."[12] Owen Jones, for example, complained that "the architect, the upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter" produce "in art novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence."[12] From these criticisms of the contemporary state of manufactured goods emerged several publications which set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analysed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for "more logic in the application of decoration."[11] Other works followed in a similar vein: Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), Gottfried Semper's Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ("Science, Industry and Art") (1852), Ralph Wornum's Analysis of Ornament (1856), Redgrave's Manual of Design (1876) and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856).[11] The Grammar of Ornament was particularly influential, liberally distributed as a student prize and running into nine reprints by 1910.[11]

Jones declared that "Ornament ... must be secondary to the thing decorated", that there must be "fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented", and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain".[13] Where a fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, these writers advocated flat and simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that "style" demanded sound construction before ornamentation, and a proper awareness of the quality of materials used. "Utility must have precedence over ornamentation."[14]

The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in 1892 in his Golden Type inspired by the 15th century printer Nicolas Jenson. This chapter from The Stones of Venice was a sort of manifesto for the Arts and Crafts movement. However, the design reformers of the mid 19th century did not go as far as the designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement: they were more concerned with ornamentation than construction, they had an incomplete understanding of methods of manufacture,[14] and they did not criticise industrial methods as such. By contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.

== The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid 19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner has said that exhibits in ==