“….the world of artists and architecture was dominated by the utterances of a single intellectual giant, John Ruskin. No figure before or since has occupied such an all-commanding position, on in which he was actually able to determine the direction in which the visual arts of the Victorian age should go….Ruskin was the greatest critic in the English language. His powers as a rhetorician told the emergent nation what to look at and how to look at it. In his case the response to the attacks of science and history on traditional Christianity and institutional religion was romantic. Ruskin cast nature as the reflection of divine truth, asking people to look at the earth and the skies as manifestation of God.”
“In Britain, unlike the rest of Europe, the Industrial Revolution had been carried through with the active participation of the aristocracy. This meant the existing structure of society remained in place, indeed, via the public school system, it was able to filter its values to the newly emergent classed. The result was that the up and coming generations began increasingly to look down on industry, trade, science and the world of business, opting rather for an aristocratic-gentry life-style, with the attributes of country house, garden and park, the cultivation of style, the pursuit of leisure and political service rather than overt sordid money-making and entrepreneurship.
That distaste for industry and the city had found its initial aesthetic voice in Ruskin, and accounts for the fact that a quintessentially urban age produced so little art mirroring the fact. What Ruskin could not have foreseen was that his hatred for what industrialism had done would be taken over and attached to a growing social and political force, the working class. In this the designer, poet, and writer William Morris was to a be the pivotal figure, moving to a viewpoint which cast the middle classes as ‘irredeemable’ and that ‘the cause of Art is the cause of the people’. Art and political ideology were for the fist time yoked with consequences which have reverberated through to the present. Morris’ achievements with the arts and crafts were to range over book design, weaving, furniture, stained glass, gardens, architecture and painting. What set his contribution apart was his linking of it the cause of socialism. In 1883, having studied the writings of Karl Marx, Morris joined the Socialist Democratic Federation, leaving it a year later to set up the Socialist League. Morris was a political radical attacking the existing industrial and commercial system, arguing that factory production was not only ruining the environment but debasing men and their products. The irony was that his solution lay not in reforming that system but putting the clock back, creating what was in effect an elitist cottage craft movement whose inspiration lay in the countryside and the vernacular artifacts of its past. This turning against the city and industry therefore permeated both the top and bottom of the social and political spectrum. “
“…..Virtually throughout the arts there was a yearning for the past. Not, one might add, a grand aristocratic past but, rather gentry and yeoman. Nowhere is this more evident than in architecture. Architects recreated the past as worked of pre-industrial simplicity, ‘quaint’ and ‘old fashioned’, whose point of reference was the small manor house, farmhouse or cottage of Tudor or early Stuart England. Houses were no longer built to look new but old, being irregular, discreet and tucked away into the folds of the landscape which they no longer sought to dominate.”
The Spirit of Britain (A Narrative History of the Arts) -- Roy Strong
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