Author Description

Arts and Crafts artist-designers changed the lives of the Scots. Through the furnishing of public buildings, exhibitions, church craft and home design, they aimed to restore beauty to everyday experience. They worked in such diverse fields as furniture, textiles, jewellery and metalwork, glass, ceramics, mural decoration and architectural design and crafts. Theirs is a narrative of close networks of families and friends, men and women, designers and industrialists dedicated to the rights of the individual and to the proper place of art within modern society. It is a remarkable and often inspiring story of ideals, commitment - and imagination. "Scottish Arts and Crafts" brought together British design practice with the romance of tradition. This book for the first time provides a national context for the work of Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer and Phoebe Anna Traquair. Various chapters look at public art, concepts of tradition, the rise of independent professional women designers, domestic and church buildings, the role of craft within communities, and how Arts and Crafts was finally transformed in the age of Modernism. Many new names emerge from the shadows - people such as the entrepreneurial Ayrshire and Carlisle manufacturer James Morton, Robert Maclaurin, Glasgow industrial chemist and co-founder of a Socialist housing colony in Stirling, James Morris, Ayr architect, writer and conservationist, and D. Y. Cameron, known as a landscape artist but also a designer and promoter of church craft. "The legacy of Arts and Crafts" is still alive in values of craftsmanship and the conservation movement.