decorative art from 
 
 A WORKSHOP POINT OF 
 VIEW. A PAPER READ 
 AT THE EDINBURGH ART 
 CONGRESS, NOVEMBER, 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Getty Research Institute 
 
 https://archive.org/details/decorativeartfroOOashb 
 
DECORATIVE ART FROM 
 A WORKSHOP POINT OF 
 VIEW. 
 
 THE key to the study of most things nowadays is the social 
 question; hence if we want to study the art question in any 
 other than its immediate bearing on ourselves, we must approach 
 it from the same point of view. Every artist or craftsman works 
 out, consciously or not, some portion of what might be termed 
 the art problem in its social aspect, in painting, in architecture, 
 in handicraft alike. Is his line portraiture, the spirit forces 
 in the portraits of Watts will appeal to him. Does he affect 
 Burne Jones, he will see the nineteenth-century hero in the 
 head of Perseus : is it church architecture he is dealing with, 
 there will come home to him the sense of two conflicting forces, 
 living vulgarity and dying antiquarianism. If he be bitten with 
 Paris, there are the confessions of George More for a stumbling- 
 block. As for Naturalism it will bring with it its honest accept¬ 
 ance of modern ugliness. In Impressionism the great moments 
 of our civilisation may be flashed upon him. While the lower 
 forms of art will reveal a still closer bearing on social questions; 
 beauty-in-use will be brought before him, cheap-and-nasty will 
 be his bugbear; and transcending all questions of style or 
 school, the great question of the life of leisure will come upon 
 him with silent insistence. How much leisure have I, how has 
 it come to me, what justifiability is there for it in my case ; to 
 what purpose of communal service am I placing it ? 
 
 THIS Congress is in itself a recognition of the fact that the 
 social question is the key to the artistic. Its purpose is, as far 
 as I conceive it, to popularise, to organise, to socialise art. 
 
 THE object of this paper, starting with the recognition of the 
 social bearings of art, is to suggest the application to the art 
 problem, and to the question of art development, the ideals and 
 practicalities of an ordinary nineteenth-century workshop, in 
 the belief that a purer and healthier condition both of indus¬ 
 trial activity, and artistic sensitiveness can only be attained 
 by a combination of the two. 
 
2 
 
 TO start with the aphorism that art must be carried on in the 
 workshop and not in the studio, in the face of the fact that all 
 the great art work of the present day has been carried on in 
 the studio and not in the workshop, appears at first sight a 
 paradox; but it is easy of explanation. In the first place, we 
 are dealing with art as a whole, and not with picture-painting; 
 in the second place, we are dealing with decorative art, in which 
 the painting of a picture is a matter of minor importance: this 
 accepted, the aphorism will not be difficult of establishment. 
 
 I do not wish it to be taken as in any sense for or against 
 either, but I should draw the distinction between the workshop 
 and the studio somewhat in the following manner. 
 
 THE studio is a happily situated nest, somewhere in the 
 region of villas and top hats; it is built of red bricks, even if 
 cheaply. It is fitted with all the apparatus necessary for the 
 lighting, lifting, and wheeling to and from exhibitions of the 
 large masterpiece; and it is ornamented with all the conven¬ 
 tional gusto of the prevalent Queen in Anne-ity. Within there 
 are scraps of damask silk, bartered from Roman curiosity 
 shops, divers ‘ subjects ’ under way, various Madonnas of the 
 future, suggestions of decorative work sprayed upon the odd 
 moments of panels. There is a cast from Pheidias, a photo¬ 
 gravure of Millet, a skeleton and a lay figure. In the corner 
 a pair of embroidered slippers, and on the mantel-piece pipes 
 and tobacco. The inmate for whom these things have their 
 being, works hard, appreciates the silence and solitude of his 
 surroundings, and is comfortably conscious of his Bohemianism. 
 In the afternoon there are lady visitors, and the servant brings 
 in five o’clock tea. 
 
 THE workshop is almost as light as the studio, though less 
 pleasantly situated, and near the racket of some big thorough¬ 
 fare. But what matters noise ? if there be noise without, there 
 is noise within ; hammering and sawing, and what not. Nor are 
 the internal surroundings as pleasant to look on. Blue white¬ 
 wash takes the place of damask fragments, and moveable gas 
 jets of patent reflectors. The place is in a condition in which no 
 house-wife would enter it, and the glue pot is simmering on the 
 stove pipe. As to the fittings, there are benches, and racks 
 for tools, also possibly a small furnace, and a good deal of grime. 
 To hang up prints there would be inadvisable, though a photo¬ 
 lithographic advertisement assists in telling the days of the 
 week, and offers an appropriate quotation for the better com¬ 
 mitting them to memory. As to the rest the furniture consists 
 
3 
 
 of rows of pegs on which hang hats, coats, and aprons ; here 
 and there a teapot with a broken spout, and an occasional 
 coloured kerchief containing two plates bound face-wise. The 
 inmates of the workshop pursue their avocation with the regu¬ 
 larity of clock-work;—a light in their faces perhaps, of an 
 armed resistance to something,—and the dinner hour at twelve 
 o’clock is enlivened with the perusal and discussion of racy 
 paragraphs from a halfpenny radical print. 
 
 THESE to my mind are the two pictures ; but I hold that in 
 the higher sense the proper place of decorative art is the latter; 
 and I repeat the aphorism that art must be carried on in the 
 workshop, not in the studio. 
 
 IN the first place, the right understanding of forms of orna¬ 
 ment,—elements of design, is only possible in their direct bear¬ 
 ing on forms of material,—elements of construction. You need 
 your basis of matter wherein to engender the spirit. You must 
 understand the stone, the wood, the pigments, the clay, what 
 each can do, what its limitations are; and this means an un¬ 
 derstanding, if, merely for the sake of conceiving our own in¬ 
 capacity to use them, of the tools that are the guardians of 
 these limitations. ‘ Rivingtons,’ that famous tome on building 
 construction, whose pyramidal ascent of facts has to be scaled 
 before youthful architects pass Royal Institute examinations, 
 would lose half its value if it were not for the fact of the isola¬ 
 tion of the architect’s studio, euphemistically termed his office ; 
 but a half-hour in the workshop would save days of fruitless 
 drudgery over its pages. I received the other day from the 
 head-master of a provincial board-school, a letter saying that 
 his board desired him to teach the use of tools ; could I assist 
 him, what text-books was he to read up, and could a list of the 
 tools be provided ? I recommended, not ‘ Rivingtons,’ but a 
 carpenter to take the head-master’s place. 
 
 THE ways are innumerable in which the workshop alone can 
 instruct in the limitations of material, and the functions of the 
 tool; every hour in the workshop reveals something, whether 
 it be so small a matter as the pressure of the sable which pro¬ 
 duced the favourite form of the Gothic painted leaf, or so great 
 a matter as the thrust of the arch which produced that identi¬ 
 cal ogeeval curve in architectural construction. The study of 
 these limitations is complex enough for us, without our losing 
 the accumulated benefit of workshop experience and practicali¬ 
 ties. We may go home to our studios and copy realistically if 
 
4 
 
 we will; but given the knack, it always remains easier to copy 
 realistically than to master the limitations of material. 
 
 A historical study of art forms is perhaps one of the most 
 fascinating things possible, and would be calculated to throw 
 much light on decorative art from the workshop point of view. 
 If we were to tell an every-day artist that his shoddy stucco 
 frame is, in the eyes of the Creator, more of a work of art than 
 his own landscape painting which it contains, the remark would 
 savour of blasphemy : or if we were to point out to him that 
 the same painting was actually a development of the frame it¬ 
 self, and that the genesis of the picture in the frame could be 
 traced to the days when Margaritone illuminated the frame¬ 
 works and crucifixes of Umbrian Altars with toilsome conven¬ 
 tionalisations of the Christ, it would appear to him a mere 
 antiquarian vagary, but none the less both statements might 
 safely be asserted. 
 
 TPIUS much for the artistic principles contained in the ideas 
 of studio and workshop respectively; and if the recording 
 angel have even not yet thrown the chased goblet into the 
 heavier scale of the latter, we have still all the human and vital 
 elements in the being of each, to take into account. 
 
 WE might call the studio in its nature subjective ; it fosters 
 that refined sensuality of nineteenth-century art, self-introspec¬ 
 tion, whereas the workshop has in it the elements of the human 
 and objective. In the coming together of men, in the magnetic 
 affinities that spring up between them, are the forces that 
 engender art creativeness, just as in academical life they give 
 rise best to speculation and literary creativeness. Ideas may 
 be conceived in solitude, but they are brought to birth by 
 co-operation. Men take creative force from each other. Those 
 psychical moments of which we now hear so frequently, imply 
 men in the union of number, in their combined readiness to 
 accept the new idea. The ancients would have stated the case 
 between the workshop and the studio in the terms of Pan¬ 
 theism. Narcissus had a studio by the brookside, and he 
 perished in the contemplation of his own loveliness; Vulcan 
 had a workshop under Etna, and all men and gods marvelled 
 at it, for it was grand and awful by virtue of the united and 
 rhythmical ringing of its hammers. 
 
 WHEN we set to work, however, to produce decorative art 
 in the workshop, there is forced upon us the problem of the 
 subdivision of labour; how unsatisfactory and uneconomical 
 
5 
 
 any present system is, and how necessary a re-arrangement. 
 But the question is, on what basis. The exigencies of the 
 market determine the supply of the decorative commodity ; 
 certain goods are wanted, and have to be provided rapidly and 
 largely; alter these exigencies, and you alter the conditions. 
 As soon as people begin to feel the true connection between 
 construction and design, the designer will at once be brought 
 nearer the workshop. Architects will no longer build houses 
 with half timber masks, nor designers paint landscapes on 
 coal-scuttles. A newer division of labour will set in, by which 
 the designer will work less on paper, and the workman less 
 without it. 
 
 BEARING in mind that the great problem of the modern 
 workshop is organisation, there seems a curious fitness in the 
 application of its ways and methods to the question of decora¬ 
 tive art, for decorative art from the very fact of its being 
 so impersonal, admits of organisation. That ceaseless fund of 
 willing labour with which mankind is endowed, finds scope in 
 it. The labour by which historical schools grow up, labour 
 unoriginal, imitative, conscientious, diligent and humble ; the 
 labour which produced the intricacies of the monastic manu¬ 
 script, and the thousand crockets on the Gothic cathedral. For 
 decorative art on any large scale implies repetition, implies 
 method, and the constant dwelling on and development of some 
 one idea. It is as the variation on a theme in a symphony ; 
 for one man to do it is an impossibility; you need a hundred 
 with different instruments, before you can give your decorative 
 theme its full value in variety. 
 
 AND further, your organisation, just like your decoration, must 
 have a soul in it. The thousand men who carve the crockets 
 must have the sense of concerted action, even as the thousand 
 crockets must artistically express unity; and so our next 
 question is how this can be got, what is to be our substitute 
 for the monastic ideal, or the creative enthusiasm of the guilds? 
 There again the modern workshop can come to our aid. Apply 
 the militant spirit of trades’ unionism which more or less 
 pervades most of our principal workshops—apply the growing 
 instinct for co-operative action whether for the purposes of 
 attack, of distribution, or of production—and we have a like 
 spirit to that by which the Athens of Pericles was perfected, or 
 the England of William of Wykeham made beautiful. 
 
 THE basis of the new subdivision of labour must therefore be 
 a sound one socially. In the Greek and Mediaeval times, labour 
 
6 
 
 was divided in a manner which we neither can nor need seek 
 to copy ; we have merely to study results, and emulate with 
 means and methods of our own. And so if we take the work¬ 
 shop as our basis of action, we have, as I conceive it, to reor¬ 
 ganise the subdivision of labour from an anti-class point of 
 view. We have first to recognise the dignity of all labour— 
 dignity in service ; we have secondly to recognise the equality of 
 all labour—equality in service, but differing according to merit 
 and capacity. We have, even as a wise collector does, to give 
 equal rights to the Sevres vase, and the chap book of hawkers’ 
 cries. True, they appealed to different publics in their day, 
 but in the cupboard—each a work of decorative art—they stand 
 as man to man. 
 
 AT present the class disunions are acute in proportion to their 
 nearness; the workman dispises the clerk, the clerk the work¬ 
 man ; the wage of each is to all intents and purposes fixed and 
 the same; the labour of one is as valuable to the community 
 as the labour of the other; it is the artificial class barrier that 
 does the mischief. A regards B as a snob or a renegade, B 
 looks on A as an inferior being. None the less, however, the 
 workshop is ready for the reorganisation, only another force 
 has to be introduced, and that is community of action. Com¬ 
 munity of adtion is already partially accomplished in our great 
 armies of industry and distributive agencies ; the co-operative 
 principle has only to be more fully applied. In decorative art, 
 where men are working to a creative purpose, and where their 
 labour is in itself educational, this community of adtion can be 
 more keenly felt, for it is a union not only of pockets, but of 
 hands and hearts. And its highest outcome will be style— 
 style in workmanship, style in design, in decoration, in archi¬ 
 tecture, and ultimately, national style. Put your decorative 
 art in the workshop; united action is the steel, workshop 
 needs, and ingenuities are the flint, and from their contact 
 the living spark will spring. We should regard decorative art 
 as a new heraldry; let our pupils, our workshops, and our 
 communities have badges, devices, trade marks of their own. 
 For there are great principles involved in the emblematic treat¬ 
 ment of decorative art. It implies an understanding of orna¬ 
 ment in its repetition and development. It implies a soul 
 within, which may have prompted its creation, and it implies 
 community of adtion, because it can exist only where men are 
 banded together for some common purpose. The signature 
 of Turner on a picture is a personal matter, but the hand on 
 
7 
 
 the prentice’s column, the collar of S.S., the badges of the old 
 guilds, the mark of P.R.B., imply an art principle within a 
 co-operative force. 
 
 SOLVE the question of style in art, and we are at once 
 brought to the solution of a still harder problem—that of our 
 standard of criticism, the bane of every most enlightened and 
 judicious hanging committee. We may, since the days of Sir 
 Joshua, have produced schools of painting, but we have pro¬ 
 duced no schools of craft. Given the style, the schools’ out¬ 
 come, and at once we have the standard. At present the 
 workman’s only canon is technical excellence, and that of the 
 average Englishman, so far as he can be said to have any at 
 all, is a shallow realism. A landscape of Hunt’s he judges 
 good if it be like what he, in some beefy moment, has seen; a 
 figure of Burne Jones, in purposeful convention, is to him an 
 affectation and an enigma. ‘ I’m a plain man, and I 
 know what I want ’ :—admirable aphorism ! but fitly para¬ 
 phrased as follows: I’m an ignorant man, I know what suits 
 my ignorance, and I’m very proud of it.’ And that was why 
 Watts in his solemn picture of Mammon has applied to the 
 modern god, the old Greek fable of Midas with the ass’s 
 ears. 
 
 TO come now to a further point, the direCt application of 
 these ideas to industry, we have to work by a decentralising 
 process. It is only in their application to each special industry 
 in its own district, it is only by a frank acceptance of the ways 
 and methods of the workshop as the men of the workshop in 
 those districts have in the course of generations created them, 
 and by a full recognition of the organising solidarity of these 
 ways and methods, that any healthy growth or glory in decora¬ 
 tive art can be achieved. Is it the industry of silk or cotton 
 which we want to benefit, we must teach our workmen and 
 designers, the evolution of pattern from the East, the sweet¬ 
 ness of the Sicilian damask, the virtue of the Flemish diaper, 
 and we must show them how the social conditions of each art 
 epoch had reference to the design in its manifold develop¬ 
 ments. Is it the industry of furniture and wood-work, we 
 must trace step by step the historical sequence of church fit¬ 
 tings, the Gothic screen, the Jacobean pulpit, we must show 
 how the art of architecture in England, or the art of painting 
 in Italy, fashioned the art of cabinet-making; whether in the 
 reredos, or the wedding chest, and we must trace the intrica¬ 
 cies of construction and design, from the solid carpentry of the 
 
8 
 
 Norman into the veneer of Louis Seize. If our industry be 
 iron we have the relation of the wrought to the cast; the work 
 of those nameless artists whose craft adorns the fireplaces of 
 English country houses, or the cunning workmanship of the 
 Canterbury screens and the Hampton Court gates. Is the 
 local industry silver—that most degraded of all modern 
 English crafts,—we can trace the history of its decline under 
 the Georges, through the art of Holland into the splendour of 
 the Spanish renaissance and back to its crowning glory in the 
 Middle Ages—the sacramental cup. If we are dealing with 
 the industry of colour-making, it is our business to apply the 
 craft of the Van Eycks, of Cennino Cennini, to modern manu¬ 
 facture, and not only to bring to bear scientific skill to purity 
 of making, but artistic sensitiveness to the development of 
 lights and tones of colour in their decorative significance. But 
 in each and every instance if it is the workman we want to 
 train, it is of the workman we must tell; each school, each 
 epoch, the industry produced in each country must be treated 
 in its relation to the social conditions of the men whose im¬ 
 press is left upon it. This I hold is the only way of ultimately 
 applying English decorative ability to English industry, and 
 it is this that I should call the application to decorative art, 
 as far as education goes, of the workshop of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 AS to the ways and means, they are ready to hand. This 
 Congress is our ventilating machine; exhibitions like those of 
 the Arts and Crafts are the agencies for bringing the public in 
 touch with the workshops; then there is the instinct for co¬ 
 operation growing up in these workshops, and there is the 
 movement for the establishment of polytechnics and other 
 technical institutions, which should give the element of school 
 and educational dignity. 
 
 WHETHER these ways and means are being developed aright 
 is another question, and one which it is scarcely within the 
 scope of this paper to take into consideration; but, as the ex¬ 
 perience which has supplied its material and given birth to its 
 confidence has been drawn from the growth and development 
 of workshops, schools, the artistic creativeness and the general 
 labour movement in East London, it might not be out of 
 place to point to a few of the special movements which have 
 been tending in the direction indicated, especially as East 
 London has in many matters of the kind in late years been 
 taking the lead. 
 
INDEED, I should hold it needless on my part to speak as a 
 theorist on these points, or even to speak at all, were I not 
 myself engaged in constructive work. The days of artistic 
 speculation are gone by, all that concerns us now is the method 
 of applying those truths which most artists and thinkers 
 concur in holding. The work which my colleagues and I are 
 doing in East London, strives in a certain measure to realise 
 the healthier conditions of decorative art, of workmanship, and 
 of industry in general, to which this paper has given attention. 
 By the creation in the Guild of Handicraft of a co-operative 
 workshop on the one hand, implying the recognition of the re¬ 
 organisation and redivision of labour, and on the other by the 
 creation of a school of Handicraft which shall be grafted on to 
 this workshop and thus serve as a field from which to draw its 
 future workmen, and as a storehouse for its artistic traditions, 
 we have striven to revive in some small way that spirit which 
 created the great craftsmanship of Tuscany, of Normandy, or 
 of Bavaria. We are seeking in short to apply the workshop 
 to decorative art. 
 
 AS an instance of the way in which this work is being de¬ 
 veloped on its educational side, I am proposing in the following 
 term to start a further series of lectures and classes for the 
 purpose of linking the education of the school to the industry 
 of the district. East London is the great centre of the English 
 cabinet-making trade, and thus I am intending to give from 
 my professional point of view as an architect, and in conjunc¬ 
 tion with the technical skill of one of the leading workmen in 
 the guild workshop, a historical and practical course on the 
 history and development of the industry of the English cabinet¬ 
 maker. 
 
 TO continue the question of the workman’s interest and the 
 workman’s education in these ways and means, I hold you can 
 do nothing unless you give him representation. You accuse 
 the workman of a want of ideas and a want of interest, but he 
 has one all-absorbing idea, one over-mastering interest; and 
 that is the problem of industry and its re-oganisation. If you 
 want him to grow interested in art matters you must put them 
 to him in his own terms. Offer him the art problem as a 
 problem of workshop organisation, and he will solve it for you. 
 Here, again, the workshop steps in. You cannot work out 
 the problem of technical education in the teeth of the oppo¬ 
 sition of the Trades’ Unions : regard it merely as a means for 
 benefitting English industry to the interest of the masters, and 
 
10 
 
 it will be ephemeral; regard it as a national matter, and it 
 will live. And this holds good not only of our workshops, but 
 of our exhibitions and of polytechnics and technical schools. 
 The problem which, to my mind, is in the immediate future 
 before the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society—if it would 
 more fully, even than it has already done, realise those pretty 
 little devices on its note paper of workmen shaking hands, 
 4 decoratively,’ with artists—is the problem of the methods of 
 representation from the English workshops, trade unions, and 
 clubs, on the body the Society; it is a question of what we 
 risk—is it to be a vulgar democracy or an exotic art ? For my 
 part, speaking as an artist, I should say trust in the democracy, 
 for the art can only be worked out through its agency. 
 
 EXACTLY the same applies to polytechnics, whether in re¬ 
 presentation or in education. Polytechnics and technical 
 schools can only develop by becoming, in the fullest sense, 
 People’s universities; by being brought to bear dire(5tly on the 
 industries of the locality in which they are situated, and by 
 having on their governing bodies the representation, loyally 
 and frankly given, of the working men who through their trade 
 societies and clubs are seeking to re-organise English industry 
 within the workshops. 
 
 TO take the case of the People’s Palace, another of the young 
 institutions of East London, and one whose fair prospers in 
 many ways have made it the model from which the other poly¬ 
 technics are being created: nothing from a workman’s point 
 of view can be more out of sympathy with the conditions of 
 East London labour and workshops than its complete absence 
 of representation : nothing from an artist’s point of view more 
 hopeless for the ultimate improvement of the industries of the 
 district or of industry in general, than its method of art 
 education. You cannot win your workmen’s sympathies unless 
 you work through them ; offer them endowments from above, 
 and they will leave them to the middle class, give them repre¬ 
 sentative power, and they are with you. And as for education 
 in art, it must be of the best, or not at all. Art, in any direct 
 bearing on industry, can only be taught by men who can them¬ 
 selves create, whether in design or in workmanship. Better 
 than make of our schools and polytechnics South Kensington 
 Cram Shops, let us give up the idea of art teaching altogether, 
 for the destinies of English handicraft and industry will as¬ 
 suredly be worked out without them. 
 
11 
 
 TO sum up. The points I have insisted on are these: The 
 art problem must be worked out through the social problem. 
 The home of decorative art must be the workshop, not the 
 studio. In working our decorative art on a large scale we 
 must reorganise the subdivision of labour, and we must reor¬ 
 ganise it on an anti-class basis. We must apply to decorative 
 art the principles of the workshop, especially those co-operative 
 ideals growing up in our midst, and we shall find in the de¬ 
 velopment of the workshop the solution of the problems of 
 style and criticism in art and craft. Finally, we must have in 
 our exhibitions, schools, and polytechnics complete represen¬ 
 tation from workmen in their societies. Thus alone can a 
 genuine workshop and a noble national art be created. The 
 great question of the consumption of its commodities—the 
 question from the point of view of the public outside, I have 
 left for a future paper ; but the workshop from within may 
 suggest ways and means for this also. The destinies of British 
 art and industry must eventually be decided by the British 
 working classes; even as they are at present slowly and 
 surely solving our social and economic questions, and in the 
 end it may yet be told how from the obscene bulb of the pluto¬ 
 cracy sprang the tulip of the new civilisation. 
 
 C. R. Ashbee. 
 
*