Appendix_43: Stuart Evans:-- "The architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) and his London-based group 'The Century Guild of Artists'"

A History of the Amateur Woodworking Movement

A Decade-by-Decade Narrative of Amateur Woodworking in America From 1900 to 2000

Appendices:
Appendices Deal With Issues Special to Woodworking History, Incident to the Main Inquiry, But Sit Outside the Narrative

An Online Book -- Raymond McInnis -- Amateur Woodworker

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Narrative Chapters

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Chap 7	Chap 8	Chap 9	Chap 10	Chap 11	Chap 12

Headnote for Manuals Manuals by Decade

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Second Case Study [also appendix 43]: Stuart Evans:-- "The architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) and his London-based group 'The Century Guild of Artists'"

In 1977 I embarked on a research degree at the University of Manchester, supervised by John Archer, on the subject of the architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942) and his London-based group The Century Guild of Artists, which flourished circa 1882-1892, and is cited as an early and important group within the Arts and Crafts movement.

It presented itself as offering architecture and the arts that support it, and its core work was a series of domestic interiors. Unlike the research on Sellers, few drawings for Century Guild designs are known but there are contemporary photographs of some of its work and items of furniture in museum and private collections, as there are examples of its metalwork, textiles and wallpaper designs, and of its publication The Century Guild Hobby Horse. The William Morris Gallery has the most comprehensive collection.

There is also a Century Guild literature in the form of its prospectuses, some material in the Hobby Horse and Mackmurdo’s manuscript notes and the typescript for an idiosyncratic ‘History of the Arts and Crafts Movement’.

However, none of the known Century Guild schemes survives intact and some are known only from illustrations in contemporary publications. The incomplete nature of the primary material about the Guild’s ‘composite interior schemes’ is a limit on any study and with little archival material on the context of practice, in terms of how the Guild was organised and who its clients were, is another.

There is, however, an extensive secondary literature in which Century Guild schemes are identified and discussed.

For this project the surviving drawings, items of furniture and decorative arts, and fragments of interiors in situ were examined. The Guild literature was studied and contemporary journals were searched. Drawings and other design tools were used to ‘recreate’ missing items of furniture and to better understand the design of the furniture and the complete interiors. For example, a series of drawings exploring a Century Guild music room shown at the International Inventions Exhibition, London, of 1885, uses perspective techniques in reverse to generate a plan, which demonstrates the room is axially planned with a balanced composition. The Guild’s interior can be stripped out to show the original volume and how it was addressed: it was oddly shaped and lay behind a half-timbered elevation in Old London, a sort of theme park within the exhibition site [7]. [Illustration 6.]

A music room by The Century Guild of Artists shown at the International Inventions Exhibition, London, 1885: two sketch views showing the space empty and with the architectural framework inserted by the Guild (drawn by Stuart Evans).

A music room by The Century Guild of Artists shown at the International Inventions Exhibition, London, 1885: view from The Builder, vol. 49.

Drawings have also been used to reveal more information about items of furniture otherwise known only from thumbnail journal illustrations. This sideboard has been drawn up in elevation (a full-size elevation in paper has been made to show its size). The original was made for Stewart Headlam who stood surety for Oscar Wilde at his second trial and to whose house Wilde was taken on release from prison.

The context of the Guild’s practice was addressed by researching other involvements of those associated. This involved studying, to give examples, the transactions of the Ruskin Society (Mackmurdo was active in the society and claimed Ruskin as an inspiration for the Guild); the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (Mackmurdo was Honorary Secretary to the Arts Section, in which issues around the impact of art in the home were discussed); and the minutes and reports of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to contextualise the Guild’s first known work, Mackmurdo’s book Wren’s City Churches, 1883, with its remarkable title page.

These are further examples of triangulation to cross-validate or expand, and there is something else, the idea of ‘transforming information into knowledge’. This is identified by Elizabeth Orna in her book Managing information for research and discussed as a systematic way of addressing sources in order to transform the information they contain, which may be apparent or latent, into a form which can be used to expand the subject and its context 3. This technique is being used to explore what is known about how the Century Guild was organised as a business.

This research has had several outcomes: a thesis and two published items, and a monograph is underway, co-authored with the literary historian Jean Liddiard 4.