American Arts and Crafts Movement

The American Craftsman style, or the American Arts and Crafts movement, is an American domestic architectural, interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and decorative arts style and lifestyle philosophy that began in the last years of the 19th century. As a comprehensive design and art movement it remained popular into the 1930s. However, in decorative arts and architectural design it has continued with numerous revivals and restoration projects through present times.

The American Craftsman style (along with a wide variety of related but conceptually distinct European design movements) was developed out of the British Arts and Crafts movement which began as early as the 1860s.

The British movement was reacting against the Industrial Revolution's perceived devaluation of the individual worker and resulting degradation of the dignity of human labor. The movement emphasized handwork over mass production, with the problem that expensive materials and costly skilled labor restricted acquisition of Arts and Crafts productions to a wealthy clientele, often ironically derided as "champagne socialists".

While the American movement also reacted against the eclectic Victorian "over-decorated" aesthetic, the Arts and Crafts style's American arrival coincided with the decline of the Victorian era. The American Arts and Crafts movement shared the British movement's reform philosophy, encouraging originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of handicraft, but distinguished itself, particularly in the Craftsman Bungalow style, with a goal of ennobling modest homes for a rapidly expanding American middle class.

In the 1890s, a group of Boston’s more influential architects, designers, and educators were determined to bring the design reforms of the British Arts and Crafts movement to America. Its first meeting, to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects, was held in January 1897 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Present at this meeting were local museum trustees, including General Charles Loring, William Sturgis Bigelow, and Denman Ross; art collectors and patrons; writers and art critics, such as Sylvester Baxter for the Boston Evening Transcript; and artists and architects, such as Ross Turner and Ralph Clipson Sturgis.

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