Art Workers Guild

The Art Workers' Guild is an organisation established in 1884 by a group of British architects associated with the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. The guild promoted the 'unity of all the arts', denying the distinction between fine and applied art. It opposed the professionalisation of architecture – which was promoted by the Royal Institute of British Architects at this time – in the belief that this would inhibit design.

The founders of the guild were five young architects from Norman Shaw's office: W. R. Lethaby, Edward Prior, Ernest Newton, Mervyn Macartney and Gerald C. Horsley. Its first master was the sculptor, George Blackall Simonds; its second master was John Dando Sedding. Among its members was Henry Bird.

Much of the impulse that had fed into religion was transferred to art, retaining a moral seriousness and sense of mission that has characterised the guild.

The architects Dunbar Smith and Cecil Brewer had an office in the front of the early Georgian house at 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, and when they heard that the freehold was for sale, encouraged the guild to buy it. The back part of the building was reconstructed as a meeting hall, designed by F. W. Troup and inaugurated on 22 April 1914. It is furnished with rush-seated chairs to a pattern made in Herefordshire in the 1880s by Philip Clisset, and afterwards copied by Ernest Gimson and his successors. The names of all members up to the year 2000 are painted on a frieze around the walls of the Hall. The list of names now continues in the front room known as the ‘Master’s Room’.

The Art Workers Guild gave rise to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.

The guild began as a male-only organisation, leading May Morris to start the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907 as an alternative for women. It was not until the 1960s that women were admitted, starting with the wood engraver Joan Hassall who became the first female Master in 1972.

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