Arts and Crafts Jewellery

Arts and Crafts jewellery valued the visible hand of the maker over the value of the materials - hammer marks were left showing, settings were hand-wrought rather than polished to industrial smoothness, and semi-precious cabochon stones were often preferred to costly faceted gems.

Overview

The Arts and Crafts movement began as a broader reaction, led in Britain by figures such as William Morris and John Ruskin, against the perceived dehumanising effects of industrial mass production on design and craftsmanship across furniture, textiles, printing and metalwork. Applied to jewellery from around the 1880s, this philosophy produced pieces that deliberately looked hand-made: irregular, hand-hammered surfaces, visible tool marks, and simple bezel or wire settings stood in contrast to the crisp, machine-finished precision that industrial jewellery manufacture increasingly made possible in the same decades.

Craftsmanship Over Costliness

Central to the movement was the idea that a piece’s value lay in the skill and integrity of its making, not in the market price of its materials. Silver and low-carat gold were favoured over the heavier, more overtly valuable gold and diamond jewellery of mainstream Victorian and Edwardian fashion, and jewellers were often trained as designer-craftsmen who made a piece from design through to finished object themselves, rather than working within an industrial division of labour.

Stones and Enamelling

Cabochon-cut semi-precious stones - polished into a smooth dome rather than faceted - were strongly preferred over brilliant-cut precious gems, since their softer, more painterly colour suited the movement’s aesthetic better than hard sparkle. Moonstone, opal, amethyst, turquoise, chrysoprase and freshwater pearls recur frequently. Enamelling, including translucent and opalescent techniques, was widely used for colour and texture, often alongside hand-wrought silver or gold wirework akin to filigree in spirit if not always in strict technique.

The Guild of Handicraft

C.R. Ashbee founded the Guild of Handicraft in the East End of London in 1888, training young craftsmen in metalwork, enamelling and jewellery. In 1902 the Guild moved to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds as an experiment in rural community life, but it struggled commercially and was wound up as a company in 1907. Ashbee’s own designs - peacock brooches and pendants in silver and gold with enamel, mother-of-pearl and cabochon stones, often hung on fine chains - are among the most recognisable Arts and Crafts jewels.

Other British Makers

• Henry Wilson, architect turned metalworker, made richly modelled jewels in gold, silver and enamel, and wrote Silverwork and Jewellery (1903), a widely used manual. His pupil John Paul Cooper worked in a similar sculptural style.
• Arthur and Georgie Gaskin in Birmingham made delicate jewellery of twisted wire, leaves and small flowers set with pastel stones. Arthur Gaskin became headmaster of the Vittoria Street School for Jewellers and Silversmiths, opened in Birmingham in 1890 to train the city’s jewellery trade in design.
• Alexander Fisher and Nelson and Edith Dawson were leading enamellers, reviving painted and champlevé enamel for jewellery.
• Phoebe Anna Traquair in Edinburgh made jewellery with small enamelled panels of figures and angels in her distinctive jewel-like colours.
• In Glasgow, designers of the Glasgow Style, including Jessie M. King, created jewellery designs with stylised roses and elongated figures, some sold through Liberty.

Liberty & Co. and Commercial Arts and Crafts

Liberty’s “Cymric” range, launched in 1899, brought the look of handmade jewellery to a wider market. Pieces designed by Archibald Knox and others drew on Celtic interlace and were made by machine methods, with hammer marks sometimes added for effect. Ashbee and other purists resented this commercialisation, but Liberty pieces are now among the most sought-after jewellery of the movement. Similar work was supplied by Murrle, Bennett & Co., much of it made in Pforzheim. See also Art Nouveau.

The Movement in America

In the United States, the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston (founded 1897) and workshops such as the Kalo Shop in Chicago, founded by Clara Barck Welles in 1900, produced hand-wrought silver and gold jewellery set with cabochons, moonstones and freshwater pearls. Frank Gardner Hale in Boston was among the best-known American jeweller-craftsmen of the movement.

Common Jewellery Types

Brooches, pendants - often suspended from a simple chain rather than an elaborate necklace - buckles, hair ornaments and rings were typical forms, generally more modest in scale than the grander gem-set jewellery worn in fashionable society at the same date.

Overlap With Art Nouveau

Arts and Crafts jewellery shares its date range almost exactly with Art Nouveau, and the two are often discussed together, but their underlying philosophies differ. Art Nouveau prized flowing, artistic line and dramatic effect, often achieved with virtuoso technical display; Arts and Crafts prized visible, honest hand-craftsmanship and simplicity of construction as ends in themselves. In practice many pieces from the period sit somewhere between the two, and British Arts and Crafts work in particular is sometimes considered a more restrained, moralised cousin of the freer Continental Art Nouveau style.

How to Recognise Arts and Crafts Jewellery

Visible hammer texture, simple bezel-set cabochon stones rather than faceted gems in claw settings, silver or low-carat gold rather than heavy fine gold, and restrained, often botanically inspired but non-naturalistic forms are all strong indicators, along with a general absence of the diamond-forward sparkle typical of mainstream jewellery from the same decades.

Transition and Decline

The movement’s influence continued alongside, and was gradually eclipsed by, the platinum-and-diamond taste of mainstream Edwardian jewellery and, later, the geometric clarity of Art Deco, though its emphasis on hand-craftsmanship and honest materials would resurface repeatedly in studio jewellery through the 20th century.