The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland: A History by Annette Carruthers (review)

The Arts and Crafts Movement presents considerable challenges to various conventions of scholarship. Aside from a certain uneasiness arising from the notion that the Arts and Crafts might be knowable largely through looking, reading, and writing—processes which seem inadequate and faintly ironic in light of the Movement’s haptic and holistic epistemological frameworks—scholars’ understandable tendency to work from disciplinary standpoints, in conjunction with the international and seemingly limitless manifestations and associations of Arts and Crafts ideas, make producing anything close to a balanced overview particularly challenging. Difficult also is the process of delineating boundaries for more focused research within the Movement. Occupying an ambitious balance between these two approaches is The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland: A History, an exceptionally handsome tome and sound contribution to the field by Annette Carruthers.

Representing a meticulously researched and wide-ranging examination of this rich episode in Scotland’s material and intellectual history, Carruthers’s book presents its extensive findings glossed with the identification of patterns and tendencies that such expansive investigation permits. The account is unavoidably constrained by the customary linearity of printed text—for a movement as vast, varied, and associational as the Arts and Crafts, a structure akin to a continually shifting three-dimensional web comes to mind as a more conducive and representative arrangement. In the absence of printed formats along these lines, however, the book arrives at a considered hybrid articulated chronologically and spatially, and punctuated by a cluster of chapters focusing on particular case-studies. Plotting a familiar arc of growth, maturity, and decline, this structure lends coherence to a set of events otherwise characterized by regional differences, variation in approaches to theory and production, and a considerable span of time. While the organization of the book largely ensures the visibility of these strands (demonstrating, for example, distinctions apparent between Arts and Crafts activity within large urban centers and provincially-based practices and initiatives), one senses some reductiveness around the notion of Scottish identity, which comes across as too monolithic as a result. However, the nationally-focused narrative that emerges usefully illuminates fin-de-siècle constructions and preoccupations, and material culture is presented as having played a significant role in these, even if its agency in this context, and the interrelations of regional and national identities, are not fully unpacked.

The book appears to aim not at a major break with conventional approaches to the Arts and Crafts, so much as at making their structures and emphases work to bring to light new knowledge. It prioritizes, for example, the expansion and population of the predominant canon within the literature on the British Arts and Crafts, rather than its reappraisal or subversion. While critically aware of the difficulties of defining Arts and Crafts-ness, the book reserves its scope for the extensive area and timeframe it covers, and while a notable range of material culture and approaches to production receive attention, the justification of various omissions on the grounds that they are not sufficiently of the Movement contrasts somewhat with the beginning of the book, which is more deft and nuanced in its presentation of the complexity and ambiguity of the subject at hand. In addition, the book replicates the predominant emphasis on objects and buildings in much of the literature on the Arts and Crafts Movement. This is expressed through a profusion of interconnected examples, which are prioritized over more in-depth analysis, though their density is offset by Carruthers’s skillful weaving of these details into a dynamic narrative. In this the focus principally revolves around biographical details of practitioners, patrons, and organizations, as well as perceptive formalistic observations which draw on extensive comparative knowledge and usefully flag distinctive or innovative motifs. While the brief though frequent appraisals of quality might not speak to all readers, Carruthers’s fluency with the source materials is everywhere apparent and lends authority both to the book’s judgements and to the necessary...