Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (12 December 1851 – 15 March 1942) was a progressive English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 architect and designer, who influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement

Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...

, notably through the Century Guild of Artists

Century Guild of Artists

The Century Guild of Artists was an English group of art enthusiasts that were active between 1883 and 1892. It was founded in 1882 by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo. The Century Guild aimed to preserve the artistic trade and the authenticity of the craftsmen behind it. The members were forerunners...

, which he set up in partnership with Selwyn Image

Selwyn Image

Selwyn Image was a British clergyman, designer, including of stained glass windows and poet....

 in 1882.

Mackmurdo was the son of a wealthy chemical manufacturer. He was educated at Felsted School

Felsted School

Felsted School, an English co-educational day and boarding independent school, situated in Felsted, Essex. It is in the British Public School tradition, and was founded in 1564 by Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich who, as Lord Chancellor and Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, acquired...

, and was first trained under the architect T. Chatfield Clarke, from whom he claimed to have learnt nothing. Then, in 1869, he became an assistant to the Gothic Revival architect James Brooks. In 1873, he visited John Ruskin's

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 School of Drawing, and accompanied Ruskin to Italy in 1874. He stayed on to study in Florence for a while; despite the influence of Ruskin, the Italian architecture he was most impressed by was that of the Renaissance. That same year, Mackmurdo opened his own architectural practice at 28, Southampton Street, in London.

In 1882, Mackmurdo founded the Century Guild of Artists. Other members included Selwyn Image

Selwyn Image

Selwyn Image was a British clergyman, designer, including of stained glass windows and poet....

, Herbert Horne

Herbert Horne

Herbert Percy Horne was an English poet, architect, typographer and designer, art historian and antiquarian. He was an associate of the Rhymer's Club in London...

, Clement Heaton and Ruskin's protegee, the sculptor Benjamin Creswick

Benjamin Creswick

-Life:Benjamin Creswick was born in Sheffield, the son of a spectacle-maker. He started his working life as a knife-grinder, but took up sculpture with the encouragement of John Ruskin. In 1887 he modelled a terracotta frieze showing the processes of knife-grinding for the exterior of Cutlers'...

. It was one of the more successful craft guilds of its time. It offered complete furnishing of homes and buildings, and its artists were encouraged to participate in production as well as design; Mackmurdo himself mastered several crafts, including metalworking

Metalworking

Metalworking is the process of working with metals to create individual parts, assemblies, or large scale structures. The term covers a wide range of work from large ships and bridges to precise engine parts and delicate jewelry. It therefore includes a correspondingly wide range of skills,...

 and cabinet making

Cabinet making

Cabinet making is the practice of using various woodworking skills to create cabinets, shelving and furniture.Cabinet making involves techniques such as creating appropriate joints, dados, bevels, chamfers and shelving systems, the use of finishing tools such as routers to create decorative...

.

In 1884, the guild showed a display in the form of a music room at the Health Exhibition in London; the stand was shown, with variations, at subsequent exhibitions in Manchester and Liverpool. It incorporated two of Mackmurdo's favourite motifs. One was foliage twisted into sinuous curves. Nikolaus Pevsner

Nikolaus Pevsner

Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, FBA was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture...

 described Mackmurdo's use of such foliage on the title page of the designer's own Wren's City Churches (1883) as "the first work of art nouveau which can be traced", identifying its main influences as Rosetti and Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...

 and ultimately, through them, William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

.

The second motif was the use of thin square columns, topped with flat squares instead of capitals. These columns influenced the furniture designs of C.F.A. Voysey, and, through him, Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, watercolourist and artist. He was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had a considerable influence on European design...

. Mackmurdo used them architecturally on his own house at 8 Private Road, Enfield, (1887), and on a house for the artist Mortimer Menpes

Mortimer Menpes

Mortimer Luddington Menpes , was an Australian-born artist, author, printmaker and illustrator.-Life:...

, at 25 Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea (1893-1894), where he incorporated them into a kind of Queen Anne style.

Life

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo was born in London on December 12, 1851 into a wealthy living family. He was the son of Edward and Anne Mackmurdo. His father was a manufacturing chemist in the early 1800s. In his early years, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo studied to become an architect with T. Chatfield Clarke and then with the Gothic Revivalist James Brooks. In 1871, he began reading John Ruskin and shifted his focus. He traveled with Ruskin to Italy in 1874, and three years later he met William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

. One of Mackmurdo’s famous quotes was “He was an artist with scientific training”. Mackmurdo himself supposed, with an uncharacteristic immodesty, that not since the day of Sir Christopher Wren had a European artist commanded both fields of endeavor in quite the way he did. Although at the height of his career as an architect and designer he stood among the first rank of the Arts and Crafts Movement and came to be praised as an important precursor of Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

. Mackmurdo soon abandoned that work for social criticism and reform, driven by his scientific interests. In retrospect, despite his reputation as a designer, Mackmurdo insisted that he attached more importance to his work as a social theorist and reformer than as artist and designer. Although time has reversed that particular judgment, Mackmurdo's judgment indicates an enriching, complex, and yet uneasy combination of forces in his activity as artist, designer, and social thinker. Mackmurdo furthered his studies by attending the lectures of Thomas Huxley and William Tyndall in 1876. To the influence of these men Mackmurdo curiously added that of Auguste Comte and accordingly avowed himself a "staunch Positivist." Around 1883 he even lectured at Newton Hall in Fetter Lane, the London center of Positivism, on one occasion with the Positivist leader, Frederic Harrison, in the chair, and on another, with Spencer and George Eliot in the audience.

In the same year, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo pursued a parallel career in arts and design. At the age of 18, his career began with an unsuccessful apprenticeship. While studying with Ruskin in Italy he established contact with such leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement as Ford Madox Brown, Richard Norman Shaw, Philip Webb, and William Morris and setting up an architectural practice in London in 1875. But all the while Mackmurdo burned with, in his own words, an "overmastering discontent with things as they were." Especially in the sphere of art and design, his criticism was frequently articulated with references to such common and ill-digested concepts of popularized evolutionism as the "law of nature," the "organism" of society and "organic evolution," the "fierce struggle" of competitive commerce, and the need for "social synthesis."It seems that not even such revered figures as Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, John Ruskin, and William Morris availed Mackmurdo in his disappointment. Instead, he saw light in two dissimilar principles: traditional craftsmanship professed to be increasingly exposed by industrial manufacture and the operations of the free market, and the urgent need for a new, scientific basis of historical understanding and social reconstruction. These two interests guided Mackmurdo's artistic career and were drawn together, briefly and symbolically, in some of his decorative designs of the 1880s. Arthur won many achievements including his decorative work was his best. Mackmurdo had Art Nouveau pieces which put him on the spotlight. Mackmurdo’s first ever Art Nouveau piece was his cover of his book called “Wren's City Churches” and it was published in 1883.

Mackmurdo’s designs were famous for the rhythmic use of flower and stem and the constructive evocation of fitness, logic, and structure. In the early 1880s, Mackmurdo's botanical motifs take their place in a long and established tradition that goes back as far to designers like Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser in the early 1800s. His cover of “Wren's City Churches” has some similarities as those two designers of their artwork. Mackmurdo’s strengths is he achieves a more direct and intense expression of natural strength by use of asymmetrical organization on a single plane. The most appealing feature of Mackmurdo’s work is the way that it is setup to be equally dynamic. In 1882, the repeat pattern of Mackmurdo's Single Flower cretonne, shows several features of his book. The inexpensive design appears in a single plane, which this piece employs color. This was to show the external force of wind or water. Mackmurdo’s originality of his designs was a result of two elements. The first element was a distinctive use of botanical imagery and the function of the imagery as the symbolic embodiment of a constructive and ordering force in the processes of nature. Between the mid 1870s and early 1880s, Mackmurdo made much of this illustration misuse of evolutionary theory, when a scientific literature was giving particular attention to plant life, including that of the seas. Mackmurdo's design guidelines and the qualities of his own designs, especially their dynamic rhythms, their suggestion of the mutual action of internal and external forces.These principles can be seen in the illustrations that by the two reports of marine expeditions by Sir C. Wyville Thomson. Mackmurdo's two basic propositions, that nature is regulated by a law of progressive development and that a work of art is similar to a plant by also being a work of nature gave his theory of design a moral and civilizing urge.