Illustration: George Heywood Sumner. Wallpaper design, c1907.
George Heywood Maunoir Sumner who was usually much better known as Heywood Sumner, initially trained for a career well outside the usual parameters of a creative lifestyle, that of law. It was his life long friend and future artist and designer W A S Benson that introduced Sumner to both William Morris and the larger English Arts & Crafts movement.
Interestingly, Sumner was openly critical of Morris interpretation of the decorative arts which he saw as both elitist and an extremely narrow interpretation. He spent much of his career trying to broaden the parameters of the Arts & Crafts market by supplying good quality design work to many who could not afford the lifestyle and prices that were at the heart of both Morris & Co and much of the English Arts & Crafts movement. This of course meant that Sumner had often to deal with the more overtly commercial and industrial aspects of the decorative arts world, something that many in the English Arts & Crafts movement either failed to take account of or purposely ignored altogether.
It is always difficult to rationalise the price tag often given to well designed hand craft, especially when considering the initial intention of designers and crafts people in wanting to deliver good hand craft to all, particularly those on limited budgets, which to be fair has always been most of the population. Few have managed the balance well, but many have tried with varying degrees of success. The inclusion of industry as a requisite has always had to be a factor, often a compromising one. This has frequently been seen as a compromise too far for many, particularly amongst the English Arts & Crafts movement.
That many English artists, designers and craftspeople had either a fully formed aversion to all forms of industrial production, or levels of uncomfortable compromise, is a foregone conclusion. However, a number of individuals did realise that compromise had to built into a system that was prepared to see fairness in good design. In other words well produced and thought out design and decoration work should be seen as being available to every financial budget, not just those who were wealthy enough to procure the likes of William Morris.
Illustration: George Heywood Sumner. Rosa Rugusa wallpaper design, c1915.
Whatever the complexity of the relationship between the English Arts & Crafts movement, hand craft, industrial production and the general public, the work of Heywood Sumner covered a range of disciplines both hand and machine made. He was known to have produced work in illustration, through stained glass, to textiles. He also produced a range of wallpaper design work through the end of the nineteenth century and into the first early decades of the twentieth century. Both examples shown here one from around 1907 and the other from 1915, share certain similarities with both Morris and the English Arts & Crafts movement. This goes to show that although Sumner may well have disagreed with Morris and others in the movement, on the principles of elitism, he did not necessarily disagree with them on the topic of decoration and its origin in nature.
It is important to remember that while radical ideas towards the linking of hand craft design with industry were being worked out in other areas of Europe, particularly Germany, Britain and more specifically England saw things very differently. In Germany decoration was taking on the early form of Modernism, whereby surface pattern, for example was becoming more and more radicalised, so much so that in some cases it was beginning to take on the appearance of mass production itself, seeming to glorify the process of the machine.
In England, although many like Sumner believed that cheaper and more immediate decorative work should be offered to the general buying public, they were still very much of the opinion that the decorative work should still give the appearance of hand production, even though the process of its making was far from that source. It is hard to say who had the right attitude to mass production, if there ever was a right attitude. The German process was one that was more than pragmatic, and in a way celebrated both the coming twentieth century and the practicalities of using the machine to produce products for entire populations rather than the few. The English attitude was one that was more pensive and involved the maintenance of the illusion of hand crafted design and decoration, despite the fact that the machine was often behind much of the production.
That the balance between man and machine has lost any hope of achieving a form of creative compromise is something we are well aware of in our own contemporary world. In many respects hand craft in England has become so rarefied and divorced from the domestic world that it has to all intents and purposes reorganised itself into a fine art form. To be fair this has often been through no fault of its own, but due to outside pressures and fundamental changes in both production and society in general. It may well be too late to reorganise itself yet again in order to serve the general public in a more pragmatic and practical sense.
Reference links:
The Ancient Earthworks of Cranborne Chase
New Forest
The Besom Maker And Other Country Folk Songs (1888)
HEYWOOD SUMNER'S WESSEX
CUCKOO HILL
The ancient earthworks of the New Forest: Described and delineated in plans founded on the 25 inch to 1 mile Ordnance Survey
Avon from Naseby to Tewkesbury: Twenty-one etchings
Combs Ditch and Bokerley Dyke reviewed (Proceedings of the Bournemouth Natural Science Society. [Offprint])
The Itchen Valley from Tichborne to Southampton;
The New Forest and Heywood Sumner
STONEHENGE TODAY AND YESTERDAY
