Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

In England from the 1730s onwards, demands were increasingly made for the improvement of the design of nationally manufactured goods. Improved design was regarded as an essential prerequisite to the ability to compete on equal terms with rival, and especially French, producers of luxury goods. Proponents of such improvements tended to concentrate their efforts on the provision of drawing instruction for artisans, and a variety of schemes for the establishment of a public educational body for the ‘arts of design’ were (unsuccessfully) put forward. In the absence of an official policy and institution with control over design education for the applied arts, the ‘market’ stepped in to satisfy the need for instruction (in the form of private drawing schools and a variety of differently motivated publications including drawing and model books, treatises and engraved ornament), and provided the forum for debate. Two distinct periods (the 1740s–1768 with a sub-period of the 1750s–1763, and post-1768 to the early decades of the nineteenth century) and the respective industries of greatest contemporary concern or visibility (textiles, woodcarving and furniture, furniture and interior decoration) serve as the basis for a more detailed analysis of the different drawing skills that were taught in the period, as well as of the various, and at times contending, meanings of the term ‘design’.

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