Charles Robert Ashbee

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Charles Robert Ashbee (London, May 17, 1863–Sevenoaks, Kent, May 23, 1942) was a designer and entrepreneur who was a prime mover of the English Arts and Crafts movement that took its craft ethic from the works of John Ruskin and its co-operative structure from the socialism of William Morris.

He was the son of businessman and erotic bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee. He received his education at Wellington College. After reading history at King's College, Cambridge (1883–86) and studying under the architect George Frederick Bodley, Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888, while a resident at Toynbee Hall, a settlement in Whitechapel, London. The fledgling venture was first housed in temporary space but by 1890 had workshops at Essex House, Mile End Road, in the East End, with a retail outlet in the heart of the West End in fashionable Brook Street, Mayfair, more accessible to the Guild's patrons. In 1902 the works moved to Chipping Campden, in the picturesque Cotswolds of Gloucestershire, where a sympathetic community provided local patrons, but where the market for craftsman-designed furniture and metalwork was saturated by 1905. The Guild was liquidated in 1907.

The Guild of Handicraft specialised in metalworking, producing jewellery and enamels as well as hand-wrought copper and wrought ironwork, and furniture. The School attached to the Guild taught crafts. Ashbee himself was willing to do complete house design, including interior furniture and decoration, as well as items such as fireplaces. The Guild operated as a co-operative, and its stated aim was to:

"seek not only to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist— which is individualistic and often parasitical— and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage" [2].

Later the Guild turned to book production after Morris's Kelmscott Press closed in 1897; Ashbee took on many of the Kelmscott printers and craftsmen and set up the Essex House Press. Between 1898 and 1910 the Essex House Press produced more than 70 titles.

The London County Council's introduction of the Polytechnic Institutes, which took on craftworkers at a minimal charge, was inspired by Ashbee's Guild and School, which it out-competed and drove out of business.

A widely-illustrated suite of furniture was made by the Guild to designs of M. H. Baillie Scott for Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse at Darmstadt.

Ashbee was the founder of the Survey of London. His papers, including his journals are at King's College [3].

He is thought to have been a member of the Order of Chaeronea founded in 1897 by George Ives.

He came of age as a young gay man in a time when homosexuality was illegal and "the love that dare not speak its name". His father was an enthusiastically heterosexual pornographer. His Jewish mother developed suffragette views. And his well-educated sisters were progressive as well. [1]

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[edit] References

  1. ^ [1] The Observer review of an autobiography of his father, 25 February 2001

[edit] Further reading

  • F. MacCarthy, 1981. Simple Life: C.R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (University of California Press)
  • A. Crawford, 1986. C.R. Ashbee, Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist (Yale University Press)

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