About

Craft skills were intrinsic to artisan production in Scotland between 1780 and 1914.  This online exhibition forms part of the ‘Artisans and the Craft Economy in Scotland, 1780 to 1914’ project, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2012-247) and carried out by a research team at the University of Edinburgh between 2013 and 2016.  The aims of the project were to investigate the world of artisans and the craft economy in Scotland in the long nineteenth century and to demonstrate that the craft economy was not destroyed by industrialisation but that instead it adapted and changed. Whilst Scotland’s geology and landscape had long provided essential material resources - particularly for manufacturers of textiles, iron, pottery and glass – the nineteenth-century brought a new type of consumer to Scotland’s towns and cities triggering demand for a greater diversity of Scottish hand-crafted goods.  Imported materials, part-mechanisation and sub-division of labour all changed the products and making processes of apprenticeship-trained workers; middle-class craft-makers found markets for their work, and manufacturers met demand for the materials and tools needed for amateur crafts. Railway tourism to the Scottish Highlands made a commodity of the landscape and created a new market for novel mementos and souvenirs.

Curated by the project team, Professor Stana Nenadic (Principal Investigator), Dr Keren Protheroe (Postdoctoral Research Assistant) and Sarah Laurenson (Leverhulme Doctoral Student), the exhibition has five themes, each chosen to illustrate the materiality of craft-making for individual makers and those working in artisan trades and the cultural landscape they and their work inhabited.

Handmade and Design

Designers embraced old and new technologies to style the look of nineteenth century Scottish craft.  They responded to fashion, popular culture and in the last quarter of the century a nostalgia for pre-industrial craft production. This section features objects designed as expressions of nineteenth-century stylisation and cultural preoccupations.

Vernacular and Place

Scotland’s geography and geology played an integral part in the material and ideological forms of its nineteenth-century hand-crafted production.  Sand, sea and pebbles, clay, cloth and transport systems all feature in this section whether as structures, surfaces or destinations, or simply as examples of uniquely local production.

Portraits

Artists and Scotland’s first generation of photographers captured images of renowned craft workers and also those whose names have been lost to history. This section shows how skilled men and women were portrayed as individual and collective representatives of their trade.

Workshops

Tools, tasks and evolving work practices can be understood from images of craft workers’ workshops and other places of work.  This section broadly defines the artisan’s workshop to show how hand-making skills and craft identities were embedded in spaces of production.  

Trades and Communities 

Scotland’s response to a modernising world shaped and defined its nineteenth century trades and communities.  Luxury, ingenuity, mobility and necessity were all drivers of collective craft production and retailing.  This section shows how trades and communities organised and found new markets for their work, often selling traditional skills and ideas but in modern conditions. 

Sources

Handmade and Design and Vernacular and Placefeature objects and architecture that can be seen in Scottish museum collections, in streets or other public spaces, or in publicly accessible Scottish country houses. Nineteenth-century materials, colours, textures, styles and techniques can be read from the surfaces of these items, which have survived to stand as physical evidence of the cultural preoccupations of their day. Portraits, Workshops and Trades and Communities draw on the rich collections of paintings and photographs that survive in Scottish archives and museum collections. As representations of artisans and artisan experience, craft makers and their aesthetic ideals, their evidence is both documentary and subjective. Technical limitations prior to 1914 demanded that every photograph be carefully posed, rendering each to a greater or lesser degree a collaboration between photographer and sitter.  But such was the enthusiasm for amateur and professional photography at the end of the nineteenth century that artisan life was recorded in its many incarnations. A range of Victorian preoccupations are represented in these images including nostalgia and loss, display and commemoration, social reform, artifice, design and innovation.