Recorded Talk Series: Heroines and Heroes of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Heroines and Heroes of the Arts and Crafts Movement
Organised by Michael Hall, Steven Brindle and Maya Donelan
Recorded between 28 January to 18 March 2026
The subject of the Series is one of perennial interest, the Arts and Crafts Movement. Although it might be thought that there is little more to be learned about its leading practitioners, our speakers will be drawing on a large amount of new research, much of which is highlighting the often-neglected role played by women in the Movement, which remains of direct relevance to architects, artists and designers today
Buy tickets for all 7 recorded talks for the price of 6. You can watch recordings of the talks at a time which suits you.
Philip Webb. A talk by Max Donnelly
Recorded on Wednesday 28 January 2026
If asked to name the most significant architect of the Arts and Crafts movement, most people would choose Philip Webb (1831-1915), yet despite the fame of his highly influential houses, the full extent of his achievements in the decorative arts has been overshadowed by his close personal and professional relationship with William Morris.
Max Donnelly, Curator of Furniture and Woodwork 1800–1915 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, will discuss Webb’s works as a designer of domestic interiors, drawing on the research he has carried out for a chapter on Webb’s designs for interior decoration in the catalogue for an exhibition on Webb to be held at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and the V&A.
Gertrude Jekyll
by Caroline Ikin
Recorded Wednesday 4 February 2026
In 2023 the National Trust acquired Munstead Wood, Surrey, home of then most famous garden designer of the Arts and Crafts movement, Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932), where from 1882 she laid out a 15-acre garden which became a place of experimentation. Work is under way both to restore the garden and to explore ways of interpreting Jekyll’s wider artistic legacy.
Caroline Ikin, Curator at the National Trust for Nymans, Standen and Munstead Wood will discuss Jekyll’s decorative arts and interiors, drawing on her recent research on this lesser-known part of the designer’s career, and will explore Munstead Wood as a complete expression of Arts and Crafts: architecture, garden and interiors.
Edwin Lutyens. A Talk by Clive Aslet
Recorded Wednesday 11 February 2026
In a career that began when he opened his first office at the age of nineteen in 1889, Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), rose to the heights of his profession with such masterpieces as the Thiepval Arch, New Delhi and the design for Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. Yet the buildings with which even now he is most closely associated are the romantically beguiling country houses he designed before 1914, thanks in part to the magical photographs of them published in Country Life.
Our guide to Lutyens’s Arts and Crafts period is Clive Aslet, visiting professor of architecture at the University of Cambridge, who was the Editor of
Country Life from 1993 to 2006. He is the author of numerous books, including Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect.
Phoebe Anna Traquair. A Talk by Elizabeth Cumming
Recorded Wednesday 25 February 2026
‘A woman the size of a fly’: Louis Davis’s 1902 comment to his friend Robert Lorimer gives no idea of the sheer ambition and many achievements of Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936). Born and educated in Ireland, she settled with her Scottish husband to Edinburgh, where she became involved in the city’s social art movement, painting murals in tiny and vast buildings and teaching design from the 1880s. She produced some of Britain’s most remarkable embroideries and illuminated manuscripts, packed with colour and imagination.
Our speaker, Dr Elizabeth Cumming, has documented Traquair’s life and art for nearly half a century, including most recently Phoebe Anna Traquair for the National Galleries of Scotland in 2022.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald. A talk by Robyne Calvert
Recorded Wednesday 4 March 2026
For all his fame, more myths cling to Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and his significance as a designer than to almost any other architect of the Arts and Crafts movement. Many centre on his marriage in 1900 to the artist Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933), with whom he was then collaborating on the design of the Ladies Luncheon Room at Miss Cranston’s Tearooms at Ingram Street, Glasgow. ‘You are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work’, wrote Mackintosh to his wife, but how true was that? Their partnership will be analysed by Robyne Calvert, the author of The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art, published by Yale University Press in 2024.
May Morris. A Talk by Lynn Hulse
Recorded on Wednesday 11 March 2026
The younger daughter of William Morris, May Morris (1862–1938), was well-known in her lifetime for her pioneering expertise in ‘art embroidery’ and for running the embroidery department of Morris & Co. She had however a much larger role in the Arts and Crafts movement as a designer of textiles, wallpapers and jewellery and as an influential teacher. Recent research on Morris has filled out our understanding of a woman who combined a career in art and design with social activism and support for women artists. A textile scholar and practitioner who specialises in embroidered furnishings of the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, Lynn Hulse is the editor of May Morris: Art and Life (2017) and author of May Morris Designs (2025)
Christopher Whall. A Talk by Peter Cormack
Recorded on Wednesday 18 March 2026
When windows designed by Christopher Whall (1849–1924) were shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London in 1888 they were immediately recognised as a break-through. Whall changed for ever the direction of the finest stained glass in Britain, thanks to his mastery of not only design but also every stage of its manufacture to create windows in which sumptuous colours were combined with thickly textured ‘slab’ glasses and bold leading patterns.
Whall’s achievement will be discussed by Peter Cormack, a noted scholar of post-medieval British and American stained glass, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose classic study Arts & Crafts Stained Glass, published by Yale University Press in 2015 was the first book to do Whall and his legacy full justice.