The Artist and the Tradesman

The Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts at Burlington House was an
acknowledgment of the fact that there are other arts besides those of
painting, sculpture, and architecture, or rather perhaps that the arts
subsidiary to architecture are arts and not merely commercial
activities. Burlington House would protest, of course, that it is not a
shop; but now at last objects are to be shown in it which the great mass
of the public expects to see only in shops and expects to be produced
merely to sell. We remember how Lord Grimthorpe called Morris a poetic
upholsterer. He meant there was something incongruous in the combination
of an upholsterer and a poet; he would have seen nothing incongruous in
the combination of a poet and a painter, because he would have called a
painter an artist; but an upholsterer was to him merely a tradesman, and
tradesmen are not expected to write poetry. Their business is to sell
things and to make objects for sale.

In that respect he thought like the mass of the public now. For them
the painter has some prestige, because he is supposed not to be a
tradesman, not to paint his pictures merely so that he may sell them. He
has to live by his art, of course, but he practises it also because he
enjoys it; and, if he is an artist, he will not paint bad pictures
merely because they are what the public wants. But it is the business of
those who make furniture and such things to produce what the public
wants. No one would blame them for producing what they do not like
themselves, any more than one would blame a pill-maker for producing
pills that he would not swallow himself. The pill-maker and the
furniture-maker are both tradesmen producing objects in answer to a
demand. They have no prestige and no conscience is expected of them.

Now in Italy in the fifteenth century this distinction between the
artist and the tradesman did not exist. The painter was a tradesman; he
kept a shop and he had none of that peculiar prestige which he possesses
now. But of the tradesman more was expected than is expected now; for
instance, good workmanship and material were expected of him and also
good design. He did not produce articles merely to sell, whether they
were pictures or wedding-chests or jewelry or pots and pans. He made all
these other things just as he made pictures, with some pleasure and
conscience in his own work; and it was the best craftsman who bec