Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (12 December 1851 – 15 March 1942) was a progressive English architect and designer, who influenced theArts and Crafts Movement, notably through theCentury Guild of Artists, which he set up in partnership withHerbert Horne in 1882. He was the pioneer of theModern Style (British Art Nouveau style) and in turn globalArt Nouveau movement.
Mackmurdo was the son of a wealthy chemical manufacturer. He was educated atFelsted School, and was first trained under the architect T. Chatfield Clarke, from whom he claimed to have learnt nothing. Then, in 1869, he became an assistant to the Gothic Revival architectJames Brooks. In 1873, he visitedJohn Ruskin's School of Drawing, and accompanied Ruskin to Italy in 1874.[1] He stayed on to study inFlorence for a while; despite the influence of Ruskin, theItalian architecture he was most impressed by was that of theRenaissance.[2]
In 1874 he opened his own architectural practice at 28 Southampton Street, in central London.
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In 1882, Mackmurdo founded the Century Guild of Artists with his friend and fellow architectHerbert Percy Horne. Others associated with the Guild included most prominentlySelwyn Image, but also Clement Heaton,William De Morgan,Heywood Sumner,Christopher Whall, Charles Winstanley,William Kellock Brown, George Esling and John Ruskin's protegee, the sculptorBenjamin Creswick.[2] It was one of the more successful craft guilds of its time. It offered complete furnishing of homes and buildings, and its artists were encouraged to participate in production as well as design; Mackmurdo himself mastered several crafts, includingmetalworking andcabinet making.
In 1884, the guild showed a display in the form of a music room at the Health Exhibition in London; the stand was shown, with variations, at subsequent exhibitions in Manchester and Liverpool. It incorporated two of Mackmurdo's favourite motifs. One was foliage twisted into sinuous curves.[2]Nikolaus Pevsner described Mackmurdo's use of such foliage on the title page of the designer's ownWren's City Churches (1883) as "the first work of art nouveau which can be traced", identifying its main influences asRossetti andBurne-Jones, and ultimately, through them,William Blake.[3]
The second motif was the use of thin square columns, topped with flat squares instead of capitals. These columns influenced the furniture designs ofC.F.A. Voysey, and, through him,Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackmurdo used them architecturally on his own house at 8 Private Road, Enfield (1887), and on a house for the artistMortimer Menpes, at 25Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea (1893–94), where he incorporated them into a kind ofQueen Anne style.[2]
Mackmurdo made a major donation to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, which is an important repository of the work of the Century Guild.
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