Music by David Gauld, 1889 (detail). Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery

Sophie Allen discovers a world of passion and elegance in an exhibition exploring the Scottish influence on the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s elongated flowers and female forms may grace everything from watches to tea towels these days, but as a new exhibition in Sheffield shows there was far more to the movement he helped popularise than his ubiquitous floral patterns.

Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland, showing at the Millennium Galleries until January 20 2008, examines a movement that sought to revolutionise design and to incorporate highly decorative objects into everyday life.

The main driving force behind much of Arts and Crafts was a rejection of what was seen as the ‘soulless’ reality of machine production, with value instead placed on simple hand-crafted items.

Mackintosh, as one of the movement’s most famous names, is well represented. His striking stained glass window, designed for the Glasgow School of Art and depicting a scene from the story of Tristan and Isolde, is a typical Arts and Crafts piece.

Its elegant design, allegorical imagery and emphasis on traditional craftsmanship are elements that recur throughout the collection. But works by Mackintosh make up only a fragment of the exhibition, which contains pieces by an exhaustive range of artists who subscribed to the Arts and Crafts ideology.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Chair for the hall of Windyhill, 1901. Courtesy Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery, photo Kevin McClean

Arts and Crafts was a movement that embraced design in its broadest sense, including everything from architecture to embroidery. Artists such as Mackintosh and Herbert McNair were concerned with people’s day-to-day relationships with the objects around them and the principles underpinning their work can be seen as nothing less than a manifesto for living.

Videos and photographs of Arts and Crafts buildings, such as Skirling House, designed by Ramsey Traquair, and Mackintosh’s Hill House in Helensburgh, show these artists could work on a grand scale, but the same philosophy is apparent in far more trivial objects. The beautiful Art Nouveau inspired covers given to books as ordinary as Modern House Construction reveal the underlying belief that everything could, and should, be beautiful.

This equal focus given to the small and domestic means women played a significant role in the movement. Although many of these women were involved in the typically female activity of needlework, Phoebe Traquair’s large-scale embroidery, The Salvation of Mankind, one of the most prominent and ambitious pieces in the exhibition, shows they were valued as artists.

Like many of her contemporaries Traquair was clearly influenced by the medieval imagery and romanticised female figures of the earlier Pre-Raphaelite movement. Images from Celtic mythology were also repeatedly used to reinforce the artists’ Scottish origins.

Elizabeth Amour (Bough Studio), Dish, c1925-26. Private collection, courtesy City Arts Centre, Edinburgh

But while their subject matter may have been old-fashioned even at the time, their method of creation combined both the traditional and the modern. While it scorned the repetitive nature of mass production, the Arts and Crafts movement was built around collaboration, particularly with skilled craftsmen, and aimed for a more organic system of production.

Arts and Crafts’ continued influence on our taste in interior design shows how its legacy has persisted, although in a debased form. Ironically, Mackintosh-inspired pieces are now as mass-produced as the objects he was reacting against. Hand, Heart and Soul does much to rescue the Arts and Crafts movement from its Laura Ashley image but never quite manages to shake off an air of middle-class gentility.

Above all, it does the collection a disservice by not placing it in a clearer historical context, telling us what it was rebelling against and the artistic movements it influenced. There are hints of a more modern style in Francis Henry Newbery’s painting Daydreams, which rejects the medieval maidens for a contemporary female figure, but we are given little insight into how Arts and Crafts developed or was incorporated into other movements.

Viewed in artistic isolation Arts and Crafts can seem staid and at times a little bloodless. Yet, there is often a surprising passion in the search for perfection and as an exhibition Hand, Heart and Soul is comprehensive, informative and as elegant as the subject it showcases.