In Essential Arts and Crafts, Karen Livingstone explores the origins, myths, and multiplicity of the Arts and Crafts movement through some of its most ground-breaking works. Encompassing painting and the Japanese Mingei (folkcraft) movement, she subtly redefines and enlarges our understanding of Arts and Crafts, one of the seminal movements of the modern world. The Arts and Crafts movement was one of the most far-reaching and influential design movements of modern times, changing the very way people thought about work and the home and producing some archetypal works that still have a strong appeal today. In the work of designers such as C.R. Mackintosh, C.F.A.Voysey, Josef Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley and Bernard Leach we see the main concerns of Arts and Crafts played out across Europe, America and, later, Japan. What inspired them all was a profound belief in social and industrial reform, the revival of handicrafts, a return to the simple