Christopher Dresser

(b Glasgow, 4 July 1834; d Mulhouse, Alsace, 24 Nov 1904). Scottish designer, botanist and writer. He trained at the Government School of Design, Somerset House, London, between 1847 and 1854, during which time he was strongly influenced by the design reform efforts of Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and Owen Jones. In 1854 he began to lecture at the school on botany and in 1856 supplied a plate illustrating the 'geometrical arrangement of flowers' for Jones's Grammar of Ornament. In 1857 he presented a series of lectures at the Royal Institution entitled 'On the Relationship of Science to Ornamental Art', which he followed up in a series of 11 articles in the Art Journal (1857-8) on the similar subject of 'Botany as Adapted to the Arts and Art-Manufacture'. His first three books were on botanical subjects, and in 1860 he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Jena for his research in this area.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Educated at the Government School of Design, London (1847-54), the British designer, theorist, and botanist Christopher Dresser went on to play a leading role in design debates in Britain in the second half of the 19th century. He worked in a wide range of design media including furniture, metalware (including work for James Dixon & Son), cast iron (including work for the Coalbrookdale Company), ceramics (including work for Mintons), glass (including work for James Coupar & Sons), wallpaper and textiles (including work for Warner & Sons). Designers such as Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones, and Henry Cole influenced his early thinking, which sought to reconcile design with industrial production as a means of bringing well-designed products within the price range of a wide public. In this respect his 1862 book, The Art of Decorative Design, introduced Dresser's design thinking to a large readership, ideas which were further developed in his later work on The Principles of Decorative Design, published in 1873. In a more practical vein in 1880 he established the short-lived (and unsuccessful) Art Furnishers' Alliance in Bond Street, London, as more direct means of introducing high standards of design to the consuming public. In his design work he used modern materials where appropriate and applied a systematic, almost scientific approach to the construction of form, the application of colour and framing of proportion.

Dresser had been deeply interested in botany in the earlier phases of his career, reflected in his appointment to the chairs of Botany at South Kensington (1860) and of Ornamental Art and Botany at the Crystal Palace (1862). His writings on the subject led to the award of a doctorate by Jena University in 1860. He also believed that the abstraction of natural forms provided the basis for ornamentation, a view that ran counter to the prevalent Victorian obsession with historical eclecticism. Natural forms offered designers in the second half of the 19th century an alternative to the widespread dependency on historical styles, an alternative approach evident in many Arts and Crafts Movement designs and much Art Nouveau work at the turn of the century. Japanese and oriental art, increasingly widely known in the West from the mid-century, also offered designers another choice in the later decades of the 19th century. Dresser himself developed a keen interest in Japanese design, examples of which he had seen at the 1862 International Exhibition in London in which he exhibited some of his own designs. In 1876-7 he made his first visit to Japan, subsequently setting up the company of Dresser & Holme to deal in Japanese and oriental goods. He also published a book entitled Japan: Its Art and Art Manufactures (1882) and was influenced in his own design work by the art forms about which he wrote so eloquently. He has been seen by some as the first industrial designer (although it should be noted that this is a very different interpretation of the term when compared to the commercial and interdisciplinary outlook of American designers such as Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, and Walter Dorwin Teague in the 1930s). Historical recognition of his contribution to the course of Modernist design was initiated by Nikolaus Pevsner in his influential book Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936).

Glasgow-born, one of the most distinguished and inventive industrial designers of C19. His publications include Botany as Adapted to the Arts and Art Manufactures (1857–8), The Art of Decorative Design (1862), The Principles of Decorative Design (1873), Japan, its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882), and Modern Ornamentation (1886). Many of his designs for incised ornament and cast-iron artefacts were widely copied. He was profoundly influenced by the natural world, by A. W. N. Pugin, by Owen Jones, and by Japanese artefacts.

Bibliography

• Dennis & Jesse (1972)
• Dresser (1862, 1873, 1882)
• Durant (1993
• Halen (1993)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)