Indicadores Financieros

In 1898 the artist and book illustrator Walter Crane became Principal of the RCA and set about a reform of the College, attempting again to introduce practical work to the College. He asked for extra workshop facilities, more practical classes to give students

402Ibid., p. 58.

403Ibid., p. 58.

an insight into the relationship between design and materials, and an exhibition space where students could create complete interiors.⁴⁰⁴ In 1899 some of these

recommendations were put into practice. The College was reorganised into four schools: Mural and Decorative Painting, Sculpture and Modelling, Architecture, and Design, each with its own Professor.⁴⁰⁵ Following Crane’s short period of time at the RCA, Augustus Spencer, who had previously been head of Leicester School of Art, became principal in 1900, a post he held for twenty years. The teaching emphasis was still strong, though now not the only purpose of the College, and, as Frayling comments, as the RCA was no longer solely training art teachers, its role had become

ambiguous.⁴⁰⁶ Spencer continued to introduce practical classes and by 1905 the College was able to offer facilities for practical classes in woodcarving and gesso, stained glass, calligraphy and illumination, tapestry and weaving, and pottery. Other classes for furniture, enamelling, stone and marble carving, textile weaving printing, and mosaic work all required more expensive resources and were awaiting on funding from the Board of Education before they could be started.⁴⁰⁷ Started by Walter Crane, and continued by Spencer, the RCA was at last returning to practical work for students.

By 1910 the College no longer took part in the national competitions which were part of the course of instruction set out by Cole and Redgrave, and questions had begun to be asked regarding the RCA’s place within a system of national art education.⁴⁰⁸ The College was seen as both a training college to supply teachers for regional art schools and a place where the pick of the students from the local schools could be trained in more advanced work for industry.⁴⁰⁹ It was therefore sending art teachers out, and receiving students in. The question was which of these two issues – teacher training or training for industry - should predominate and how the two issues related to each other.⁴¹⁰ The Board of Education set up a Departmental Committee to investigate these issues and published its final report in 1911; some of the statistics in the appendix made

404Ibid., p. 66-7.

405Ibid., p. 67.

406Ibid., p. 68.

407Ibid., p. 69.

408Ibid., p. 77-9.

409Ibid., p. 79.

410Ibid., p. 79.

for interesting reading. According to the report, only 25% of students stayed at the College long enough to complete their courses and apparently, only 26 students out of all of those who graduated between 1901 and 1910 had gone on to become professional designers or craftspeople.⁴¹¹ In view of the strong emphasis on art teacher training and the lack of practical work at the College in the preceding years, this last statistic is perhaps unsurprising. Given that the original aim of the School of Design back in 1837 was to be of benefit to manufactures, it can be argued that the School had failed, and failed miserably in this regard.

Conflicting views were brought before the 1910 Committee, perhaps reflecting the on-going discussions about the RCA since it had started. Manufacturers thought that RCA students had too little knowledge of the history of design and the styles that the public liked; teachers at the College thought that courses were too historical and did not let students develop their own personal style.⁴¹² Frayling writes that the solution was to encourage students to take more of an ‘apprentice’ role in classes to replicate

professional conditions, perhaps in a similar manner to the classes held by Gottfried Semper in the 1850s. It seems ironic that sixty years later, in 1910, the same solution was being proposed, and gives rise to questions as to the direction art education would have taken had it not been diverted off course away from manufactures by Cole and Redgrave.

The intention was to reduce the amount of art teacher training at the College though it was to be another thirty years or so before the RCA fully shed its teacher training responsibilities.⁴¹³ There was also the intention to make the RCA ‘a place of research, providing opportunity for the highest specialisation in art and craft, and conducted to meet the fullest educational requirements of both the artist and craftsman’, though again, it would be the late 1940s before it came to full fruition.⁴¹⁴ This was the first time that mention had been made of the RCA becoming what was in essence a postgraduate institution and Frayling writes regarding the College, that by 1911 there was ‘no point

411Ibid., p. 79.

412Ibid., p. 80.

413Ibid., pp. 81 & 83.

414Cited inIbid., pp. 81-83.

in pretending that its primary function, in the early part of the twentieth century, was to provide artisans with an understanding of the principles of design, for that was no longer the case…. ‘the provinces’ could deal quite adequately with that side of things’.⁴¹⁵

Local art schools then, were to take on the responsibility for training art teachers, though some would go to the RCA for more advanced work, and the local schools were also to undertake the training of artisans in the principles of design. The two local art schools which are examined in this thesis were indeed both providing teacher training and art education for their students, but towards the end of the 1800s both schools attempted to offer more practical, relevant training to their students; a move which was not approved of by the Department of Science and Art.