In the words of the Oxford Companion of the Decorative Arts, the text here was written by a man who “affected the whole direction of twentieth-century European design education.” William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931) was an architect who became involved in the Society to Preserve Ancient Buildings and in the Arts & Crafts Movement. He was the first director of the Central School of Arts & Crafts and one of the founders of the Art Workers Guild. DNB notes, “Lethaby was a reformer whose beliefs in the moral significance of art were expressed in the surge of books, articles, and lectures that continued for five decades, amounting to the most impressive body of sustained design polemic since John Ruskin.”
