Principles of Decorative Design

A lump of clay can be worth eighteen-pence—or five pounds, perhaps fifty. The difference, Christopher Dresser argues, is not the material but the mind that shapes it.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, Dresser turns to the workshops of carpenters, potters, weavers and other makers, insisting that design is no luxury: it can transform ordinary materials into beauty and livelihood. He urges working people to train their eyes through patient study, learning to tell the graceful from the coarse, the refined from the deformed. But good taste is not a gift to be trusted blindly, nor can precious materials rescue a poor design. What kind of knowledge lets a maker give humble clay the worth of a costly treasure?

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