Victorian Era Tidbits:
Although students of Victorian art, architecture, and design confidently discuss the sources, importance, and influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement, they rarely agree on precisely what it was or who belonged to the movement. Everyone seems to agree that A. W. Pugin, John Ruskin, and William Morris greatly influenced the movement. All also agree that the Arts and Crafts Movement created the twentieth- and twenty-first century idea of Fine Craft, in which artist-craftsman produce furniture, glass, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, clothing, and other kinds of applied arts that museums, galleries, and collectors consider as either as fine art or as aesthetically equal to it. In fact, now that the intertwined worlds of commercial galleries, museums, and purchasers of fine arts have long abandoned the artist's personal skill as a criterion of excellence, Fine Crafts have filled the need for those who appreciate exquisite workmanship. The word art originally meant simply "craft" or "skill," and the word fine — or Beaux (as in les beaux arts) — became attached to art as a means of elevating it to a liberal art analogous to poetry. Now things to have come full circle; or almost."    (Information from www.victorianweb.org/art/design/craftintro.html)