The paradoxical English Arts and Crafts designer William Arthur Smith Benson developed a love of craft and machines as a child from an uncle who taught him to use lathes and other simple machinery. After attending Oxford University, he met the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the Arts and Crafts pioneer William Morris, both of whom encouraged him to use his skills and become a craftsman. Ignoring this advice, Benson trained as an architect but ultimately decided not to make it is his career. However, he did design and build occasional architectural projects for family and friends.

 

With his father’s financial backing and Morris’s encouragement, Benson opened a workshop for wood and metalworking in London in 1880. As he wrote to his mother in January of that year, “The long and the short of it is, I must make something or be miserable. . . . I think there’s every chance of profit as well as pleasure.”¹ In his first year, he made only furniture while attempting to find skilled metalworkers. In 1882 he opened a Kensington showroom to retail his newly realized metalwork designs. These products included a variety of domestic items, such as light fittings, hollowware, and other useful items for the home and hearth. His metalwork proved so popular that by 1887 he had moved his showroom to New Bond Street, the retail heart of fashionable London.

 

Benson is considered an early modernist due to his embrace of the technical innovations of the time. His production encompassed a variety of fittings for gas lights, oil lamps, and, by the 1890s, electric lights. Although he preferred to “produce beautiful forms by machinery on a commercial scale, rather than single works of art,” his designs for artistic metalwork were seen as appropriate for interiors in the Arts and Crafts style.² The use of reflective copper and brass enhanced and directed light sources in an innovative way. William Morris called him “Mr. Brass Benson” and used his distinctive brass light fittings, teapots, and fireplace furniture in many of his interior projects.

 

Benson’s love of machinery and invention set him apart from the predominant interests of the Arts and Crafts movement, which prized handwork, old-fashioned techniques and designs, and an avoidance of machined parts. To Benson, the machine was acceptable, providing that it was in service to the vision of the craftsman-designer. He designed within the ethos of the movement: his pieces have simple decoration with plainly visible joints, wires, and mechanisms. Morris saw Benson as an important designer, and Benson would become a director of Morris & Co., the preeminent Arts and Crafts retailer, in 1905.

 

Benson was one of the most significant and forward-looking of the Arts and Crafts designers.  His fittings for early electrical lights are perhaps the most commonly found examples of his metalwork. This screen is a rare example of Benson’s imaginative ideas for that old-fashioned fixture, the fireplace. Screens were historically used to contain sparks from flying embers and to protect occupants from the intense heat of the fire. The use of smooth, unornamented copper on this screen also allowed for a reflection of warm light into the room. Its celebration of simple utility and beautiful form make it a signature work for Benson. The oval design, registered in 1891 and numbered 691A in his 1899 catalogue, was one of two floriform screens he offered.³ The more common design, numbered 679, has been variously interpreted as resembling a round flower or a propeller, embracing both sides of Benson’s aesthetic. The asymmetrical example, sometimes called the Lotus screen, is far rarer, with only three examples now in public collections.⁴ Benson was certainly pleased with the screen and its curving vanes that resemble a multipetaled flower or leafy plant. In a 1911 photograph, it appears in the fireplace of the drawing room at Windleshaw House (fig. 7.1), a country house designed by Benson for himself and his wife. —Christine Gervais