Walter Crane was an Arts and Crafts designer, theorist and active socialist. His work is difficult to categorize. He made designs for wallpaper, pottery, stained glass, trades union banners; illustrated books, newspapers and magazines; wrote prolifically; and also painted. He believed in the ‘unity of the arts’ and was a founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild (founded in 1884), and was also president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1888 to 1893.

Crane was the first person in the audience to respond to George Birdwood’s damning comments concerning Indian art, made after E. B. Havell’s paper on 12 January 1910 at the Royal Society of Arts. Alighting on Havell’s points about the dangers of Western commercialism for the survival of traditional Indian arts and craft, Crane said that he had found a link between what certain artists in India and England were attempting to do, namely, to ‘raise the banner of the handicrafts’.

Crane and his wife had travelled to India in the winter of 1906-7, a journey he recorded in his book India Impressions. Crane noted that he and his wife had been inspired to make the trip after making the acquaintance several young Indian men in London, many of whom were called to the Bar. Crane was also a member of the India Society and sat on the Executive Committee of the Festival of Empire in 1911. He was involved with the Festival’s Indian Court committee and was appointed to the art sub-committee. Crane designed posters and other visual material for the Festival. A year after the Festival of Empire, Crane designed the front cover of a new publication, the African Times and Orient Review, edited by the Egyptian writer, actor and nationalist, Duse Mohamed.

Eric Gill was one of the most significant sculptors to work in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. As well as being a talented stone carver, he was also a gifted draughtsman, letterer, typographer and printer. Rejecting the established techniques of making sculpture with the aid of the pointing machine, Gill is credited with re-establishing the practice of ‘direct carving’ in Britain and influencing the work of subsequent generations of sculptors, including Henry Moore.

Gill began to make sculpture in 1909, having trained in the offices of the architect W. D. Caroë and enrolled in evening classes in masonry at the Westminster Technical Institute and calligraphy at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. His first figural sculpture, Estin Thalassa (now lost), combined cut lettering, for which he had already become well known, and a naked, crouching woman. He showed photographs of this work to William Rothenstein and Roger Fry who became crucial supporters of his work. Whilst Rothenstein was travelling in India, Gill wrote to him telling him about his own exposure in Britain to images of Indian architecture and sculpture through a publication called Wonders of the World.

In 1908, Gill met Ananda Coomaraswamy at a lecture given by the latter at the Art Workers’ Guild in London. Through these acquaintances, Gill became interested in the art and culture of India and he joined the India Society in 1910 (as did fellow sculptor Jacob Epstein). Gill took a specific interest in the religious carving which adorned South Asian temples, heavily influenced by Coomaraswamy’s publications. In his Autobiography, Gill wrote of Coomaraswamy: ‘I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding.’ Gill also wrote an introductory essay on ‘Art and Reality’ for Mulk Raj Anand’s The Hindu View of Art and contributed a full-page engraving to Anand’s The Lost Child, published in 1934.