History of modern mosaics in Britain

The founding of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) under the directorship of Sir Henry Cole in 1852 was pivotal to the continued development of mosaics as a respected craft. Cole’s founding principle was to make art available to all, to educate working people and inspire British designers and manufacturers. The new museum actively encouraged experimentation in decorative and craft skills with mosaic, most suitable for the wet, foggy environment, at the forefront. A major project was the decoration of the South Court of the museum with depictions of famous artists of history, soon known as the Kensington Valhalla. Cole commissioned designs from leading painters of the day then called on British companies in the vanguard of mosaic production. Salviati & Co., now based in Regent Street, London, produced eight of the 35 mosaics in Venetian glass smalti. Cole established a mosaic school, exclusively for women and run by his daughter Mary. She and her cousin Florence became eminent mosaic makers, executing several of the Valhalla images using British mosaic material. Powell and Son of Whitefriars were among the first manufacturers of vitreous glass exclusively for mosaic making along with Rust & Co. Some floors in the museum were composed of prefabricated panels made by women prisoners of Woking and Fulham Prisons, under supervision. This work is known as Opus Criminale and was also laid in the Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. (Andamento 5 & 9)

Jesse Rust was a pioneering mosaic maker and inventor of a patented vitreous glass material, commissioned by Cole to lay the first extensive run of mosaic floors in the V&A Museum in 1861 (now lost). He also contributed a staircase and one of the Valhalla portraits. The portfolio of work produced by this Battersea-based father and son company from its establishment in 1856 until it finally closed in 1940 is vast. The latter half of the 19th century witnessed many grand public and ecclesiastical building projects with Rust’s mosaics featuring widely, particularly the Frank Brangwyn reredos of St. Aidan’s, in Leeds, in 1916. (Andamento 1 & 7)

In 1891, William Blake Richmond, artist and follower of the Arts and Crafts movement, was commissioned to mosaic the ceiling of the quire and apse of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He immediately went to study mosaic-making in Italy and returned convinced that the best way to fabricate the mosaics was by the Direct Method, in situ. The glass smalti were specially produced by Powell and Co. and the work finished in 1904. (Andamento 4)

Another member of the Arts and Crafts movement was Robert Anning Bell, whose mosaics are found on Westminster Cathedral’s entrance tympanum, in its Lady Chapel and in the Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. Bell also worked with George Bridge and his team of ladies including Gertrude Martin, the first woman Master Mosaicist, to provide the façade mosaic of the Horniman Museum in S. E. London, in 1901. (Andamento 7, 10 & 11) Many fine examples of 19^th– and 20^th-century mosaic can be found in Westminster Cathedral.

Mosaics are still commissioned and installed all over Britain today, many of the leading artists being BAMM members. Since their reintroduction into Britain in the mid-19th century, mosaics have never gone out of fashion, but changes in taste and style over the following 180 years meant that many outstanding examples were lost in the constant cycle of demolition and rebuilding that beset the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Some glorious late 19^th– and early 20^th-century mosaics were lost to the Blitz of WWII. Sadly, mosaics have never been categorised or documented in the same way as other art forms, leaving them vulnerable to mindless destruction.