A well-published nonacademic specialist on the art and architecture especially of Georgian Britain, James Ayres sets out in his latest book to trace the movement from craft to art in what he describes as the “early modern British tradition.” That rather broad blanket allows him to treat “the training of individuals and their creation of handmade objects” (448) from the Elizabethan era to the nineteenth century and to offer intriguing glimpses into comparable experiences in colonial North America. He goes about his task with twenty short and largely narrative chapters, seventeen appendices (mostly bringing illustrative primary sources to print), an eleven-page glossary of terms, and 134 well-reproduced illustrations.

The very notion of craft as distinct from art and the definition of the elements of each have become important and current subjects in art historical discourse, and ones that now lean heavily to the theoretical side. Though Ayres remains largely innocent of that turn, he provides here a detailed understanding of the nuts and bolts of both craft and art, and of their makers, which can be ignored by those inclined to theoretical concerns only at their peril.

Ayres begins with an opening five chapters on the guild structure and training that pertained in the sixteenth century and that evolved in a generally downward spiral until the early nineteenth. In what historians will find to be the weakest section of the whole, Ayres sometimes treads here on long barren ground, crossing swords, for example, with George Unwin (1908) for neglecting the Statute of Artificers, and finding it necessary to distinguish religious from craft guilds, while neglecting the copious specialized research which has since accrued. He then moves more confidently to consider the working life of painters (chapters 6–13), tracing in close detail both the evolution of specialties within that occupation and the techniques and materials employed by each of them. The consideration of sculptors that follows (chapters 14–18) treats at length the techniques of sculpting in clay, plaster, wood, and metal (though surprisingly little on stone), along with discussion of the practitioners of that occupation and their essential relevant materials. Finally, chapter 19 treats the emergence of academies of art, the culminating stage of his story, and chapter 20 offers a conclusion to the whole.

James Ayres can always be counted on for a hands-on approach to the arts and crafts of early modern Britain, one that brings the view from the shop floor and mason's lodge as well as the library and archive (though rather little from the academic seminar). This offering is no exception, and it also finds Ayres markedly unrestrained by the boundaries of his title. That is to say, for example, his “British tradition” sometimes takes in colonial North America as well, deals with craftsmen in other lines of work, and (more disturbingly) too readily takes evidence from one era to support a point about another. Yet this is not a work to be taken lightly nor by any means to be dismissed as dull. Ayres likes a good story. He proceeds with rich and colorful anecdotal material and draws easily on an impressive range of literary and historical sources, leaping boundaries of time and place as he does so. He also takes great interest in how things work, delighting in the technical details of craft production and organization. Such descriptions serve to distinguish the book from conventional academic discourse while they contribute substantially to such discussion. On the down side, he deals somewhat more erratically with current scholarship. Thus, for example, he takes on board the suggestive work of Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), on handicraft production while remaining largely silent about the substantial outpouring of scholarship produced over the past three decades on such subjects as guild organization and operation.

Perhaps such inconsistencies of coverage are inevitable in a work with such a broad remit, for this is a brave “crossover” book of the sort now very much encouraged by publishers, intent on reaching out to new and broader audiences. In that regard it would be heavy going without the very useful interdisciplinary glossary of terms, most of them already familiar to some potential readers but not to others. (Oxbow should be thanked for allowing Ayres to include it, and for the elegant appearance of the whole, but not for a standard of editing that could have tightened the organization and eliminated numerous typographical infelicities!) In sum, readers of both history and art history, specialists in material culture, labor history and industrial organization, and connoisseurs of both art and craft, will find much to learn here, along with some things that one group or the other may have learned long ago.