The Art Workers' Guild is an organisation established in 1884 by a group of British painters, sculptors, architects, and designers associated with the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. The guild promoted the 'unity of all the arts', denying the distinction between fine and applied art. It opposed the professionalisation of architecture – which was promoted by the Royal Institute of British Architects at this time – in the belief that this would inhibit design. In his 1998 book, Introduction to Victorian Style, University of Brighton's David Crowley stated the guild was "the conscientious core of the Arts and Crafts Movement".

The guild was not the first organisation to promote the unity of the arts. Two organisations, the Fifteen and St George's Art Society had existed previously, and the guild's founders came from the St George's Art Society. They were five young architects from Norman Shaw's office: W. R. Lethaby, Edward Prior, Ernest Newton, Mervyn Macartney and Gerald C. Horsley, plus metal worker W. A. S. Benson, designer Heywood Sumner, painter C. H. H. Macartney, sculptors Hamo Thornycroft and Edward Onslow Ford, and the architect John Belcher. The motive for the guild's creation was the summer exhibition in 1883 at the Royal Academy of Arts, where the "mother of arts" were snubbed to two side walls in one gallery. Edward Prior wrote in November 1883,

Painters, Sculptors, and Architects are in danger of settling permanently into three distinct professions, oblivious of one another's aims. A Society is wanted to restore their former union with one another with a programme of cohesion such as the Royal Academy hardly now suggests, and which the Institute of British Architects has deliberately rejected.

Others were soon invited to join, including Fifteen members Lewis Foreman Day, George Blackall Simonds and J. D. Sedding, as well as architects Somers Clarke, John Thomas Micklethwaite, W. C. Marshall, Basil Champneys; painters Herbert Gustave Schmalz, Alfred Parsons, John McLure Hamilton, William R. Symonds and etcher Theodore Blake Wirgman. The first meeting took place on 18 January 1884 at Charing Cross Hotel with Belcher as chair, and after some debate agreed they would invite others "for promoting greater intercourse among the Arts". Several names were proposed, including Guild of Art by Benson, Guild of Associated Arts, Guild of Art Workers, The Art Workers and the Society of Art Workers. Prior combined the name ideas and put forward the Art Workers' Guild and wrote the Guilds prospectus. The name and prospectus was agreed and the guild was formally created on 11 March and by its first formal annual meeting on 5 December 1884 it had grown to 56 members. The guild was based on the medieval trade guilds, with members called Brothers and its head called Master. Its first master was the sculptor, George Blackall Simonds. In 1885, Walter Crane reiterated the guild's worries to the Fabian Society,

Artistic expression had only reached its noblest and most beautiful results under collective condition of the arts, at all events when all art was decorative, and all were allied to architecture.

The guild organised talks, lectures, demonstrations and meetings to bring unity of the arts to its members including guest speakers such as Lucien Pissarro in 1891. Sir Edwin Lutyens was first invited as a guest in 1892 and recalled:

then, no one knew me and those few that did patronised or snubbed me

but he joined later and admired the freedom to argue passionately and: