These words all refer to makers or constructors of products at some level below that of artistic creation. An artisan falls midway between the full-scale artist who creates single inimitable words and the mere worker who turns out identical, anonymous products: Italian artisans were imported to New York expressly to hand-carve the masonry on the brownstone buildings of the 1890s. Artisan was once much closer in meaning to artist, as witness the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral. These were created by anonymous artisans , but they are often great works of art none the less. Artificer still can suggest its earliest meaning of a worker who possesses mechanical facility: the artificer in an infantry company who cares for and repairs its weapons. In other uses artificer had begun to sound fusty until James Joyce re-introduced the word in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to stand for the artist as creator and controller of art and life. It has sometimes been used since in this highest sense.

Craftsman has risen somewhat in the scale to the artist end of the spectrum since the advent of machine-made objects in the 19th century: Replaced by factories, the furniture-maker, the bookbinder, the dyer and the weaver were all skilled craftsmen whose century-old secrets were lost during the industrial revolution. Craftsman is now a common term to describe a worker in the minor arts; a ceramist or a pottery-maker would not feel insulted to be called a craftsman . In the other arts, the word is used of an artist unusually adept in the technical aspects of his art: The young poet was an extraordinary craftsman simply from the standpoint of the variety of poetic forms that he could command effectively.

Creator and designer in the minor arts are parallel terms and imply the existence of a subordinate who carries a plan into effect. The person named on the playbill as the creator of a play’s costumes conceived and sketched them; someone else probably made them. A fashion, book-cover or car designer plans the physical appearance of the completed product down to the smallest detail, but craftsmen and other workers actually make up or build according to the designs.

Workman implies someone who has more craftsmanship than a worker would possess but far less than an artisan.

• We called in an artisan to repair the broken base of our Sèvres vase; At the same time, workmen arrived to fix our leaky roof.