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Aestheticism (also known as the aesthetic movement) was an art movement in the late 19th century that valued the Aesthetics of literature, music, fonts and the over their functions.Denney, Colleen. "At the Temple of Art: the Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890", Issue 1165, p. 38, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000 . According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to teach a moral, create a Allegory, or perform another Didacticism purpose, a sentiment expressed in the slogan "art for art's sake." Aestheticism flourished in the 1870s and 1880s, gaining prominence and the support of notable writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture, as many Victorians believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Writing in The Guardian, Fiona McCarthy states that "the aesthetic movement stood in stark and sometimes shocking contrast to the crass materialism of Great Britain in the 19th century."
Aestheticism was named by the critic Walter Hamilton in The Aesthetic Movement in England in 1882. By the 1890s, decadence, a term with origins in common with aestheticism, was in use across Europe.
Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.These ideas were imported to the English-speaking world largely through the efforts of Thomas Carlyle, whose Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays and Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) introduced and advocated aestheticism while also, if not marking the earliest use of the word "aesthetic" in the English language, certainly popularising it. Ruth apRoberts declared him the "apostle of aesthetics in England, 1825–1827", in recognition of his pioneering influence on the subsequent development of the aesthetic movement.
The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George MacDonald's conception of art as something moral or useful, "Art for truth's sake".Raeper, William (1987) George MacDonald, p. 183. Tring, Herts., and Batavia, Illinois: Lion Publishing. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it only needed to be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and Synesthesia/ideasthesia effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Music was used to establish mood.
Predecessors of the Aesthetes included John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and some of the who themselves were a legacy of the Romantic spirit. There are a few significant continuities between the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy and that of the Aesthetes: Dedication to the idea of 'Art for Art's Sake'; admiration of, and constant striving for, beauty; escapism through visual and literary arts; craftsmanship that is both careful and self-conscious; mutual interest in merging the arts of various media. This final idea is promoted in the poem L'Art by Théophile Gautier, who compared the poet to the sculptor and painter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones are most strongly associated with Aestheticism. However, their approach to Aestheticism did not share the creed of 'Art for Art's Sake' but rather "a spirited reassertion of those principles of colour, beauty, love, and cleanness that the drab, agitated, discouraging world of the mid-nineteenth century needed so much." This reassertion of beauty in a drab world also connects to Pre-Raphaelite escapism in art and poetry.
In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne (both influenced by the French Symbolists), James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These writers and their style were satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience and other works, such as F. C. Burnand's drama The Colonel, and in comic magazines such as Punch, particularly in works by George Du Maurier.
Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes as he is influenced by older, decadent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant of aesthete society at Oxford University, describe the aesthetes mostly satirically, but also as a former participant. Some names associated with this assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, A.E. Housman and Anthony Powell.
Government Schools of Design were founded from 1837 onwards in order to improve the design of British goods. Following the Great Exhibition of 1851 efforts were intensified and oriental objects were purchased for the schools teaching collections. Owen Jones, architect and Orientalism, was requested to set out key principles of design and these became not only the basis of the schools teaching but also the propositions that preface The Grammar of Ornament (1856), which is still regarded as the finest systematic study or practical sourcebook of historic world ornament.
Jones identified the need for a new and modern style that would meet the requirements of the modern world, rather than the continual re-cycling of historic styles, but saw no reason to reject the lessons of the past. Christopher Dresser, a student and later Professor at the school worked with Owen Jones on The Grammar of Ornament, as well as on the 1863 decoration of the oriental courts (Chinese, Japanese, and Indian) at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), advanced the search for a new style with his two publications The Art of Decorative Design 1862, and Principles of Design 1873.
Production of Aesthetic style furniture was limited to approximately the late 19th century. Aesthetic style furniture is characterized by several common themes:
Ebonized furniture means that the wood is painted or stained to a black ebony finish. The furniture is sometimes completely ebony-colored. More often however, there is gilding added to the carved surfaces of the feathers or stylized flowers that adorn the furniture.
As aesthetic movement decor was similar to the corresponding writing style in that it was about sensuality and nature, nature themes often appear on the furniture. A typical aesthetic feature is the gilded carved flower, or the stylized peacock feather. Colored paintings of birds or flowers are often seen. Non-ebonized aesthetic movement furniture may have realistic-looking three-dimensional-like renditions of birds or flowers carved into the wood.
Contrasting with the ebonized-gilt furniture is use of blue and white for porcelain and china. Similar themes of peacock feathers and nature would be used in blue and white tones on dinnerware and other crockery. The blue and white design was also popular on square porcelain tiles. It is reported that Oscar Wilde used aesthetic decorations during his youth. This aspect of the movement was also satirised by Punch magazine and in Patience.
In 1882 Oscar Wilde visited Canada, where he toured the town of Woodstock, Ontario and gave a lecture on 29 May titled "The House Beautiful".O'brien (1982), p. 114. In this lecture Wilde exposited the principles of the Aesthetic Movement in decorative and applied design, also known at the time as the "Ornamental Aesthetic" style, according to which local flora and fauna were celebrated as beautiful and textured, layered ceilings were popular. An example of this can be seen in Annandale National Historic Site, located in Tillsonburg, Canada. The house was built in 1880 and decorated by Mary Ann Tillson, who happened to attend Oscar Wilde's lecture in Woodstock. Since the Aesthetic Movement was only prevalent in the decorative arts from about 1880 until about 1890, there are not many surviving examples of this particular style but one such example is 18 Stafford Terrace, London, England, which provides an insight into how the middle classes interpreted its principles. Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church in upstate New York, is an important example of exoticism in the Aesthetic Movement decorative arts.
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