The Victorian Era

What Is Aesthetic Movement Design?

Article · Architecture & Design · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Aesthetic Movement was one of the most important art movements of the Victorian period, and it had a profound influence on the architecture, the interior design, the furniture, the decorative arts, the textiles, the pottery, the metalwork, the jewellery, the printing, and the bookbinding of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. Its principal figures were the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and the Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), and the movement also included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), and William Morris (1834–1896), the three principal figures of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the early Arts and Crafts Movement, although Morris eventually distanced himself from the Aestheticist position. The movement was grounded in the writings of Walter Pater, particularly The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), and in the writings of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire in France. The history of the movement is examined in Victorian Furniture and Decorative Arts, and the broader context is set out in Victorian Architecture and Interior Design.

The Origins of the Movement

The Aesthetic Movement had its origins in the 1860s, when a small circle of artists, designers, and writers in London began to question the prevailing taste of the period, the prevailing morality, the prevailing religion, the prevailing politics, and the prevailing social conventions. The circle centred on Whistler, who arrived in London in 1859, and on Rossetti, who had been painting his famous stunner pictures — full-lipped, full-cheeked, luxuriantly haired women in richly coloured rooms — since the late 1850s. The circle included Burne-Jones, the painter of the King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) and the Briar Rose series; Morris, the painter, designer, writer, printer, and socialist; the architect Philip Webb; and a small group of collectors, patrons, and critics.

The Aesthetic Movement was influenced by a number of intellectual sources. The most important was the work of Walter Pater, particularly The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), which argued that art should be valued for its own sake, that beauty represented an autonomous good requiring no moral justification, and that the cultivation of sensation and heightened experience was the highest aim of the well-lived life. The second was the work of Charles Baudelaire, particularly Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863), which emphasised the importance of the modern, the urban, the artificial, the transient, and the strange. The third was the work of Théophile Gautier, particularly Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and the preface to Albertus (1858), which set out the principle of l’art pour l’art, the idea that art should be valued for its own sake, should not be subordinated to any other purpose, and should be free. The Aesthetic Movement was the English response to this French doctrine.

The Principles of the Movement

The Aesthetic Movement was based on a small number of principles. The first was the principle of art for art’s sake, the idea that art should be valued for its own sake, should not be subordinated to any other purpose, should be autonomous, and should be free. The second was the principle of the unity of the arts, the idea that the arts should be unified, that the arts should be coherent, that the arts should be integrated, and that the arts should be a whole — the principle that the architecture, the interior design, the furniture, the textile, the wallpaper, the picture, the vase, and the book should all speak the same language. The third was the principle of the importance of beauty, the idea that beauty should be valued, that beauty should be cultivated, that beauty should be sought, and that beauty should be a part of daily life. The fourth was the principle of the cultivation of the senses, the idea that the senses should be cultivated, that the senses should be refined, that the senses should be heightened, and that the senses should be celebrated.

The Aesthetic Movement was a reaction against the prevailing taste of the period, the prevailing morality, the prevailing religion, the prevailing politics, and the prevailing social conventions. It was a movement of cultural reform rather than a movement of social reform, and it was associated with the bohemian, the dandy, the flâneur, the decadent, and the symbolist currents of late Victorian culture. It was also a movement that flourished in the fashionable quarters of London, in the great country houses, and in the studios and the drawing rooms of the artistic set.

The Aesthetic Interior

The most visible expression of the movement was the Aesthetic interior, the pale, sparsely furnished, deliberately artful room that stood in deliberate opposition to the heavy, cluttered rooms of the mid-Victorian middle-class home. The Aesthetic interior was generally hung with a flat, pale wallpaper — a cream, a putty, a pearl, a sage, an eau de nil, a salmon, or a soft blue — over a painted dado, and it was furnished with a few, well-chosen pieces of furniture, generally in light woods such as satinwood, sycamore, or eucalypt, in the Anglo-Japanese manner.

The principal features of the Aesthetic interior were the blue-and-white china — the willow pattern, the dragon pattern, the prunus pattern, hung on the walls in the Chinese manner or arranged on a shelf or in a cabinet; the Japanese fans, hung in clusters on the walls; the peacock feathers, displayed in a jar or a vase; the sunflowers, the lilies, the irises, and the peonies, in the painted or printed decoration; and the few, well-chosen pictures, generally of a single colour or a single subject. The most famous Aesthetic interior in the world is the Peacock Room of 1876–77, painted by Whistler for the shipowner Frederick Leyland at 49 Prince’s Gate in Kensington, now reinstalled in the Freer Gallery in Washington.

The Aesthetic Style

The Aesthetic Movement produced a recognisable style, the Anglo-Japanese, which drew on the Japanese art that had begun to arrive in England in significant quantities after the opening of Japan to Western trade in the 1850s and the display of Japanese work at the International Exhibition of 1862. The Anglo-Japanese style took the flat colour, the asymmetrical design, the large-scale pattern, and the sparing use of accent colour of the Japanese woodblock print, and adapted it to English furniture, English wallpapers, English textiles, and English ceramics. The most famous Anglo-Japanese furniture was the Sussex chair, a low, light, rush-seated chair based on a country type and adapted to the Aesthetic interior by Morris & Co. in the 1860s.

The Aesthetic Movement also produced a number of substyles, named for their characteristic motifs. The Peacock style used the peacock, the peacock feather, and the iridescent eye. The Sunflower style used the sunflower, in homage to Whistler’s signature motif. The Lily style used the lily, the iris, and the other flowers of the Aesthetic garden. The Rose style used the rose, the Tulip style the tulip, the Poppy style the poppy, the Pansy style the pansy, and so on. The Anglo-Chinese style used the Chinese motifs of the willow pattern, the prunus pattern, and the dragon pattern. The Aesthetic style was a key influence on the Art Nouveau of the 1890s and 1900s.

The Legacy

The legacy of the Aesthetic Movement is substantial. The Aesthetic interior shaped the artistic interior of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the movement’s influence on Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil, the Vienna Secession, and the broader design reform of the 1890s and 1900s was direct and immediate. The Aesthetic movement also shaped the cultural history of the period: Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of America in 1882, his trial and imprisonment in 1895, and his death in Paris in 1900 are part of the wider story of late Victorian culture, and Whistler’s lawsuits with John Ruskin in 1878 and with the art critic Harry Quilter in 1885 are part of the wider story of the position of the artist in Victorian society. The history of the parallel Arts and Crafts movement is examined in How did the Arts and Crafts movement begin?.