To name association of artists the Aesthetic Movement today would make sense as some of the ‘art’ that is created today reveals
very little aesthetic consideration - in that it is not concerned with beauty or the appreciation
of beauty - and is neither easy on the eye or easy on the pocket. But back in the 19th Century when the likes of Whistler and Beardsley picked up the guantlet most art was governed by said conceit but what the Aesthetics were doing was rebelling not only against art but the environment in which they lived and no one had ever done that before. They, unlike we inhabitants of the new age of complacency, the Aesthetics not let the tide of
industry, globalisation, capitalism and greed sweep over them like a gaggle of beached whales. They stood up and made a stand, albeit artistically, and, not with standing their detractors, changed the way the world looked and the way we looked at the world for ever.
Indeed, according to Isaac Newton’s Third Law, for every action there is always a reaction equal in size and opposite in direction. This rule also exists in art, style, music and culture, which often react against both the prevailing style of the
day and its socio-political and economic trends. This was never truer than in the mid-nineteenth century when said gang of barking mad, decadent, hedonistic artists and writers formed what became known as the Aesthetic Movement, which except for Pop Art is the only art movement ever bom in the UK.
Their clarion call was ‘Art for art’s sake,’ and that one’s taste in all things is paramount. They held that art should have no moral or didactic purpose but simply be beautiful and reward the viewer with a pleasure solely drawn from aesthetics.
As such, they embarked on a mission to inject overwhelming pulchritude into what was a new and very ugly Britain, where every aesthetic consideration had been bludgeoned to death. What followed was an outpouring of paintings,
objet d’art, interiors, sculptures and calligraphy full of swirling lines, exotic birds, flowers and oriental sensuality tinged with a soupcon of medievalism.
Consequently, architects, writers, philosophers, poets and craftsmen jumped on this conceit, which went on to dominate every aspect of UK culture for the next 40 years and influence the world.
Arguably, the Aesthetic Movement was the first ‘youth’ cult - albeit an upper-middle class one - that, like punk rock, was spearheaded by some of the most controversial, self-confessed libertarians of the era. It had its own mottos and contentious manifesto that self-consciously rebelled against staid Victorian morals.
It had its own dandified, often rakish, style of dress. The women - typically thin, deathly pale and intense - wore long, diaphanous gowns (long red hair being very much in vogue), while their narcissistic, often effeminate men, favoured long hair, green britches, extravagant silk neckwear, canes and complex jacket configurations available only to the moneyed. Sexual ambiguity was suggested by wearing green carnation in the buttonhole - very much a mainstay.
The movement also had its own writers, acolytes, propagandists, and loose mores that included unbridled sexual congress and a lot of drugs
and strong drink. All the rage were opium (the British having introduced its use as a pleasurable narcotic in China), and laudanum - a potent morphine tincture sold without prescription as cough medicine, which was very much
abused by everyone from ageing septuagenarians to tetchy mums to bored farm workers.
Cocaine, then considered a harmless stimulant, was a fashionable substance, as illustrated by Conan Doyle’s coke- sniffing aesthete Sherlock Holmes
(first published in 1887). While the aesthetically inclined dandy, Robert
Louis Stephenson, wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1884 during a six-day binge on the marching powder.
Thrown in for good measure was the mind- bending, psychosis-inducing absinthe (with the original wormwood extract), the favoured tipple of Lautrec, Wilde, Van Gogh, Verlaine and Baudelaire. By 1900 it had reached sales of 36 million litres
a year in France and was said to be responsible for the country’s packed mental asylums. The Aesthetes, never afraid to suck influence from whatever quarter, were indeed all over these racy continental French ways like custard on a tart.
But primarily, the protagonists of the Aesthetic Movement were reacting against the industrial rape of their country. In their days there were no
campaigners protecting an almost extinct breed of caterpillar whose habitat was about to be obliterated by industry, no naturalists protecting woodland for its Davall’s sedge, and no activists championing the cause of the Cortinarius cumatilis. Thus, factory owners just stamped their way through the UK in heavy hobnails, smashing all that stood in their way.
Of course, it is impossible for us to grasp what Britain must have been like in the mid nineteenth century. The industrial revolution had not only changed almost every aspect of daily life but scarred the landscape beyond our imagination.
In less than sixty years Britain had gone from a largely arable community, where most people lived and worked the land, to a country governed by cities full of foul factories where every concern, (especially the health of the workers) played tenth fiddle to the financial feeding frenzy.
Foul centres of industry were hastily knocked up and, in their wake, even uglier slums to accommodate the influx of poor workers.
Manchester boasted some 1600 mills, where kids as young as thirteen worked day and night producing cloth for almost the whole of the western world. It was hell.
‘The noxious sulphuric smoke from the factory chimneys was so dense no object could be seen from 100 yards away and sunlight never penetrated,’ wrote French writer Alexis de Tocqueville after a visit to Manchester in 1835. ‘The foul smell mixed with that of rotting, uncollected refuse, and dormant animal and human excrement permeated the air... Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.’
London had also grown out of all proportion, its population housed in overcrowded ghettos where sanitation was nil, squalor was endemic and cholera was epidemic. The latter killed some 25,000 people in London, culminating in the Broad Street outbreak in 1854. John Snow, the doctor who discovered it was the result of drinking water contaminated by raw sewerage, described it as ‘the most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom.’
People were throwing their buckets full of faeces up river, while folk were drinking from it downstream. ‘Gong farmers’ (people employed to remove excrement from privies and cesspits)
made a decent living collecting human and animal defecation from the river’s edge and selling it to proper farmers as fertiliser.
In the summer of 1858, the sewerage problem reached its nadir when The Great Stink brought the whole of London to a standstill. Due to
the overflowing of 200,000 cesspits into the streets, the stench was so bad that the House of Commons soaked their heavy draped curtains
in chloride of lime, and people walked the streets with handkerchiefs over their noses. Understandably, sales of lavender water and perfume rocketed.
I’d like to think that such olfactory repugnance prompted artists to seek a return, albeit aesthetically, to a time when their world was beautiful, bucolic, beatific - and did not smell of fresh turds. But I might be wrong. Yet if one considers that this mephitic outrage was but
one manifestation of the horrors of the industrial revolution, then that might well be true.
Some say Aestheticism began in 1861 when renowned socialist William Morris opened a design studio, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, with Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Maddox Brown and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose entire shtick was a conscious return to an age when individual craftsmanship was paramount. These pioneers stood in obstinate opposition to the era’s destitute decorative arts and the asinine covetousness that had swallowed up the country.
William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s main protagonist, had been influenced by
architect, designer, artist and critic, Augustus Pugin - who had himself trail-blazed the Gothic Revival - and the much-traveled poet, writer, art critic and patron John Ruskin, who later tutored Oscar Wilde. The latter championed environmentalism, sustainability, craftsmanship, medievalism and The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who trail-blazed the aesthetic ideal.
Morris’s cohort, Rossetti - art historian Doctor Anne Anderson described him as the Johnny Depp of his day - alongside William Holman Hunt
and John Everett Millais, all barely 20 at the time, had pre-empted Aestheticism by forming the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in Gower Street, London, in September 1848.
The PRB believed that liberty and accountability were indivisible and, particularly fascinated by medievalism, had used their often otherworldly, almost phantasmagorical art as a stand against industrialism. Deliberately borrowing from the Italian Quattrocento School - whose artists such
as Botticelli painted in the surreal International Gothic style - they too believed that the past could be harnessed to revitalise the present, and threw whimsy, colour and elegant line into our filthy, smog-infested wheezing cities.
Consequently, as much as the PRB raged against the machine, it was the machine that made them the first celebrities of the embryonic modem world, their works mass-produced as best-selling prints, while the burgeoning popular press sold copies off the back of their madcap antics that titillated the general public.
They were the first media stars. Accordingly, drug addiction, insanity, infidelity, obsession, neurosis and sexual anxiety were enjoyed in abundance. So notorious were they that even their life models risked social ostracisation by posing for them. Thus, each night the gang
went off on the prowl in search of
beautiful women to paint, and found barmaids, prostitutes and seamstresses willing to pose nude and fornicate with them.
Rossetti had every intention of marrying the voluptuous prostitute, Annie Miller, until he discovered she had been doing the deed with all of his confederates, while the insane yet sexually chaste Ruskin (then aged 39), who had allied himself with the PRB, boasted of the love letters he received from a 13-year-old Irish girl named Rose, which he wore next to his skin. He would be arrested today without doubt.
As such, the Aesthetic Movement carried on from where The Pre-Raphaelites left off - both hedonistically and ideologically. They also followed the writings of Professor Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde’s mentor, who, in the conclusion to his book of Renaissance essays published in 1873 advocates living for the moment, and that no experience can be turned down.
‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself,
is the end,’ he wrote. ‘To bum always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life... Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake...’.
Pater also name-checks Victor Hugo, a leading figure in the French Decadent Movement, often compared to Aestheticism. Other ‘Decadents’ included Baudelaire, who first translated into French the works of Aesthetic idols and fellow opiate addicts Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas
De Quincy. Baudelaire declared in 1845 that ‘everything that gives pleasure has its reason,’ while fellow decadent, Theophile Gautier, coined the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ motto, itself adapted from a phrase in Poe’s essay The Poetic Principle (1850). Aestheticism was one big old tangled mess of groovy influence.
Its genesis can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the British Empire
had grown eastwards. Travelers such as Lord Byron had returned to the UK with cases full of arcane foreign treasures, pots of opium and tales of adventure that unveiled a corporeal, distinctly non-British emancipation.
New trade routes opened and the traders became rich. Exotic curios were all the rage. Then, in 1858, after
200 years of zero trade with the British, Japanese goods flooded Europe, inspiring a new artistic bent. In Paris, Japonism, as it was called, was a huge fad amongst fashionable Bohemian circles. When American painter James McNeill Whistler
moved to London from Paris he encouraged artists and designers to embrace the Nippon ideal. Apart from raw fish, he took to all things Japanese with religious fervor.
Indeed the movement was drawn to all things Eastern, including flowers, plants, and birds, all of which were delicately realised on vases, glassware and interiors. The immensely successful painter Edward Leighton, who had painted everyone of note, including Queen Victoria, added an Arab Hall to his magnificent Holland Park house in 1877 to complement his Greek Statues and Arts and Crafts Wallpaper (Leighton had a penchant for North Africa and the Middle East and was rumored to be homosexual).
'Aesthetic' or 'Patience Teapot' - Chrsities.com
But the finest of all the Eastern-influenced aesthetic interiors was The Peacock Room, the dining room in the magnificent London home of notoriously rude Liverpudlian shipping magnate Fredrick Leyland.
The room was originally created by interior architect Thomas Jeckyll but Whistler, whose painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain eventually formed the centrepiece of the room, usurped him and offered to retouch the some
of the walls, leaving Leyland to go back to his business in Liverpool.
In his absence the American let rip and made the interior his own, painting over the whole room. Whistler wrote to Leyland telling him that his dining room was ‘brilliant and gorgeous while,
at the same time, delicate and refined to the last degree,’ finally advising his patron to stay in Liverpool until the room was 100 percent finished.
Without Leyland’s knowledge, Whistler then threw lavish parties in the house in order to show off ‘his’ creation to both the press and guests. His employer’s response was to cut Whistler’s fee by half. Whistler’s retort was to paint two huge peacocks on Leyland’s expensive rare leather walls. The more aggressive-looking bird, bearing its plumage, is an obvious caricature of the
shipping tycoon, while the slighted peacock in the foreground, its tail down, is himself.
Declared persona non grata by Leyland, Whistler never saw the room again. It was eventually dismantled and bought by a wealthy American industrialist, and now sits in the Smithsonian Institute’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.
However belligerent, Whistler was held in the highest esteem by fellow Aesthetes.
Bom in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, he spent part of his youth in St Petersburg and London, enrolled in West Point military academy (but was dismissed for poor grades) and trained as an artist in Paris from 1855.
While in the French capital he was part of the great Gustave Courbet’s group, which included painter Edouard Manet, and the aforementioned Baudelaire and Gautier. Whistler, who frequently passed himself off as a wealthy Southern Gentleman, moved to London in 1858 and was subsequently attracted by the artistic flavour of the time: Albert Moore’s cadenced friezes of toga-clad Greeks, Edward Burne-Jones’ medieval mysticism and Thomas Armstrong’s virtual surrealism.
Thus, Whistler constantly crossed the channel, like a bee pollinating both sides with the other countries’ Bohemian notions. Evidently, everyone listened to this erudite, caustic, combative Yank whose signature was, characteristically, a butterfly with a sting in its tail.
Accordingly, Whistler, with his curling moustache, monocle and the ostentatious attire of a dandy, was the main man behind the Aesthetic Movement. His painting of 1861, Symphony In White No.l; The White Girl, was in many ways a precursor to it, but it was overshadowed by Manet’s controversial Le dejeuner sur Vherbe, (1863), featuring a nude woman at lunch with two folly dressed rather foppish men in a woodland copse.
The French man’s work was a deliberate affront to the propriety of the time and thus a major influence on the Aesthetic Movement. But, however peeved Whistler was, he went back to his easel and in 1864 created The Golden Screen, featuring his mistress in a kimono in a profoundly Japanese interior, and Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks - with the same woman in Chinese garb surrounded by ceramics from said country. Just as the Sex Pistols defined the punk milieu with God Save the Queen, these works demarcated the Aesthetic genre.
After a visit to Chile, Whistler moved back to London and produced a few outstanding paintings, one of which was Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1874), which showed the old wooden bridge etched against a golden green skyline and river. The picture achieved a certain notoriety after John Ruskin wrote that the artist,
‘Was asking 200 guineas for throwing a pot of paint at the canvas.’
Whistler, in bristling form, sued for libel and received one farthing in damages, which he forever wore on his watch chain. Unfortunately, the court costs together with the debts he had accrued building his lavish pad in Chelsea’s Tithe Street (designed in partnership with E.H. Godwin) bankrupted him in 1879, prompting an auction of his work, collections, house and chattels. Leyland oversaw the sale. Whistler’s obituary in the New
York Times on July 18, 1903, described him as ‘The maker of paradoxes, the epigrammatist and the master of the “gentle art of making enemies.’”
While Whistler had pioneered on canvas in the early 1860s, up the road William Morris had been busy reinventing the Victorian interior with his distinctive wallpapers, tapestries and textiles. Harking back to the country’s Arthurian folklore, they were an attempt to create a beautiful utopian ideal and merged such with the flowing lines of Eastern art. All the rage in the late nineteenth century, no upmarket bohemian home was complete without Morris’s wallpaper or textiles.
Accordingly, the time was nigh for the movement’s commercialisation, and in 1874 entrepreneur Arthur Lasenby Liberty, previously a trader of Eastern bric-a-brac, opened the now famous
store off Regent Street and took to producing the hitherto hand-made Arts and Crafts/Aesthetic objects in bulk, employing craftsmen to design and oversee production.
Among them was one Archibald Knox, raised on the Isle of Man and an expert in enamel, pewter and silverware. Knox drew influence from the intricate Celtic imagery so prevalent on his island and coined it.
Another was the ceramicist Mary Watts, who created the magnificent medieval-influenced, Arts and Crafts shrine, The Watts Mortuary Cemetery Chapel, in Compton, Surrey.
The results, via the auspices of the recently realised mail-order catalogue, made Liberty a huge global brand - to the extent that in Italy Art Nouveau, (the child of Aestheticism) was known simply as ‘Stile Liberty.’
And it was thanks to home furnishings that the most famous figure associated with the Aesthetic Movement, the latecomer Oscar Wilde, stepped into the fray. Wilde appeared on the London scene in the early 1880s, describing himself as a
‘Professor of Aesthetics’ and an arbiter of taste. In truth he was a blagger who, entirely bereft of any knowledge of art, had not one published work to his name.
He had, however, been editor of The Woman’s World, where he promulgated the ideas outlined in The House Beautiful, a book written by American author Clarence Cook in 1877. He became an art critic and breathed fresh air into the Aesthetic milieu.
His late arrival was greatly derided by Whistler, who embarked on a severe rivalry with the Irishman. Wilde was said to often parrot Whistler’s many witticisms. On one occasion Wilde is alleged to have responded to a quip of Whistler’s by saying, ‘I wish I had said that’, to which Whistler replied, ‘You will, Oscar, you will’.
Although undeniably rivals, Wilde and Whistler perplexed the Victorian general public. In 1879 the humorist George De Maurier embarked on
a series of satirical cartoons in Punch entitled ‘Nincompoopiana’, which mocked the aesthetes every step.
Patience, a comic-opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, ridiculed the Aesthetics’ affectation, while Royal Worcester fashioned the Patience teapot, half of which depicted a caricatured female aesthete and the other her male counterpart. They were big news.
And yet Wilde, with his novel The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), encapsulated the aesthetic ethos by exploring themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty, while also outlining its corrupt and dire consequence.
Lured by the opportunity of exploring the aesthetic consideration before a larger audience, Wilde took to penning plays and soon became
the most successful playwright of his day, his work shown with regularity at the Criterion Theatre, after which he and his minions would retire to the magnificent Criterion Bar and restaurant.
Designed by the architect Thomas Verity and built at a cost in excess of £80,000 (around £8 million today), it opened in 1873 and remains intact today, a true testament to the overwhelming magnificence of Aesthetic interiors.
Another of Wilde’s hangouts was the Grill Room at The Cafe Royal where he met Lord Alfred Douglas, the profoundly camp young man who would hasten his demise. Sixteen years his junior, Bosie, as he was nicknamed, became Wilde’s sexual partner - to much public condemnation.
In 1895, the younger man’s father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, had described Wilde as a ‘sodomite’, after which the playwright sued him for libel and the Marquess was arrested.
The trial became the talk of the town and front page news, but Queensbury’s lawyers, turned the screw on Wilde, describing him as an older degenerate homosexual who preyed on young
innocent men, and threatened to call a barrage of young male prostitutes to testify against him.
Wilde, without a leg to stand on, dropped the charges and was bankrupted by court costs. Consequently, the Marquess sent the evidence of Wilde’s bawdy ways to Scotland Yard and the writer ended up serving two years hard labour
and abject humiliation in Reading Gaol. He exited a broken man, his health and reputation in tatters, and went into exile, dying ten months after Queensberry at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris on November 30, 1900.
With his extravagantly camp demeanour, Wilde had scandalised Victorian society yet still garnered myriad devotees who took up the Aesthetic
flag. One such adherent was the young Aubrey Beardsley, who travelled to Paris in 1892 and witnessed the poster art of Wilde’s friend Toulouse Lautrec and the Gallic fascination with Japanese woodcuts. Beardsley returned to London with enough chutzpah to approach Wilde with an offer to illustrate his 1894 play Salome.
An immediate sensation, Beardsley, who was also influenced by Burne-Jones, Morris and Whistler, was catapulted into the upper echelons of the Aesthetic movement, his simple use of pen and
ink, ‘whiplash ‘ line and block colour immediately marking him as a genius of the age. He died of tuberculosis aged 25 in 1898.
By the turn of the century, with the exception of the stubborn Whistler who died in 1903, all of the major aesthetes - Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Maddox Brown, Wilde and Beardsley - were all dead and buried, and thus some might argue that the movement was dead, but it wasn’t so. The idea had spread worldwide, hit the high street and morphed into Art Nouveau.
In 1899 the architect George Skipper designed the Royal Arcade in Norwich in what is arguably Aesthetic nee Art Nouveau style, and engaged the services of ceramic sculptor and Arts and Crafts artist W., J. W. Neatby to tile his creation.
In 1902, Harrods recruited Neatby to design their food hall in a purely Aesthetic style depicting a medieval Arcadian Albion that, albeit magnificent, never existed. And the trend continued. Neatby went on to design even more Aesthetic-Art Nouveau-style shopping arcades (the forerunner
of shopping malls) nationwide.
In Glasgow the notion was taken to its splendid conclusion by the undervalued Aesthetic visionary, Scottish-born Margaret Macdonald and her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh. As young art students they had been influenced by Beardsley’s hugely controversial drawings. The couple went on to create a style that is purely Aesthetic, lending heavily on the restraint and economy of means
of Japanese design. It was most evident in the magnificent Glasgow townhouse they designed to showcase their talents.
Now preserved at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, it is a temple to faultless design and gentle understatement. But, just like
their Southern counterparts, Mackintosh and Macdonald were derided by the press of the day and moved to France in 1923. Macdonald died in Chelsea in 1933 leaving £88.
In 2008 her work The White Rose and the Red Rose (1902) was auctioned for £1.7 million. Mackintosh, meanwhile, is revered as one of the
greatest ever British architects and designers. The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt admitted he had been hugely influenced by the frieze Macdonald exhibited at the 8th Viennese Secession in 1900.
Aestheticism was the one British art movement that influenced the whole world for decades. What were the aforementioned Klimt and his Viennese secessionist acquaintances if not a branch of the Aesthetic Movement?
Alphonse Mucha, the undisputed king of Art Nouveau, was entirely influenced by the Aesthetics. Rene Lalique, the great glass designer, took a massive leaf out of their book, and the bisexual dancer Isadora Duncan was 100 percent aesthete, while composers Claude Debussy
and Eric Satie simply applied the Aesthetic consideration to music.
Curiously, the movement lived by sucking in influence from all over the world and ended up influencing the entire globe. Its reign ended quite appropriately as World War I and its new industrial killing machines smashed every consideration
bar survival out of the ballpark, and a new darker, more cynical and destructive ethic took centre stage. The party was over.
But since their influence has always been and still is most evident. Only today I saw a burly Yorkshireman in the park with a bald head and several tattoos, one of which was a Celtic design that was pure Archibald Knox and one a copy of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The Aesthetic ideal lives on.