1. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

2. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Group of painters who banded together in 1848 to reform British painting
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (also a poet)
William Holman Hunt
John Everett Millais
Supported by influential art critic John Ruskin

3. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Combination of realistic and fleshly (even ugly) details and religious subjects, which scandalized critics
Interest in studying nature rather than following established rules of composition
Inspiration from medieval sources (King Arthur)
Bright colors
Protest against academic painting (e.g., that of Sir Joshua Reynolds), with its rules about contrast and form.

4. Rossetti, La Ghirlandata

5. Rossetti, Beata Beatrix

6. Rossetti, Proserpine

7. John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallott (1888)

8. Aesthetic Movement, 1870s-1900
Art for art’s sake (L’art pour l’Art) rather than for moral instruction.
Baudelaire: “Poetry has no other end but itself. . . If a poet has followed a moral end he has diminished his poetic force.”
Like the later Decadent movement, an interest in experience through the senses.

9. Characteristics of the Aesthetic Movement
Art:
Interest in Japanese prints, with their flat perspective
Blue and white china
Peacock feathers and peacocks
Blue and green (and gold) as colors
Artists:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Aubrey Beardsley (also associated with the Decadent movement)
Edward Burne-Jones
James McNeill Whistler

10. Walter Pater, conclusion to The Renaissance
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions -- colour, odour, texture -- in the mind of the observer.

11. Pater, continued
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

12. Tenets of the Aesthetic Movement
Living intensely (Pater, Baudelaire)
Idealism and living for the ideal
Emphasis on the soul (as a philosophical rather than religious concept)
Sensitivity to beauty and artistic experiences
Placing beauty above other values (valuing church rituals for their sensory impact, for example)
Cultivated artificiality: life imitates art rather than vice versa (Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

13. Authors Aubrey Beardsley Max Beerbohm Ernest Dowson
Richard Le Gallienne
Lionel Johnson
George Meredith
William Morris
Walter Pater
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
John Ruskin
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Arthur Symons
Oscar Wilde
Links are to the Victorian Web

14. Oscar Wilde
Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience satirized the Aesthetic movement in the character of Bunthorne, who was based on Oscar Wilde.
Wilde was sent on a lecture tour of United States in 1882, in part so that audiences would understand what was being satirized.

15. Whistler, Old Battersea Bridge

16. Peacock Room