Cult of beauty - Minerva

Museum exhibitions
frescoes of subjects from Sir Thomas
Malory’s cycle of Arthurian legends,
the Morte D’Arthur. Three densely
detailed watercolours with medieval
subjects painted by Rossetti around
1857 – The Tune of Seven Towers, The
Blue Closet (Fig 1) and A Christmas
Carol – directly inspired poems by
Morris and Swinburne. One passionate
enthusiasm common to all
at this time was Edward FitzGerald’s
translation, published in 1859, of the
selection of 12 th -century poetry attributed
to the Persian polymath Omar
Khayyam (AD 1048–1131). Rossetti
first heard about The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám in January 1861 after it had
been remaindered and was on sale
for a penny outside a London bookshop,
at which point he and Swinburne
bought numerous copies, one of which
Swinburne presented to Burne-Jones
who produced an illuminated manuscript
of the poems (Fig 4).
As the term implies, the Olympians
were hugely successful artists, dominant
at the time. The work of Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward
Poynter, G.F. Watts and Frederic
Leighton – who became president of
the Royal Academy in 1879, was created
a baronet in 1886 and became
Lord Leighton just before his death in
1896 – emphasised the classical in both
style and subject matter. Leighton’s The
Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in
Procession to the Temple of Diana (Fig
3) is a monumental canvas inspired
by a passage in the second Idyll of
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Fig 8. Armchair,
mahogany with cedar
and ebony veneer,
carving and inlay of
several woods, ivory
and abalone shell,
replaced upholstery.
Sir Lawrence Alma-
Tadema (designer),
Norman Johnstone
& Company (maker).
Fig 9. John Roddam
Spencer Stanhope,
Love and the Maiden,
1877. Tempera, gold
paint and gold leaf
on canvas, Fine Arts
Museums of San
Francisco.
Fig 10. ‘Helen of Troy’
necklace, gilded
silver and bowenite,
designed by Sir
Edmund Poynter,
made by Carlo
Giulliano, c. 1881.
Loan by American
Friends, V&A Images.
Fig 11. William
Blake Richmond,
Electra at the Tomb
of Agamemnon,
1877. Oil on canvas.
Grosvenor Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto,
Canada.
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Theocritus, ‘And for her then many
other wild beasts were going in procession’.
It depicts some two dozen figures,
each a tribute to the art of the past.
A crucial source of inspiration for
the Olympians and many of their
contemporaries were the Parthenon
Marbles, which had been housed in
the British Museum from 1816 (See
Minerva, March/April 2011, p. 9). In
Albert Moore’s A Musician (Fig 2), the
listeners are reminiscent of the reclining
figures depicted on the pediments
of the Parthenon; in Edward Burne-
Jones’ 1880 work The Golden Stairs
(Fig 7), the maidens move in concert,
like figures circling a Greek vase.
In the 1870s, the leading Aesthetic
artists, Whistler, Leighton, Watts,
Moore and Burne-Jones, evolved a
new kind of self-consciously exquisite
painting in which mood, colour, harmony
and beauty of form were paramount
while subject played little or no
part. In Leighton’s Greek Girls Picking
up Pebbles by the Sea (Fig 5), there is
a discrepancy between the complexity
of the figures’ classical drapery and
the triviality of their activity, while the
painting compels the viewer to trace
the rhythms of the compositional lines,
to follow them, zigzag-fashion, from
one figure to the next into the depth of
the scene. Similarly, the garden rakes
and the baby juxtaposed with the classical-cum-Regency
gowns in Thomas
Armstrong’s The Hay Field (Fig 6) provide
the reader with intentionally confusing,
anachronistic clues.
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The opening of the Grosvenor
Gallery in 1877 gave the aesthetic
painters a glamorous showcase for
their art. One of the most ambitious
paintings at the first Grosvenor exhibition,
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s
Love and the Maiden (Fig 9), shows a
reclining female figure who starts, as
if waking from sleep, to encounter a
winged youth with a bow. This might
easily represent the myth of Cupid and
Psyche, when Cupid awakens Psyche
from the deathlike slumber into which
she has been cast, having disobeyed
the divine order not to open the casket
she was tasked with retrieving from
the underworld – an aesthetic subject
par excellence, for the casket contained
the secret of beauty. Yet Stanhope
does not include a casket in his scene,
the work generalises the story, which
could depict any girl’s romantic or sexual
awakening, and the classical associations
are further complicated by
unmistakable allusions to the paintings
of Botticelli. Blake Richmond’s
Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon
(Fig 11) draws upon classical tragedy
but displays a stylised vision of death
and mourning, avoiding passion and
instead aiming for a compositional
balance and refined colour harmonies.
The rise of aestheticism in painting
was paralleled in the decorative
arts by a new and increasingly widespread
interest in the interior design
of houses (Fig 13). Many of the key
avant-garde architects and designers
worked not only for wealthy clients
Minerva May/June 2011