Cult of beauty - Minerva

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but also in the reform of design for
the middle-class home, as the notion
of ‘The House Beautiful’ became a
touchstone of cultured life. Attracted
by the growing popularity of aesthetic
taste, many of the leading firms manufacturing
ceramics, domestic metalwork
and textiles courted artists such
as Walter Crane and a growing band
of professional designers, most notably
Christopher Dresser. Even the mighty
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema designed
an armchair in the Grecian style (Fig
8) to form part of a luxurious suite
of furniture, costing £25,000, for the
‘Greek Parlour’ in the New York mansion
of Henry Gurdon Marquand, a
highly successful American entrepreneur,
art collector and benefactor.
Archaeological discoveries of the
19 th century provided a welcome
new resource for jewellery design.
Connecting with an idealised classical
past, such jewels had a historical
fascination and were exemplars of
fine metalworking rather than vehicles
for the display of massed gemstones
(Fig 14). The Helen of Troy necklace
(Fig 10) designed by Poynter to be
worn by the model for his 1881 painting
was a reference to the remarkable
treasure discovered in 1873 by
Heinrich Schleimann during his excavations
at Troy, although its style owes
more to Gujerati design.
In the last decade of Queen Victoria’s
reign the Aesthetic Movement entered
its final, fascinating Decadent phase,
characterised by the extraordinary
Archaeological discoveries
of the 19 th century provided
a welcome new resource
for jewellery design
Fig 12. Frederic
Leighton, The Bath
of Pysche, c.1889–90.
Oil on canvas. © Tate,
London.
Fig 13. George
Aitchison, design for
the interior decoration
of the front drawing
room at 15 Berkeley
Square, London, for
F. Lehmann Esq, 1873.
© RIBA library
drawings collection.
Fig 14. Copies or
adaptations of
archaeological finds
were considered
more artistic than
conventional gem-set
jewellery. This wreath
was a wedding gift to
the future Countess of
Crawford in 1869. Tiara
of gold and pearls.
Castellani, Rome.
© V&A Images.
Fig 15. Harry Bates,
Pandora. Marble,
ivory and bronze,
1890. H. 94cm.
Tate, London.
Fig 16. Icarus, bronze
by Alfred Gilbert,
1884. H 49.5cm.
© National Museums
and Galleries of Wales,
Cardiff.
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black-and-white drawings of Aubrey
Beardsley in The Yellow Book. The
V&A exhibition ends with a superb
group of the greatest late Aesthetic
paintings, including masterpieces such
as Leighton’s Bath of Psyche (Fig 12),
Moore’s Midsummer and Rossetti’s
final picture The Daydream, shown
alongside the sensuous nude figures
sculpted in bronze and precious
materials. Classical prototypes were
abandoned by innovative young sculptors
such as Alfred Gilbert, Edward
Onslow Ford, Harry Bates and other
brilliant younger exponents of what
was termed ‘The New Sculpture’. These
artists used both explicit symbols and
subtle suggestion to express intangible
themes of love, death or the eternal.
A profound stillness and sense
of introspective self-absorption is a
recurrent leitmotif in much of the New
Sculpture. There is little movement or
drama, but instead a pervasive melancholy,
suggesting the psychological
dimensions of the self that dictate fate
or future action. Where classical subjects
are depicted, as in Bates’s Pandora
(Fig 15), the figures are frozen at the
moment before they fulfil their destiny,
becoming archetypes for human frailty
and the complexities of the psyche that
dictate behaviour. Frederic Leighton
commissioned a bronze statue, leaving
the choice of subject to Gilbert. Icarus
was, at the same time, both a tribute
to Leighton’s well known painting
Daedalus and Icarus, and a chapter in
his series of bronzes (Fig 16).
Attempting a definition of this
period, the poet and critic Arthur
Symons, a central figure of the
Beardsley period and the principal
apologist of the decadence of the
1890s, wrote: ‘After a fashion it is no
doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities
that mark the end of great periods,
the qualities that we find in the
Greek, the Latin decadence; an intense
self-consciousness, a restless curiosity
in research, an over-subtilising refinement
upon refinement, a spiritual and
moral perversity.’ Walter Pater’s philosophical
novel Marius the Epicurean,
published in 1885, is set in the decaying
years of the Roman Empire,
reworking in symbolic, philosophical
fictional terms the aesthetic ideals
that he had first adumbrated in his
Renaissance essays. ‘That old pagan
world,’ he wrote, ‘had reached its perfection
in the things of poetry and art
– a perfection which indicated only
too surely the eve of decline.’ n
‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic
Movement 1860–1900’ is at the V&A
until 17 July, tickets £12, concessions
available. A catalogue accompanies
the exhibition, edited by Stephen
Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr,
with essays by Elizabeth Prettejohn,
Penny Sparke and Christopher
Breward: hardback, 288pp, 250
colour photographs, £40. For more
information, please visit www.vam.
ac.uk/cultofbeauty.
Minerva May/June 2011 45
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