The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic
Movement
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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

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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.

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Rossetti, La Ghirlandata
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Rossetti, Beata Beatrix
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Rossetti, Proserpine
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John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallott
(1888)
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Aesthetic Movement, 1870s-1900

• Art for arts sake (Lart pour lArt) 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.

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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

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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.

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Pater, continued

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

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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

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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

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Oscar Wilde

• Gilbert and Sullivans 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.

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Whistler, Old Battersea Bridge
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Peacock Room

• http//www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/
  1vr.htm