the pre-raphaelite brotherhood and the aesthetic movement

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement

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

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.

Rossetti, La Ghirlandata

Rossetti, Beata Beatrix

Rossetti, Proserpine

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallott (1888)

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.

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

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.

Pater, continued

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

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”

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

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.

Whistler, Old Battersea Bridge

Peacock Room

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