CategoriesStyles and Movements
The Aesthetic Movement
British and American art and design of the 1860s to the 1880s devoted to beauty for its own sake, in painting, furniture and the home.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
In 1878 James Abbott McNeill Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for libel after Ruskin accused him of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face with Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875). Whistler won a farthing, but the trial aired the movement's central claim: that a painting or a room need not teach or tell a story, only be beautiful.
From the 1860s to the 1880s, in Britain and then America, it shaped painting and the home alike. Albert Moore and Frederic Leighton painted languid figures, and Whistler gave canvases musical titles. E. W. Godwin and Christopher Dresser drew on Japanese art for spare furniture and strikingly modern metalwork, and blue-and-white porcelain, peacock feathers and sunflowers became its emblems. In New York, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler and Lockwood de Forest designed complete interiors. Gilbert and Sullivan mocked the fashion in Patience (1881).
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