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The Aesthetic Movement, or Aestheticism, was an artistic movement born in England that flourished above all in the 1870s and 1880s. Its central idea is summed up in a motto taken from the Frenchman Théophile Gautier: "art for art's sake". A painting, a book or a piece of furniture need not teach anything or serve a moral purpose: it must be beautiful. In England its theorist was the critic Walter Pater, with his studies of the Renaissance (1873), and the name "Aesthetic Movement" was fixed in 1882 by Walter Hamilton's book.
Painters, poets and dandies
Its protagonists included painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted beautiful women without any moral message, and the American James McNeill Whistler, who titled his paintings like pieces of music, "harmonies" and "nocturnes". The movement's most famous face, however, was the writer Oscar Wilde. In 1882 he took Aestheticism to America on a long lecture tour, including a talk on The House Beautiful. The aesthetes also had their own way of life: soft clothes, flowers in the buttonhole, collections of precious objects. For that very reason they became a target of satire, from George du Maurier's cartoons in Punch to Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience (1881).
The aesthetic home
Above all, Aestheticism changed interior design. After the 1862 International Exhibition in London, where many English people saw Japanese art for the first time, the Anglo-Japanese style was born. From 1867 the architect Edward William Godwin designed light, geometric furniture in ebonised wood, stained black, such as the famous sideboard now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Christopher Dresser, who visited Japan in 1876–1877, designed teapots, vases and silverware with strikingly modern forms. The favourite motifs were peacock feathers, sunflowers, lilies, ginkgo leaves and blue-and-white porcelain, which the aesthetes collected with passion.
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The symbol of this taste is the Peacock Room (1876–1877), the dining room designed in London by the architect Thomas Jeckyll for the shipowner Frederick Leyland to display his porcelain. Whistler covered it with golden peacocks on a blue ground without asking permission, and his quarrel with the client became legendary. Since 1923 the room has been on display at the Freer Gallery in Washington. In London, Arthur Lasenby Liberty's shop, opened in 1875, sold fabrics and objects from Japan and the East; Oscar Wilde, a regular customer, called it "the chosen resort of the artistic shopper".
Legacy
Aestheticism was short-lived: by the 1890s it had turned into Decadence, and Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895 symbolically marked its end. But its idea that the beauty of everyday objects matters as much as that of paintings passed on to Art Nouveau and the Glasgow School. Its taste for Japanese simplicity also paved the way for modern design. Unlike the Arts and Crafts movement, which saw craft as a social commitment, Aestheticism sought beauty and nothing else.
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