Aestheticism

The Aesthetic movement is a term used for a loosely defined movement in art and literature in later nineteenth century Britain. Generally speaking, they represent the same tendencies that Symbolism or Decadence stood for in France, and may be considered the English branch of the same movement. It belongs to the Anti-Victorian reaction and had post-romantic roots. It took place in the late Victorian period[?] from around from 1868 to 1901, and is generally considered to have ended with the trial of Oscar Wilde.

The English decadent writers were deeply influenced by Walter Pater[?] and his essays published in 1867-1868, where he stated that life had to be lived intensely following an ideal of beauty. Decadent writers used the slogan, coined by Théophile Gautier in France, "Art for Art's sake" and asserted that there was no connection between art and morality.

The artists and writers of the Aesthetic Movement tended to hold that the arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence they did not accept John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold's utilitarian conception of art as something moral, didactic, useful. Art has not any didactic purpose, it needs only to be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy art, they asserted in a paradox. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, synaesthetic effects, that is correspondence between words, colours and music.

The Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites. In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists. Artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement include James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Writers include Oscar Wilde. The movement has an influence in interior design. 'Aesthetic' interiors were chracterised by the use of such things as peacock feathers and blue-and-white china. This aspect of the movement was satirised in Punch magazine, and in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta "Patience".