British Art Up North - Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Birmingham

PART ONE

William Hogarth - The Distressed Poet

An ill-travelled Southerner, I recently headed up North to Leeds, Manchester and Wakefield, with a short subsequent jaunt to the Midlands and Birmingham (which is still North from here, anyroad). This gave me the opportunity to visit the local galleries and see the excellent collections of British art which they hold from the Victorian and early to mid-twentieth century periods, and come across works by favourite artists which I’d not encountered before in the sense of standing before the actual painting (an experience which no reproduction, no matter how expertly photographed and reproduced, can replace). The Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham museums and galleries are all housed in imposingly monumental buildings reflecting the sense of civic pride in these newly emergent cities of the industrial revolution. Given the neoclassical Victorian facades of all these buildings, it’s unsurprising to discover that they all have impressive collections of nineteenth century British art, with Manchester and Birmingham having particularly fine displays of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. There are works by earlier favourites, too: Hogarth, Blake and Samuel Palmer. The original oil painting of Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1733-5) in Birmingham, which was subsequently reproduced in several versions as a print, vividly portrays the poverty and despair of a Grub Street writer (the precursor of the modern day hack). Hogarth depicts his jobbing wordsmith as more exploited than exploitative. The garret room is unadorned and bare (as is the food cupboard) and the ceiling plaster is crumbling, exposing the joists beneath. The writer, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown sits at his desk, his chair the end of the bed, desperately rubbing his head beneath his wig as if to prompt the circulation of new ideas. The detritus of crumpled and discarded papers below indicates that they are refusing to emerge to order. Meanwhile, his wife sews his worn trousers and attempts to deal with the demands of the milkmaid, who proffers the full board of unpaid bills. Only the cat seems comfortable, curled up on the writer’s coat, which is cast down on the floor. His comfort may be shortlived, however, since it seems unlikely that he’ll be getting any more milk. It’s a scene which had a bitter personal resonance for Hogarth. His father, Richard, came down to London in the late 1680s, with dreams of becoming a writer and teacher, and settled in the Bartholomew Close in the Smithfield area, adjacent to Grub Street, where William was born. But he found the learned life to be a hard struggle, and failed to make a name for himself, his proposals for a dictionary and literary coffee house never realised. The only books for which he did find a publisher were a children’s introduction to Latin, Greek and English and a few school texts. The manuscript of the dictionary and encylopaedia, his grand work, was later lost. In 1709, when young William was 12 years old, he found himself in the Fleet debtor’s prison, where he remained until 1713. His incarceration would have been more extended had it not been for a new parliamentary bill offering relief for low-level debtors.

Samuel Palmer - The Bright Cloud

There were a couple of William Blake paintings in Manchester, delicately sculptural renderings in tempera of literary ‘heads’, busts of the Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and the French enlightenment essayist Voltaire. Relatively conventional and lacking in his customary visceral visionary intensity, these date from around the year 1800, when he also submitted two biblical paintings in tempera (The Last Supper and The Loaves and Fishes) for exhibition at the Royal Academy. It would seem that this was a period in which he was making one last bid for artistic respectability. Blake’s follower Samuel Palmer has his painting The Bright Cloud (1833-4) in Manchester. It’s not the only picture he did with this title, and the billowing masses of cumulus cloud form a secondary landscape in the background. It’s one of his depictions of a golden and russet coloured autumnal idyll, a Kentish Eden in the Darenth Valley, where he lived in the village of Shoreham. The sleepily rural scene, with placid cattle idling on the hillside beneath oak and beech, is given a sacred resonance by the figures walking past, baskets on their heads presumably containing apples from an adjacent orchard. They are led by a figure in a blood-red headscarf (echoing the autumnal reds on the hill) on a donkey, who guides them in a processional line into the valley, like Christ riding into Jerusalem; the prelude to an English pastoral Passion.

Atkinson Grimshaw - Reflections on the Thames, Westminster (1880)

Leeds Art Gallery honours its native son, Atkinson Grimshaw (he was born in Back Park Street on 6th September 1836) with a number of his works from their extensive collection on display. Probably best known is his fairy painting Iris, which also acts as a study in autumnal colours and atmospheres. The titular fairy, hovering above a woodland pool with a certain aerodynamic implausibility, has a fiery halo forming a coronal crown about her head, the light from which reflects on the spectral translucence of her dragonfly wings, which in turn refract in beams and phosopherescent spatters of radiant light. This sprays out into the twilight shadows of the autumn woodland, bringing out and making hallucinatorily vivid their orange, red, caramel and mossy green colours. Iris was the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology, connecting heaven and earth, the divine and the human, and was associated with the rainbow, which similarly connected those realms. Here, Grimshaw brings the Greek goddess into a very English environment, linking the old Mediterranean myths with the more native fairy tale tradition, with its northern European roots. She becomes the spirit of autumn, highlighting the beauty of the season which Grimshaw would repeatedly depict to such atmospheric effect. Iris is, in effect, his muse. Grimshaw was also known for his nocturnes, evocations of nightime atmospheres, either in reflective, rain-slicked city streets or in tree lined suburban streets, with eerie, shadowy figures hovering in the middle distance. On display here was his London picture Reflections on the Thames, Westminster, in which the curve of the Embankment leads to Westminster Bridge, lit by doubled rows of gaslit lamps, and the clockface of Big Ben smoulders with a baleful orange glow. A woman looks longingly over the water, silvered by the full moon which shines through dappled cloud, thinking who knows what. Perhaps she is considering how inviting the waters look. Her dog looks at the oncoming night strollers, intent on protecting her from any unwanted attentions. The lunar light creates a moody green luminescence which is an instantly recognisable characteristic of Grimshaw’s nocturnes. His nights are always tinted with a copper-green patina. A small, late work from 1892-3 is also on display, Snow and Mist (Caprice in Yellow Minor). A departure from his signature style, the musically allusive title makes clear his debt to Whistler, his fellow nocturniste. Its snowbound landscape is featureless noplace, daringly stripped of recognisable landmarks or any sign of human habitation. The lady with a shawl carrying her small basket on her concealed arm is walking into a blank void. It’s a study in off-whites, approaching abstract colour composition in the manner of Turner. It’s a brave turn towards experiment, an exploration of new styles and techniques in what was to be the last year of his life. He died in the year of its completion, 1893, and was buried in Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds.

Ford Madox Brown - Work (1852-65)

Ford Madox Brown’s Work, in Manchester, is one of the key works of Victorian art, in which the Pre-Raphaelite medieval dreaming or pious religiosity was set aside for a moment in order to represent the world around them as they saw it. Just as much of a dream, perhaps, but a fascinating insight into the Victorian mindset. And, thanks to the detailed photographic realism of the Pre-Raphaelite style, with its invisible brushstrokes, a real snapshot of Victorian life in all its colour and grime. The view is from the raised footpath above Heath Street in Hampstead, and is still recognisable today, although the road is now habitually choked with traffic heading up the hill towards the heath and over into Golders Green and points north, or down towards the centre of the ‘village’ and on through Archway into the dense heart of the city beyond. As usual with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the composition is cluttered with symbolic detail, every carefully placed object and figure freighted with some more or less obscure meaning. I find it best, having taken note of the different meanings, to ignore them and just enjoy the painting on its own pictorial merits. Here, Brown crams all the tiers of Victorian society within his small, overarching gold frame: the industrious navvies digging up the pavement; the well-dressed ladies leisurely taking the air; the marchers with their sandwich board surplices, perhaps advertising their temperance sentiments; the dishevelled, bare-footed flower-seller, miserable with poverty; and the unruly and unsupervised urchins in the foreground, antecedents of the ‘chavs’ of modern-day parlance (these maybe having a more direct linguistic correspondence, gypsies coming down from the fairs on the heath). Overlooking the whole teeming parade with a surveying stance of analytical detachment are portrait figures of the Reverend F.D.Maurice, a man of the cloth with a bent for social reform, and the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle. With their air of casual repose, they represent a less physically arduous kind of work, the labour of the mind. They stand in for the observer of the picture, implicitly inviting a unifying overview which draws all the elements together into a socially representative whole. Carlyle was a difficult model, too impatient and restless to stand still long enough for his portrait to be accurately painted. His likeness was instead worked up from a photograph, the new medium which allowed for a realistic reproduction of nature to be created within the comfortable confines of the studio.

John Everett Millais - Autumn Leaves (1856)

Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, also in Manchester, is another of the best-known of Pre-Raphaelite works. This moves out of the city to a more characteristic rural and, in this case, agricultural setting. Again, the symbolism, with straying sheep and tempting apples, can be comfortably ignored, leaving us with an enjoyable portrayal of rosy-cheeked rustic lust against a beautifully realised farmland backdrop, one part pasture, one part golden-sheaved arable. This background is painted with the meticulous Pre-Raphaelite attention to the detail of the natural world, to the shape, texture and colour gradations of leaf, grass-blade and corn-stalk. Such attention to natural form can also be found in Arthur Hughes’ 1859 painting The Long Engagement, in which fern and ivy, tree-bark and moss are rendered with such exquisite care that you can almost smell the loamy woodland aroma. They draw the attention as much as the trysting figures chastely meeting behind the tree trunk. John Millais’ Autumn Leaves, in Manchester, is a more evanescent evocation of nature, a beautiful depiction of twilight gloaming. Its warm, after-sunset colours contrast with encroaching shadow in what amounts to an autumnal English impressionism, catching the quality of evening light. A few curls of smoke send exploratory tendrils into the frame from the left, and the painting exudes a taint of smoky atmosphere from neighbouring bonfires and chimneys, synaesthetically extending its sensory range beyond the visual to the olfactory. The pile of dead leaves raked up by the young girls, their cheeks rosy with the cold and faces aglow with the light from the implied bonfire placed beyond the frame, about where the viewer is standing, at which they stare, are clearly intended to reflect the seasons of life, foretelling their own inevitable aging. I prefer once more to put such sentimental and overstuffed Victorian symbolism to one side and revel in the melancholic glow of this magical autumn evening.

John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shallott (1894)

John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallott, in Leeds, represents the wistfully yearning Arthurian dreaming of the Pre-Raphaelites, mainly (as in this case) deriving from Tennyson. Here, the lady, forever isolated in her river island tower, weaves the threads of her own binding fate, not yet aware of the figure of Lancelot riding across the meadow beyond. The same subject was painted by William Holman Hunt, a picture I first came across on the cover of the post-New Worlds SF and fantasy anthology the Savoy Book, published out by the Manchester Savoy Press in 1978. It was his last work, completed with the help of Edward Robert Hughes in 1905, and now resides in the suitably castellated building of the Wadsworth Athenium in Connecticut. Waterhouse’s smaller painting is not to be confused with his much-loved, large scale work entitled The Lady of Shallott, which happened to be on display in Birmingham at this time as part of an exhibition of Victorian paintings on loan from the Tate, entitled Love and Death. This transports us to the final stages of Tennyson’s poem, with the lady leaving her protecting tower to float downstream towards Camelot. It’s a journey which fulfils her foretold fate, her mysterious, funereal arrival at the castle presaging the fall of Arthur’s court. The frail, fey figure of the Lady reveals, as did Millais’ Ophelia, the Victorian gentleman’s tendency to view women as fragile creatures in need of sheltering and protection, and their attraction to tragic and mournfully sentimental presentations of femininity. The popularity of the Pre-Raphaelites in the late 60s and 70, particularly in their Arthurian mode, also made Waterhouse’s Lady the model for many a wispy flower child or myth-soaked folkie.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Proserpine (1874)

The decadent phase of late Victorian art, as embodied by Aesthetics like Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Whistler, favoured a more openly sensual approach, full-bloodedly seductive or exquisitely refined, and pious religiosity or finickety symbolism tended to get left behind. There are a number of Rossetti paintings in the museums, as well as Holman Hunt’s memorial portrait of his friend, painted in 1882 from an 1853 sketch. It captures him as a wide-eyed 22 year old romantic, a remembrance of better days. Beata Beatrix, in Birmingham, posthumously casts Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s dead love. The poppy which the descending dove brings to her in its beak, as well as the ecstatic, dreamily self-absorbed look on her face, alludes to Lizzie’s laudanum habit and the overdose from which she died. It’s a portrait of someone who had already effectively left him before she died. This particular painting was one of five copies he made of the composition, and Ford Maddox Brown took it upon himself to complete it in as close an approximation of his friend’s style as he could manage. Bower Meadow, in Manchester, is a more Pre-Raphaelite style watercolour, with fey, dreamy women gazing into some unspecified distance, possibly an interior one. They pluck absently on their instruments, producing what we can imagine as suspended, Debussyesque melodies, to which their doubles turn floating steps in each other’s arms in the middle distance. Unusually for Rossetti, there is also a tree-lined landscape in the background, like something from a medieval tapestry. This was taken from sketches he made at Knole Park near Sevenoaks some 22 years earlier. The woman on the right, with the copper hair and full features, is Alexa Wilding, one of the women Rossetti picked up from the streets to use as a model. She featured in a great many of his paintings from the mid-1860s onwards, although her presence tends to be overshadowed by that of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, given the fact that she led a fairly self-contained and respectable life and had little to do with the tangled romantic lives of Rossetti and his circle. La Donna della Fiesta, in Birmingham, which dates from 1881 (the year preceding his death), and Proserpine (a variant name for Persephone, hence her biting into a pomegranate) are two of his later sensual portraits of mythological sirens which use Jane Morris as the model. Janey was the great love and muse of his life after Siddal had died. It was a love which was complicated by the fact that she was married to his friend and sometime artistic collaborator William Morris. Rossetti, perhaps more beholden to the mores of the time than he would have liked to admit, and undoubtedly sensitive to Jane and William’s feelings, kept the affair within the bounds of passionate friendship, although their relationship seemed to many to be closer than that between husband and wife. Rossetti’s feelings for her come through in the paintings, and in the roles in which he casts her. In his artistic renditions of her, he enjoyed dressing her up in theatrical finery, and imaginatively changing her appearance. In some versions of La Donna he dies her black hair golden, and in the Proserpine on display in Birmingham in the Love and Death exhibition it becomes auburn.

Frederick Sandys - Morgan le Fay (1862-3)

Like Rossetti with Alexa Wilding and later Fanny Cornforth (and to a degree Jane Morris, whom he first saw in a theatre box when she was still Jane Burden and then bumped into again in the streets of Oxford), Frederick Sandys cast a model from the streets, gypsy called Keomi, who took on the dramatic role of Morgan-le-Fay in his 1862-3 painting, in Birmingham. The sorceress’ room is imagined with a fantastic richness of detail, from the jewelled safe box with its phial and scroll in the bottom left and the coloured wool discarded on the floor, to the loom, which doubles as an owl perch, the flaming crucible and the straw scattered on the grain of the wooden floorboards. There is a similarly heady mix of textiles in different colours, with Morgan draped in folds of green, yellow and purple, a black cloak with colourful Celtic symbols hanging on the wall, and a red, green and gold tapestry covering the back wall. This Morgan is evidently very well-travelled: she wears a leopard-hide tied about her waist, holds what looks like some Assyrian relic, has a statue of the Buddha on her safe box, and a book at her feet with a painting of an Egyptian figure, as well as depictions of the Egyptian gods Bes, Horus, Set and Ra on her large tapestry wall covering. There’s a tiny landscape seen through the small window in the upper right hand corner, through the threads on the loom, the burnished after sunset colours of the sky reflected in a curve of river, suggesting that this is a room high up in a castle tower (a hidden corner of Camelot, perhaps).

Simeon Solomon - A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8)

Simeon Solomon, several of whose paintings are in the Birmingham collection, offered a more homoerotic perspective on Aesthetic sensuality. His paintings A Deacon (1863), A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8) and The Child Jeremiah (1862, privately owned but on display here) present beautiful young men dressed in fine garments, posed holding various sacramental objects within provocatively religiose compositions. The young Jeremiah has his lyre slung casually over his shoulder, an ancient Hebraic Dylan, whilst the deacon and saint hold their urns, censers and blossoming branches with an absent looseness, their inward gaze indicating that their attention is directed elsewhere. They are the kind of sexy priests, saints and prophets who might appear in the knowingly kitsch and romantically decadent photographic tableaux of Pierre et Gilles. Solomon was a friend of Rossetti and a member of his artistic circle (being particularly close with the poet Algernon Swinburne). Most of these friends and acquaintances moved to distance themselves from him after he was arrested in 1873 for picking up men in a toilet just off Oxford Street. One of the few who stood up for him was Edward Burne-Jones, on the surface a more sober and ‘respectable’ man, with none of Rossetti or Swinburne’s wildness, whose acceptance of a baronetcy towards the end of his life seemed to seal his establishment status.

Edward Burne-Jones - Star of Bethlehem (1885-90)

Burne-Jones has a whole room dedicated to his work in the Birmingham Art Gallery, an acknowledgement of his birth (in 1855) in nearby Bennetts Hill in what is now the centre of the city. The huge annunciation painting Star of Bethlehem was indeed commissioned by the Corporation of Birmingham late in Burne-Jones’s life, in 1889, its impressive yardage presumably a badge of profligate prestige. It was a copy, in watercolours, of a tapestry which he’d designed for Exeter College, Oxford in 1887, the fact that he was being asked at this stage to make copies of pre-existing works an indication of his well-established popularity and fame. Greybearded Joseph, standing just outside the stable, little more than a straw-roofed rain shelter held up by silver birch trunks, looks more like a druid than a carpenter in his blue-grey robes with a bundle of twigs under his arm and an axe at his foot. Mary sits on straw in her bower, whose wicker walls are threaded through with wild roses, contrasting with the blue speedwell and white celandine dotting the lush green grass beyond. They are quite the match for the jewels in the crown laid at the feet of one of the three kings who have just arrived. The angel who greets them, and who nurtures a warm glowing globe of light within its prayerfully uplifted hands, hovers just above the earth, indicating its separateness from the mortal realm. Its downturned feet are perfectly posed to show off the glittering straps of its golden sandals, and it casts a radiant shadow on the rush-bordered puddle beneath its weightless form. The African king seems to have a robe brought directly from Morris and Co, with Burne-Jones designs along the bottom hem. The dark shadows of the wildwood on the hills beyond the gathered group locate this scene more in the northern lands of Grimm fairy tales than in Biblical times and climates. It’s of a piece with Burne-Jones’ Arthurian paintings, part of a continuum with his mythological dreamworlds. Also in the room are large scale cartoons of The Last Judgement, created as models for stained glass windows produced by Morris and Co. for Easthampstead church in Berkshire from 1874-80. Working as murals in their own right, they indicate how prolifically hard-working Burne-Jones was, here effectively doubling the effort of creation to produce the finished glass-work. A late portrait of 1893-5 of Lady Windsor finds him painting in an uncharacteristically Whistler-like style. It is as much a subdued study in greys as it is a society portrait, and might as well have been given one of Whistler’s musical titles. The fact that he was, at this point in his career, sought after to paint society portraits, even though it was hardly what he was known for, indicates the degree to which Burne-Jones had been embraced by the art-loving establishment. His upwardly mobile drift, whilst it was not something he ever actively pursued, put a strain on his long term and very close friendship with William Morris, who was at the same time moving in the opposite direction, towards radical socialist engagement.

Walter Crane - At Home: A Portrait (1872)

Walter Crane was another artist, illustrator and designer working in the Arts and Crafts style who embraced socialist ideals, having initially been influenced in this direction by William Morris. This is not something you’d readily detect from his 1872 picture of domestic calm At Home: A Portrait, which is in the Leeds Gallery. This is an immaculate assemblage of Aesthetic interior furnishings: there’s the blue and white china vase; blue and white fireplace tiles, illustrated with various unusual creatures, including bats, salamanders and dolphins; a Rossetti style medievalist Pre-Raphaelite wall tapestry; a decorative blue and green carpet; and a Japanese fan neglectfully held between the thumb and forefinger of a woman in a state of easeful repose. This is Crane’s wife Mary, to whom he was devotedly married for 44 years, before she was tragically killed by a train in December 1914. Here, she is more modestly dressed than most Aesthetic models, the typical loosely draped garments restricted to a white shawl falling from her shoulders. She doesn’t have the enervated slump found in many Aesthetic portraits of women, too. Instead, she leans lightly on the mantelpiece and intently reads the book she is holding. Its covers are yellow, but it’s a little too early for it to be the Yellow Book, not quite close enough to the fin de siecle. A tabby sits regally by the fire, warming its back against the crackling flames. The relaxed presence of Mrs Crane and cat (the obvious choice of pet for an Aesthetic, Rossetti’s wombats aside) make this a genuinely homely scene, rather than just an ostentatious display of exquisite taste. It’s a portrayal of quiet beauty and intelligence, a record of the artist’s own love for his wife.

Gwen John - Interior (1915-16)

Gwen John was the master of contemplative domestic interiors with calm female subjects in the early 20th century. There were several of her sensitive portraits in the galleries, all displaying the subdued use of clay-like colours, thinly applied to give the pictures the look of roughly fired earthenware pottery. The bloom in Woman Holding A Flower adds a drop of red at the bottom of the frame to the palette. The woman herself has a sad and inward look which fails to reflect this intrusion of primary colour, however. The flower is drooping in her hand, and already wilting memory, perhaps echoing the melancholic turn of her thoughts. It may have been a variant of the expressions she wore whilst modelling for August Rodin, who was also her lover at this time, but who never returned her love with the same intensity of feeling which she exhibited. The model for the Woman Holding A Flower was Chloe Boughton-Leigh, with whom John became friends in 1907, and for whom she also sat as a model. The Convalescent, in Manchester, is one of her pictures of women reading, making it a good follow-up to the Walter Crane portrait. John’s reading women, like Crane’s wife in At Home, are a study in calm, concentrated repose as they focus in on the page, and on the inward thoughts which it promotes. Here, it is a letter rather than a book which the young woman reads as she sits in her wicker chair, back propped up on a pillow and loosely clenched hand resting in her lap. The overall pallor of the background and the furniture make the teapot, highlighted with glints of reflected light, stand out with preternatural clarity, as if it contained the medicinal stuff of life (as well it might). In another such portrait, The Student, also in Manchester, John’s friend Dorelia McNeil is posed in a standing position, looking down at a well-thumbed French paperback book, La Russie (a Russian dictionary?), a notebook grasped in one hand, the other leaning on the back of a simple chair. Her face is lit by a lamp somewhere beyond the frame, and she casts a shadow on the wall behind her in what is clearly, from the proximity of the ceiling above her head, a very modestly proportioned room. The glow cast on her face could easily be seen in symbolic terms, the radiance emanating from an active and intellectually engaged mind. McNeil, who was later to have an affair with Gwen’s more extrovert and licentious brother Augustus, was a junior secretary in a solicitors office. A woman from a humble background, she nevertheless had a passion for art, and went to evening classes at the Westminster School of Art. She had a winning personality, and was soon frequenting artistic circles, where she met and became friends with Gwen. They set out in 1903 on a spontaneously arranged and barely planned continental adventure, their intention to walk from Bordeaux to Rome. In the end, they got distracted and diverted along the way, and the journey was re-routed to take them eventually to Paris. John was to make her home there for many years, too many of them spent in the vain hope that Rodin, now an elderly man, might return her romantic feelings. Interior, in Manchester, depicts her room in the Rue Terre Neuve in Meudon, just outside Paris. Like the similar A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, it is haunted by her absence, a depiction of a space from which she has vanished, leaving behind strangely affecting everyday artefacts betokening recent presence. A set of tea cups and accessories and another brown teapot, standing out with talismanic solidity against the spectrally pale backround – perhaps still warm.

The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers is a follow up to his 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, a point worth making since it is not mentioned anywhere on the dust jacket. The novel could stand on its own, but references or allusions to previous events would be lost, and the reader might suffer from a vague feeling that there’s a narrative abyss from whose ragged edge the story they’re being told begins. This is not the first time that Powers has gone back to stories which originally stood as single, self-contained novels. Earthquake Weather, from 1997, drew together the fantasies Last Call (1992) and Expiration Date (1995) into a grand, synthesising mythologisation of the history and landscapes of California and Las Vegas, combining their modern re-interpretations of Fisher King allegories and ghost stories into a complex whole. This revisiting of earlier material is indicative of Powers’ compulsive creation of grand mythological systems which incorporate historical events, rich and realistic depictions of place, rationalised manifestations of the supernatural and real-life characters lent appropriately legendary characteristics (Last Call features the ghost of Thomas Edison and Expiration Date the gangster Bugsy Siegel as the inheritor of the Fisher King’s crown).

The Stress of Her Regard (its title taken from lines in a Clark Ashton Smith poem, Sphinx and Medusa) weaves its intricate and complex mythological schema around the lives, travels and artistic vision of the English Romantic poets. At the granitic core of his invented, or recast mythology is the notion of a stony race of supernatural beings which predate organic life. They are the nephilim of Biblical legend, the ‘giants in the earth’ who were the pre-Adamic descendants of Lilith. Formed from the rocks of the earth, they can take the shape of inhuman mineral behemoths, ambulatory boulder masses, or even sentient mountains; when sluggish or sleeping, they can appear as statues (with shades of Steven Moffat’s weeping angels in Doctor Who); or they can splinter off and ‘marry’ a selected human being, becoming their doppelganger twin. They also take the form of semi-serpentine lamiae, and exert a mesmeric, transfixing influence over their spouses akin to the opiated addiction to a vivid dream world. This bewitching link is sustained by blood, and a lineage furthered by the rebirth of infected hosts as nephilitic ‘revenants’, variants on the classic vampire. Powers moulds his mythology to reflect, adumbrate and comment upon the various aspects of the Romantic worldview (and its Gothic offshoots), and to incorporate various of its artistic creations. The nephilim are partly comprised of Keats’ lamiae, partly of Polidori and Byron’s vampires, and numerous fragments of Romantic poetry and journal entries are quoted at the head of chapters, recast to make reference to the stony tribe. The notion of the Romantic sublime, found in its ultimate aspect in the inhuman scale of the Alpine peaks and crevasses, is given a new slant of awe and terror with the notion that those mineral masses might in some sense be sentient and exerting an influence on the overwhelmed observer.

Powers also provides a rationale for the air of tragic mortality which seemed to surround the Romantic poets. The nephilitic lamiae act as muses, bringing with them the incidental gift of transcendant artistic vision, an insight into an extra-human realm. But there is a terrible cost to pay. Whilst there is a genuine love between muse and often willing ‘victim’, the nephilim are jealous lovers, and wreak terrible, murderous violence upon any others who come too close to the affections of their chosen ones. He also incorporates rationalised variants of a whole panoply of Gothic devices. Indeed, the formative evening for modern Gothic horror, that storm-wracked night of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Geneva during which Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Lord Byron, John Polidori and Percy Shelley decided to tell each other tales of terror congruent with the turbulent darkness beyond the walls, is included as a scene-setting preface to the book. Splintered wooden stakes fired from rifles are effective against the stone creatures, as are iron spikes and silver bullets. Those who fall under the spell of the nephilim, and who open their veins for them, return as revenants themselves after death, no longer human but hybrid beings. They light on victims of their own, but must be invited in first, as with classic vampire lore. Polidori becomes one such, thus becoming the Vampyre of his own nephilim-fuelled imagination. Powers also manages to incorporate fragments of Norse and Greek mythology, hinting at some grand underlying synthesis. Allusion is made to the Greek tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the sole survivors of a great flood who repopulate the earth by casting stones behind them which sprout into human beings. The use of wooden stakes to slow the stone beast which emerges from the Swiss mountainside leads to a comparison with Balder the Beautiful in Norse mythology, killed with a dart made from mistletoe, with Byron likened to Loki, his assassin. This leads Byron to fumingly wonder ‘do all our most affecting legends, as well as our literature, derive from these devils?’ The Graiae, or Fates, also play a central role, taking on the form of the statures atop the pillars in St Michael’s Square in Venice (with the third lying below in the waters of the canal). The notion of their omniscient vision, which encompasses all time, conjures up modern notions of chance and quantum mechanical uncertainty. The attempts of Byron, Shelley and our protagonist (the unfortunately named, for the English reader, Michael Crawford) to prevent the re-awakening of the Graiae becomes a battle over the ontological status of reality, and of the theological state of free will, as well as a metaphor for the Romantic Poets’ opposition to dynastic tyranny (the occupation of Venice by the Hapsburg Empire in this case).

The narrative offers a grand tour of Romantic locales via Crawford’s fate-driven travels across Europe. Spanning the years 1816 t o1822, with a short epilogue in 1851, it moves from London to the Swiss Alps, Venice to Rome, Livorno to Portovenere on the North West coast of Italy. Along the way he meets Keats and Shelley (both of whose deaths he witnesses), Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, Dr Polidori, Byron, and his friend and companion in adventure Edward Trelawny. Powers clearly has extensive knowledge and understanding of the Romantic poets, and enjoys assimilating the events and legends of their lives into his story. He and his friend and fellow Californian writer have indeed co-created their own Romantic poet, William Ashbless, who first featured in Powers’ Victorian London-set novel The Anubis Gates. They have since written numerous Ashbless poems which lovingly pastiche the Romantic and Victorian styles. Ashbless even gets a mention in Hide Me Among the Graves, his name casually thrown in amongst a list of the great poets of the age with a modest acknowledgement of its lesser status. Algernon Swinburne is told that if he loses his connection with his bloody muse, he will no longer write with the visionary intensity he has lately been enjoying, at least ‘not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you’re now free to shed. But – like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably’.

Powers characters tend to be sorely tried, and to suffer injury and symbolic disfigurement or lameness in the course of their adventures. They also go through mental agonies, frequently suffering from anguish and guilt at some past failure or moral dereliction, whether real or perceived. In The Stress of Her Regard, Crawford loses his middle finger, and ages prematurely, and he is tortured by the sense that the death by drowning of his brother and of his wife in a fire were somehow brought about by his neglect or inaction. Josephine, initially his antagonist but later his companion, his lover and finally his wife, loses an eye (torn out in an echo of Biblical imprecations and Greek tales – the Fates again) and suffers throughout from tormented mental states and schizoid shifts in personality. There are elements of the precepts of Christian sacrifice here, and of the Fisher King mythos of the would which will not heal, and which is symbolically associated with the ruination of the land. The quest of the hero is thus not only a search for personal salvation, for the erasure of guilt or curse, but for the restoration of the broken world, of a lost wholeness.

Powers is, perhaps not incidentally, Christian himself (Catholic, to be specific, putting him in the noble lineage of writers of the fantastic such as GK Chesterton, Walter M Miller and Gene Wolfe). He and Blaylock were friends with Philip K Dick in his later years, with regular discussion circles held at his house. He turns up as a character named David in Dick’s late, pseudo-autobiographical tale of madness and the re-building of a fragile sanity, Valis. Valis, and the lengthy Exegesis which underlay it, was Dick’s own attempt at the construction of a universal mythological system (analogous in his case to a Gnostic religious variant) to give meaning to his chaotic and damaged life and the violence and tyranny in the world around him. At this point it’s not clear to what extent he believed in the actuality of what he was writing, an ambiguity which he addresses by splitting his autobiographical persona into two characters, Phil Dick and Horselover Fat, who turn out to be the schizoid halves of the same person. Powers, in the guise of David, offers the fractured Dick protagonists a kindly perspective on the universe, which he sees as essentially benevolent despite its apparent cruelties, guided by a compassionate underlying presence which manifests itself through the generosity of human spirit. The protagonists of Powers’ novels, for all their anguish and suffering (and perhaps partially through them), generally find this to be true, and the author shows the same generosity towards them as he did towards the ailing and sometimes unbalanced Dick. There’s an essentially kindness at the heart of his work which transcends the travails he puts his characters through. The punishments they endure are often exacerbated by their strong sense of moral purpose, their refusal to give up their quest or mission despite all the temptations laid in their path, or to abandon their companions, or even apparent enemies, to their fate. Indeed, it is a characteristic of Powers’ novels that enemies can become allies, or even friends, joining forces to stand against inhuman or demonic powers.

Hide Me Among the Graves (the title deriving from one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal’s little known poems, At Last) takes place some forty years after the events of The Stress of Her Regard, and features John Crawford, the son of Michael and Josephine, whom they named after John Keats. We briefly met him as a thirty year old man in that novel’s coda, as his aging parents told him their remarkable tale in the place where it all began. He has followed in his father’s medical footsteps, although choosing rather to minister to animals as a veterinarian. Where The Stress of Her Regard moved between a succession of colourful continental locales, the later novel remains firmly rooted in a vividly imagined Victorian London, whose geography is expertly laid out. The three main sections take place in the years 1862, 1869 and 1877, with a prologue taking us back to 1845, and an epilogue forward to 1882. The Romantic poets have now been replaced by Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetics, with a cast centred around the Rossetti family: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, and their siblings Maria and William; and Dante’s friend and sometime housemate, the wild-haired and hearted poet and rakehell Algernon Swinburne. The nephilim are reawakened through Christine’s christening of the diminished stone statuette which Polidori has become, and which her father has brought back from Europe, with blood. Trelawny returns, grizzled with his adventures in Italy and Greece with the late Lord Byron, and reported piratical escapades. He has had his own brushes with the nephilim, and now has one of their dormant ‘eggs’ lodged as a growth in his neck (Powers had used the idea of gallstones as nephilim eggs in The Stress of Her Regard). He also carries part of Shelley’s jawbone as a talisman, having been present at his shoreline cremation following his drowning in the seas of Livorno (drowning being one way of escaping from the attentions of the stone lamiae and avoiding a terrible rebirth).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - self-portrait 1870

A difficult and oft-thwarted romance between damaged and initially ill-suited protagonists is once more at the heart of the story. John Crawford overcomes his initial Victorian gentleman’s shock at the forthrightness of Adelaide McKee (to whom he refers with a businesslike ‘McKee’ for most of the novel), the ‘fallen woman’ who enters his life on Blackfriars Bridge, and with whom he takes a plunge into the Thames after a plummeting ‘meteor’ (a jealous nephilim in pure mineral form) roars down on them from the London skies. Powers introduces further mythological lore and local legend to his Romantic portrayal of a Dickensian, gaslit city. There is the paying of coins to the road sweeper at the Seven Dials junction, who hands them back and replaces his broom to allow for a ‘blind’ passage, free of the supernatural vision of nearby watchers. The Thames is re-imagined as a fogbound medium for ghosts caught in an afterlife limbo, flopping about as devolved, fishlike blobs. There is a thriving ‘hail Mary’ trade, in which Adelaide is involved, involving the use of ‘aves’, or birds to catch the souls of the recently departed and allow for a limited form of communication. And the nursery rhyme vocalisation of the sounds of London’s church bells (oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements etc.) are revealed as mnemonics for the ancient Latin passwords (oranges and lemons representing Origo lemurum) required to pass safely down neighbouring wells and into London’s labyrinthine underworld. This underworld, a city beneath the city, is depicted with chill imaginative detail, and we gain the sense that the subterraenean territories which John and Adelaide stumble into are just the edge of a vast, lightless subworld. Powers’ London is a layered city, whose historical strata are still open to the excavations of the adventurous or foolhardy archaeological adventurer. The gateways to the labyrinths of hidden London can be found in the most unprepossessing of places, such as the basement of the ramshackle spit and sawdust Spotted Dog pub. Powers brings the mythological matter of Britain into play, casting Gog and Magog as giants of the stone race, Albion personified, with Boadicea as their nephilitic offspring, intent on making England shake and razing London to the ground once more, as she did in revenge for the defilement of herself and her daughters by the Roman invader.

There’s also a scene in which John and Adelaide gain entrance into what appears to be the interior of a giant stone skull (the inside of Gog or Magog’s skull?) by inching their way along a narrow crawl space beneath a tomb in Highgate Cemetery, with no possible of turning around. It’s a passage which rivals Colin and Susan’s crawl through the constricting cave tunnel beneath Alderley Edge in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Bringamen for clammy, airless claustrophobia. Highgate Cemetery, the locus of Victorian gothic in London, is a natural locale for the novel to spend time in. Powers cleverly incorporates Rossetti’s disinterment of his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s body from the cemetery into his narrative, giving him a better purpose for such desecration. According to legend, Rossetti had buried his notebook with all his poems in it with Lizzie’s body. He later came to regret this, and managed, some seven years later, to again permission to dig up the coffin and retrieve them. Lizzie was reported to be perfectly preserved, a strand of her red hair coming away with the book. Here, that preservation is explained by the immortality granted by marriage to the nephilim (she is not dead, but merely sleepeth), and the disinterment is an attempt to prevent the birth of an unnatural offspring, conceived before her death. Rossetti’s determination to recover his notebook is also rationalised, his foreswearing of his own destructive ‘muse’ resulting in a dying down of the fever of artistic inspiration in his blood, and the subsequent need to find the words he’d written while it still raged. Powers plays games with autobiographical detail, reflecting on Rossetti’s concentration on poetry rather than art for a period in his life. He similarly offers a metaphorical depiction of the waning of Christina Rossetti’s creative powers, or of her will to write further in later years, a melancholy acknowledgement of the diminishing of the sense of burning, youthful purpose.

Quiet heroism - William Rossetti

As in The Stress of her Regard, the stone muses are shown to be harsh mistresses or masters, the creation of visionary poetry or art through their aegis an exacting and spirit-sapping calling, inviting an attendant train of tragic event which can in its turn be transformed into artistic expression. William Rossetti, the more stable and staid male member of the clan, who tirelessly promoted the work of his brother and his fellow artists, and who ended up chronicling their lives (in the mid-century PRB Journal and in his 1906 volume Some Reminiscences), is offered a vision of the library of great poetic works he could create if he opened himself up to a nephilitic lover (thus allowing the Polidori creature to re-establish itself). But he knows the price he and others would have to pay, a resists this heady temptation, sadly resigning himself to an acceptance of his lesser literary talents. This refusal is an oddly heroic moment, a sacrifice of a secretly held dream, and an unseen act of will which saves others by retreating to the shadows of insignificant obscurity. Once more, Powers allows his characters such moments of quiet heroism, choices made which result in sacrificial suffering for the sake of others whom they may not even know that well. Such gestures are eventually repaid, though. There is a sentimental but touching and quite beautiful scene in which John, having been infected by a nephilim bite, and knowing that his will shall shortly be affected, throws himself into the Thames once more to cast off the malign influence with his dying breath. But having reached that final moment, he finds himself being gently nudged to the surface by many furry forms – they are the blind and lame cats which he has cared for in his house over the years, which have joined the river of ghosts. Later, lost in the underworld and pursued by hungry ghosts, he is again aided by animal spirits, this time of the horses he has treated in his surgery. These scenes extend the generosity of Powers’ world view beyond the human, and typify his benevolent take on the universe. It’s a hard path which his characters are forced to take, but in the end, love sees them through.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART THREE


The latter part of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new medium, photography, and this too was enthusiastically adopted by the Aesthetic movement, whose eclecticism readily absorbed anything which could be of use in creating their ideal world of beauty. The element of narcissism in Aestheticism also naturally responded to the allure of seeing itself reflected in the contrived mirror of the photographic portrait. The aesthetic photographic portrait was a popular and fashionable way of adopting the style for one immortalised moment. A temporary costume, a thoughtfully arranged pose and an appropriate backdrop served to put on the attitude; a bit of fancy dressing for fun, aping those for whom such details were the outward signs of a philosophy of life. Some of these are shown here, taken by such portrait photographers as David Wilkie Wynfield and Julia Margaret Cameron. Wynfield’s picture of the architect William Swinden Barber with a flower and a vaguely Eastern headdress, looking for all the world like a 1960s hippie, a Decadent Donovan. The part-time poseurs were exposed as bit part extras in comparison with the master of the self-publicising photographic portrait, however – Oscar Wilde. The series of twenty photos of Oscar taken by Napoleon Sarony in New York in January 1882 define the male Aesthetic look: the long hair, velvet smoking jacket, casual, lounging posture, and distanced gaze.

Wilde became a celebrated aesthete long before he produced artistic work of any great significance, although the construction of his persona could in itself be considered a sustained work of art, and a very successful one at that. He was also very generous and energetic in praising and promoting the art and artists which he admired, and the outlook of the Aesthetic Movement in general. His lecture tour of America and Canada in 1882 was a heroic odyssey in which he spread the gospel of beauty well beyond the usual metropolitan centres, venturing to the heartlands of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Omaha, and to the Southern states of Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray amounted to a manifesto for Aestheticism, whilst also, with its central conceit of the artistic portrait which absorbs the repugnance of the protagonist’s moral corruption, containing a warning about the dangers of self-absorption and disconnection from humanity in the pursuit of beauty and sensation. All of which suggests that Wilde was possessed of a healthy degree of self-awareness and an ability to face the inherent fatuity of the dazzling demi-monde in which he shone with such stellar fusion. The novel begins with a series of epigrammatic declarations, which brook no refutation and which articulate the Aesthetic creed: ‘the artist is the creator of beautiful things’; ‘those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For them there is hope’. He dismisses the ‘fleshly school’ attacks by stating that ‘no artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything’. He shows solidarity with Whistler’s combinatory ideal by positing that ‘from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician’, and, perhaps considering himself and the importance of his personality to his art, ‘from the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type’. Finally, after noting that ‘the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely’, he concludes that ‘all art is quite useless’.

Sarah Bernhardt

Wilde achieved his greatest artistic success in the theatre in the 90s, with comedies of serious intent such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance. The theatre enjoyed a huge upsurge in popularity in this period, and undoubtedly the hugest star of the stage was Sarah Bernhardt, who rose to an almost mythical ascendancy, at first in Paris and then throughout the Western world. She was the Garbo or Dietrich of her day. The divine Sarah was another embodiment of Aestheticism, pale and thin, a lover of both men and women, and a mistress of the extravagant gesture. She was photographed lying supine in an open coffin, sipping from a skull, and used to surround herself with lilies. Wilde cast an armful of lilies at her feet as a gesture of supplication when she arrived in England in 1879. The French decadent writer Jean Lorrain summoned up her dangerous allure (drawn from a certain degree of personal experience) in his poem Le Sang des Dieux (The Blood of the Gods): ‘When she roamed abroad like a young goddess,/Irritating Paris with her loud laugh,/Golden chains flashed from her eyes/And her bare feet trampled the bruised bodies of her lovers.’ Wilde simply called her ‘that serpent of old Nile’. Bernhardt often played male roles on stage (she played Hamlet in a French translation), or parts such as the lead in Dame aux Camellias, which projected an exaggerated femininity. In modern terms, her persona would be considered camp. She was keen to play Salome in Wilde’s play, and the two discussed the production, whose stage design was to have been influenced by the jewelled mythological fantasies of Gustave Moreau. The play was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, however, and never reached the stage. Bernhardt influenced many writers and artists of the fin de siecle period, notably Alfonse Mucha, who designed a number of posters for her theatrical appearances and helped to consolidate her image. These became signature works of art nouveau, which was in many ways a development from the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. A striking theatrical poster on display here, designed by Fred Walker, advertises an 1871 stage adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ novel of Victorian gothic The Woman In White. Its dramatic composition is similar to Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ in its use of tonal variation within a limited palette, but uses the bolder outlines of a print. Its depiction of a figure approaching the dark threshold of the night is reminiscent both of GF Watts’ Love and Death and William Blake’s Los Entering the Grave, the frontspiece to his visionary epic Jerusalem.

A George du Maurier Punch satire

Aesthetic figures like Wilde and Bernhardt were characters of such self-created exaggeration, whose every gesture and utterance were part of a sustained performance, that they became easy targets for satire. George du Maurier’s cartoons in Punch were particularly popular and effective, and exhibited a keen insight into the spirit of Aestheticism. This was unsurprising, given that du Maurier had lived with Whistler whilst he was a young art student in Paris. Du Maurier’s satirical portraits centred around two characters whom he invented; the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Variants on Wilde regularly made an appearance, too, which didn’t bother him, since the caricatures were never vicious. Being the regular subject of satire was a compliment in its own way. It was a testament to how widely recognised he had become. He was wise to the mechanics of maintaining celebrity and realised that any publicity was good publicity (although the universal applicability of such an equation would later prove to be disastrously unfounded). In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan produced their comic opera Patience, a satire of the Aesthetic movement based around two sparring Aesthetes, Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor. Wilde asked if he might reserve a box for the opening night, and wrote ‘I am looking forward to being greatly amused’. Elsewhere in the exhibition we find Alfred Concanen’s cartoon of a swooning Aesthete on the cover of the sheet music to a comedy song entitled ‘Quite Too Utterly Utter’. Perhaps most amusingly, however, there is an 1881 Royal Worcester teapot in the form of a fey Aesthete, his crooked arm forming the handle, and gesturing, limp-wristed arm the spout. It’s interesting to note how far back the limp-wristed stereotype goes. No doubt it predates this period, reaching back to the courts of Louis and Charles and probably further.

Aubrey Beardsley - The Climax

The latter stages of the exhibition include a particular focus on literature and the arts of book illustration and design. The central figure here is Aubrey Beardsley, another artist who owed his success to the patronage and promotion of Wilde. He was also someone who was quite capable of producing his own unflattering, pre-emptive caricatures of himself as an enervated, swooning and painfully thin figure (he was never in good health and died young from the tuberculosis which had afflicted him from an early age). He described his 18 year old self in 1890 as possessing ‘a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop’. This element of self-loathing perhaps fed into the grotesque nature of many of his creations. His illustrations for the published version of Salome were not to Wilde’s taste, but they have come to define and possibly even eclipse the play itself. The Toilet of Salome, included here, has Beardsley’s characteristic bold, flowing outlines with areas blocked in black, along with stippled lines lightly evoking lace or frills. There is a small collection of books stacked below Salome’s dressing table whose titles can be traced along the spines (if you look closely) and which offer a decadent’s reading list of literary inspiration; de Sade, Manon Lescault, Nana by Zola and the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the satirical second century tale of a boy transformed into an ass, which also includes a telling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche – undoubtedly of relevance to Wilde’s play. The Climax is perhaps Beardsley’s best-known illustration, an intensely expressionist depiction of the culmination of the play. Salome seems to hover in ecstatic flight above the ground, the sinuous tendrils of her hair echoing the unfurling shoot coiling into life beneath her bent knees (the germinating seed of her morbid seduction). The baptist’s disembodied head sheds an almost continuous ribbon of blood, which resembles a stalk upon which it rests like a flower or seed head. Salome is held within a circling, bubbling, cloudlike envelope, and stares with mad intensity into the eyes of the severed head which she is about to kiss. It rivals Munch’s The Scream in terms of a composition in which everything is an emanation of the disturbed psychological state of the central figure.

Aubrey Beardsley - The Abbe

The Abbe is an illustration for Beardsley’s own Romantic novel Under the Hill, published in volumes 1 and 2 of the Savoy Magazine, and is a work of baroque fecundity. The diminutive face and miniscule hand of the eighteenth century dandy at its centre are wholly engulfed not just by the stippled, choking bowed cravatte, tightly furled and many layered muff and voluminous, op-art lined cloak but also by the thick, exotic, long-stemmed flowers which rise above him on either side and the dark woodlands which press against him from behind. He holds a foil, which looks more like a decorative pin, between fragile thumb and forefinger, and the insectile head of some strange stringed instrument peers from behind his shoulder, its body invisible, strapped to his back. A narrow break in the treeline allows the man moon to tentatively emerge and illuminate a fairy which is more moth than human in form. Perhaps that pin foil will be necessary after all. Beardsley’s illustration to Siegfried, first published in The Studio magazine in 1893, is an intricate weave of lines of fantastic complexity, whose curlicued arabesques form both the river winding towards the distant mountains, the profusion of twining trees and flowering undergrowth, and the figure of Siegfried himself, resting in languorous repose above the dragon which he has just slain. The whole composition looks as if it has grown out from several pen point planted on the paper’s seedbed surface. It’s influence on future fantasy artwork and magazine illustration is profound.

The infamous Yellow Book (1894), with its Beardsley cover, is one of several such journals which served to propogate the fervid fin de siecle growth of decadent art and literature. Of these, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon’s The Dial is also included here, with a cover illustration by Ricketts himself. The Yellow Book caused an outburst of heated fulmination in the Westminster Gazette, which called, in a rather Father Ted-ish way, for parliamentary action ‘to make this sort of thing illegal’. It and other magazines gave access to and displayed the influence of the literature of the French decadents, and their intoxicating essence pervaded the Aesthetic Movement in the 90s. As Lord Henry opines in The Picture of Dorian Gray when faced with the prospect of progress and ‘development’, ‘decay fascinates me more’. This chimed perfectly with the fin de siecle sense of the sunset of an era; of some things dying and other waiting to be born. The magazines also created a thriving market for short stories, and as Elaine Showalter points out in the collection Daughters of Decadence (with inevitable Beardsley cover) which she edited, over a third of the contributors were women. These were writers such as: George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose The Yellow Wallpaper is a classic of psychological horror), and Charlotte Mew, whose A White Night Showalter describes as ‘a feminist counterpart of Conrad’s A Heart of Darkness’. Other book illustrators represented here include Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, well known for their pictures for children’s books. Crane produced the illustrations for Wilde’s The Happy Prince. There are also books which are works of art in themselves, bookmaking being one of the fine crafts ennobled by Morris. Aubrey Beardsley’s Morte D’Arthur was certainly influenced by the publications of Morris’ Kelsmscott Press, and even though he disapproved of the mechanical means of its reproduction, it is a thing of exquisite beauty.

Rossetti - Daydream

The final gallery takes us into the last, late evening blooming of the Aesthetic Movement, now fully into its decadent phase, which it embraced with self-immolating fervour. Here we encounter one final Rossetti Goddess in his portrait of Jane Morris as ‘Monna Primvera’ in The Day Dream (1880). Janey is depicted as the sad-eyed spirit of Spring, sitting amongst the branches of a tree in her iridescent green dress, the buds bursting into leaf around her. She seems rather heavyset in this picture, her neck stretching out of proportion to her face, her fingers crooked and distended. She certainly seems too massive for the thin branches on which she sits. These seem almost to be emerging from her body at several points, leaving the impression that she is some sort of dryad, a wood spirit which is growing with and out of the tree, becoming more (or less) than human, the green of her eyes shading into the fresh green of the new leaves in the upper canopy. Lord Leighton’s Garden of the Hesperides also seems to depict a sort of ecstatic union with the non-human world, with its classical figures happily reclining in the coils of the serpent which binds them to the apple tree, clearly feeling no urgency to free themselves. It is a painting which reminds me of the opening of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe first enters the louche, hothouse atmosphere of the Sternwood house and observes ‘a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying’. No decadent Aesthete, Marlowe.

Time for tea

The final room has the visitor circulating around the cast for a sculpture which has been seen by a far greater number of people than any other work in the exhibition: Alfred Gilbert’s Eros. Made as a memorial for Lord Shaftesbury, this created a stir of controversy when its form was revealed, the naked figure with its flaccid bow having evidently just loosed its arrows of love considered to amount to an advertisement and signpost for the prostitutes who gathered to ply their trade in the area. Its permanence and recognition as one of the major London landmarks is in its own way a testament to the lingering appeal of Aestheticism, a lasting memorial to the spirit of the movement as much to the philanthropy of Lord Shaftesbury. The turn of the century and the bright dawn of the brief, practically-minded Edwardian era saw the dissipation of the Aesthetic dream, which was so much associated with an eschatological end of Empire glow, an embracing of the impending end of things. As Dorian Gray says in Wilde’s novel, ‘I wish it were fin du globe…life is a great disappointment’. Wilde’s trial and imprisonment marked a reassertion of establishment power and values. The Empire didn’t crumble, and as it geared up for conflict once more, it became less inclined to tolerate ‘unmanly’ qualities which be of no use in keeping the Boers or Germans at bay. One final sculpture from the early twentieth century serves to sum up its decline into ineffectual mannerism. Charles Ricketts had collaborated with Wilde on potential set designs for Salome, illustrated his collection of children’s stories A House of Pomegranites, produced and illustrated his own magazine The Dial, and set up the Vale press in 1896. But his 1905 sculpture Silence (intended as a memorial to Oscar Wilde) is little more than a trinket; an enervated angel, hand held to its mouth in a camp gesture, half-regretful, half-amused at some minor mishap or misdeed. Jacob Epstein’s Paris Pere Lachaise tomb, with its move towards art deco and modernism, is a far more fitting monument. Ricketts’ statuette is more Frank Spencer or Charles Hawtrey than divine messenger, hapless rather than heavenly. It as an appropriate figure to usher us out of this lush end of the century dreamworld and back into the contemporary wasteland (literally in terms of the roadworks currently engulfing Exhibition Road), in which people retreat into digital dreamworlds. Fortunately, it is but a short walk through the sculpture galleries (Buddhist and nineteenth century European, as I recall, possibly incorrectly) to the museum’s gorgeous William Morris tea rooms, a glorious setting for a more than decent cuppa, and a tasty scone.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART ONE

As you walk into the entrance lobby of the dimly-lit galleries in which the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cult of Beauty exhibition is housed you are immediately faced with an arrangement of objects which serve to conjure the spirit of the Aesthetic Movement of the mid to late 19th century which is its subject. There is a glazed dish with a peacock design made by William de Morgan, an employee of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts firm who had branched out on his own and opened his own ceramics workshops in the 1870s. The peacock’s feathers fan out to fill the left hand of the plate, following the curve of its edge, and seem to glimmer with an almost metallic sheen. There is a lengthwise photograph of a bowl of lilies by Frederick Hollyer, and a pair of andirons for the fire designed by Thomas Jeckyll in the form of sunflowers. All of these had symbolic import for the artists and followers of the Aesthetic Movement, Peacock feathers embodied a self-justificatory glorying in display and the favouring of jewelled colours. They stood for art for art’s sake, as Whistler put it. There was also something of the Byzantine mosaic quality to the feathers, which seemed designed to catch the light of the dying sun, or the decadant fade of empire towards the fin de siecle. If the peacock represented empty splendour, the lily symbolised the eternal soul, its white flowers suggested an unblemished purity, and was, for those who sported it, an indication of heightened sensitivity and attunement to spiritual rather than material values. It was the Aesthetic accessory par excellence, and was carried with a mixture of earnestness, irony and defiance in the face of Victorian convention. Its long, sinuous stem and pallid petals, which seem to droop under their own weight, also served as an analogue of the Aesthete’s ideal figure: tall, willowy and prone to draping itself decorously over the nearest piece of exquisite furniture. It was an absolute gift for the satirists and caricaturists of the day. If the lily suggested moonlight and nighttime, then the sunflower was its opposite. The flower of the summer day, it burned with bright, Apollonian light, the illumination of creation and artistic inspiration. Its yellow became one of the key colours in the Aesthetic palette. Whilst it was incorporated into various designs and paintings and was regularly carried about by Oscar Wilde, it was the lily which became the dominant symbol of Aestheticism. It was cool and distanced and a touch aloof.

There is also a bronze statue in this opening arrangement, The Sluggard by Frederick Leighton. It stands as the perfect representation of the Aesthetic figure – languid, listless and stretched into an artful disposition of limb and torso. Its modesty is minimally preserved by a miniscule fig-leaf, and is a bold indication the Aesthetic Movement looked back to the Classical world in embracing male as well as female beauty. This sometimes manifested itself in the expression of homosexual desire, and such open display of sensuality was to attract strong opprobrium and lead to a disastrous end for several of the movement’s figures, both prominent and lesser known. The intermixing of fine and applied art objects in this introductory display, the prelude to the exhibition proper, with materials ranging from bronze and wood to ceramics and iron, also indicates the wide reach of the Aesthetic Movement. More than merely visual art, it was a lifestyle, an interior design look, a fashion, a literary style and, perhaps above all, an elegantly struck pose.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The exhibition’s trail through the later decades of the nineteenth century England begins with a series of paintings which depict the search for a new ideal of feminine beauty. Some of the principal figures of the Aesthetic Movement are introduced, divided into separate groups. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, and Frederick (later Lord) Leighton and George Frederic Watts. Broadly speaking, they can be said to represent the Romantic and Classical divisions of Aestheticism, although such distinctions are largely academic. Watts and Leighton remained firmly ensconced within the Royal Academy establishment, at the heart of the recognised art world (as indicated by Leighton’s ennoblement). Those gathered around Rossetti’s circle, and later launching themselves beyond his orbit, tended on the other hand to stand in opposition to the Academy’s dictates, whether through necessity or design. Leighton and Watts were the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the Olympians, partly due to the colossal scale of their works, which frequently extended to the monumental size of the pictures themselves. Leigton’s Pavonia, a portrait of a dark-haired figure glancing back over her shoulder, her hair haloed with a fan of peacock feathers, has been used for the V&A’s exhibition poster. It’s very effective as such, Pavonia seeming to turn to look directly at the viewer, who finds themselves standing in for some imaginary interlocutor. The name Pavonia is a paradoxical feminine version of the Latin word pavonius, which means peacock. Leighton’s classicism tended to veer towards exotica, as can be seen in his frieze-like painting The Syracusan Bride, in which a parade of female supplicants of varying ethnicity make their way along a path leading to a temple. This wedding party includes women leading tamed lions, tigers and leopards. Such classical fantasies also provided an excuse to expose a good deal of flesh, the temporal and geographical distance and air of literariness lending such displays an air of semi-respectability. Whilst Rosetti and his circle generated a significant amount of moral outrage over their supposed debasement of noble artistic values, the likes of Leighton and Alma-Tadema didn’t raise an eyebrow with their bathing scenes and sleeping beauties.

Frederick Sandys - Gentle Spring

Frederick Sandys’ Gentle Spring typifies the Aesthtic’s presentation of the female subject as symbolic figure. His English variant of Botticelli’s Primavera is a pagan embodiment of the turning season, a verdant Goddess surrounded by blossoming life, a rainbow promise arcing above her head, flowers bursting into colourful life in her footsteps. Female figures are often bordered or laurelled with flowers in Aesthetic paintings, usually with traditional folk or literary import intended. Fruits of similarly symbolic weight also hang pendant, or are clutched or laid on tables, half-eaten. Sandys’ picture of Vivien (complete with fruit, flower and peacock feather array), the sorceress sometimes identified with the Lady of the Lake, also indicates the importance of Arthurian mythology to the movement, and of a dream of medieval life in general. This is particularly apparent in the work of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, although Rossetti, who had gone through his medieval period with the Pre-Raphaelites, tended now to look elsewhere for inspiration. Sandys was a follower of Rossetti’s who had produced an amusing satirical representation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood called A Nightmare in 1857. In this pastiche of John Everett Millais’ Sir Isumbras at the Ford, the armoured Millais rides a rather baleful and ragged mule identified as the critic John Ruskin (a champion of the PRB at a time when others were deriding it), with Rossetti sitting on his knee in a dress, and a tiny William Holman Hunt clinging on to Millais behind. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother, describes in his writings about the artistic milieu of the time how Sandys fell out with Rossetti. He felt that Sandys was cleaving rather too closely to his subject matter and style. Such borrowing was literally the case with his picture Medea of 1868 which, like Vivien, used his gypsy lover Keomi Gray as a model, and in which he borrowed the red bead necklace which Rossetti had used in his famous portrait Monna Vanna two years earlier. Sandys understandably took exception to such a view, bordering as it did on accusations of plagiarism.

Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866), not included here, is one of his third length portraits of women (or Goddesses) from mythology or Medieval and Classical literature. They are much more solid and physically present than the pale, ethereal and wispily evanescent women of his Pre-Raphaelite years. Those figures were largely modelled on Elizabeth (or Lizzie) Siddall, his partner and latterly his wife, who died in 1862 after years of debilitating illness and opium addiction. She stood in for the tragic, doomed heroine, the favoured female subject (or, more accurately, object) of the Pre-Raphaelites. There was a definite sense of continuity between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Aesthetics, but there was also a shift in emphasis. Only Rossetti, of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, can really be said to have become a significant (and indeed leading) part of the Aesthetic Movement, and his work distinctly altered in its nature. The Pre-Raphaelites placed great emphasis on realism, both in terms of the representation of the world, in the accuracy of every detail, and in fidelity to historical setting. This is one of the factors which initially attracted such vociferous criticism, particularly when it came to their representation of religious subject matter. They also allowed for a degree of social and moral commentary, particularly when it concerned that abiding Victorian preoccupation, the fallen woman. The Aesthetic Movement tended to turn away from such outward concerns and occupied itself solely with the creation of dreamworlds and sensual surface appearances. The Aesthetic generally favoured interiors, as opposed to the finely observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelites, in which every blade of grass was scrupulously reproduced. This retreat indoors was an indication of an increasingly inward-looking nature. There was still an interest in fallen women, but now they were brought back into the studio to pose as models, and not for morally uplifting or instructive tableaux. They often ended up staying.

Bocca Bacciata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti’s Bocca Bacciata (1859), which is included here and painted while Lizzie was still alive, is a portrait of Fanny Cornforth, one of the women whom he picked up off the street. She was what he referred to as a ‘stunner’, a word which he frequently used to describe anyone or anything whose beauty hit him with a dazing blow. Fanny as Bocca is a picture of ruddy health, sturdy and full of face, with the rosy apple by her side echoing the bloom of her cheek. She is bedecked in fine jewellery, the flowers of her necklace reproducing the corona of marigolds arrayed behind her head. The marigolds in this case stand in (in reduced form) for sunflowers. The dark, ivy-coloured green of her bodice jacket and the yellowish tinge to the flesh show two of the signature colours of the Aesthetic Movement, often used in combination. Gilbert and Sullivan would later satirize the preoccupation with these colours in their opera Patience as greenery yallery (also a punning take off of the Grosvenor Gallery, the centre for Aesthetic art exhibitions). Fanny also features in Rossetti’s Fair Rosamund, her cheek now in suggestively full flush. The bottle-glass windows behind her again provide a murky green background. The poet Algernon Swinburne, friend and sometime housemate of Rossetti, remarked of Fanny, in the context of Bocca Bacciata, that she was ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’. Although, given his reputation for uninhibited speech, it was likely that he felt free to express his feelings in all their ripe indecency. Her free flowing hair in both the portraits betrays another of Rossetti’s obsessions. Elizabeth Gaskell commented that ‘it did not signify what we were talking about or how agreeable I was, if a particular kind of reddish brown, crepe-wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment…He is not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’. Fanny was given free run of the house, coming and going as she pleased whilst ostensibly holding the position of housekeeper. Many of Rossetti’s friends blamed her for the regular disappearance of household items and money, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned. The muse must, after all, claim her due, the wages of inspiration.

Algernon Swinburne by William Bell Scott

Turning right, we come across objects relating to the early years of the arts and crafts movement, and the close-knit group of Rossetti, William Morris, Jane Burden (who became Jane, or ‘Janey’ Morris), Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Swinburne. Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones had cheerfully collaborated on the ill-starred (because ill-prepared) creation of a mural for the Oxford Union, an endeavour which might have failed artistically but which brought them all closer together. They were joined there by Swinburne, an Oxford undergraduate at the time and already a rebelliously inclined poet who, like Morris, was somewhat in awe of Rossetti (as much as a poet as an artist). A dramatic portrait of Swinburne by William Bell Scott depicts him standing before a Romantic seascape, a small compact figure with a wild mane of red hair, which somehow looks too big for his head, sculpted by the wind. It’s one of the pictures which provides the inspiration for Elizabeth Hand’s novel Mortal Love, which brings one of Rossetti’s ‘Goddesses’ to life, both in the fin de siecle period and in the modern day. The cover features a detail from Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata (The Garlanded), one of his portraits of Alexa Wilding (another woman Rossetti invited in from the streets), who in this case is playing a highly ornate harp watched over by two angels. Swinburne appears as a character, and Hand gives squeaking, high pitched voice to his eloquent profanity. It is a marvellous meditation on the destructive potential of pursuing artistic inspiration, of being consumed by the burning, mesmeric gaze of the muse, and serves as the ideal reflection on the Aesthetic and Decadant period and its subsequent influence (not least on the kind of literary fantasy which Hand writes).

The Red House - Philip Webb

The desire to create objects which combined functionality with beauty and which were produced in a craftsmanlike fashion was a reaction to a perceived ugliness manifested in the mass-produced products of the industrial revolution. The entire Aesthetic Movement, with its emphasis on refinement and highly cultivated taste, can be seen as a recoiling from the influence of industrialised production and the uniformity which it fostered. Its favouring of fey fragility and anti-athleticism countered the brute force and thunderous noise of the factories which powered the industrial revolution. They were retreating from the birth of the modern world into a golden age fantasy of their own dreaming. The extension of the artistic outlook to the decoration of the home is exemplified by The Red House in Bexleyheath, now an oasis amongst barren acres of dull suburbia (I should know, I grew up nearby). It was built for William and Jane Morris by Philip Webb, who also created some of the interior furnishings, alongside Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who painted wooden panels and helped design hangings and stained glass. It became a regular meeting place in what was something of an Edenic period for the group. It is represented here by two of Webb’s bronze candlesticks and a wooden bureau decorated with murals by Rossetti, and there are also examples of Burne-Jones’ stained glass near at hand.

The Aesthetic Movement always tended to be dominated by forceful and charismatic personalities, from Rossetti and Morris to Whistler and Wilde. Rossetti’s brother William Michael was a much more restrained personality, his unostentatious christened names seeming to predestine him for a more prosaic and steady life than the impulsive and temperamental Dante Gabriel. He maintained a 49 year career with the Inland Revenue, reaching distinguished high office, something which allowed him to support the less stable fortunes of his artistic friends and acquaintances when needed. Although he was one of the original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he never produced any significant artistic work. But he was a sensitive and perceptive editor, critic and biographer, and has left us with some insightful first hand literary portraits of the artists he knew so well, written with a generosity which nevertheless allows for a certain amount of reading between the lines. Of Morris, he notes that ‘he was turbulent, restless, noisy (with a deep and rather gruff voice), brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them, and doing scores of things inconsistent with the nerves of the nervous’. As for Algernon Swinburne, William discreetly observes that ‘no man has a more vigorous command of the powers of invective, to which his ingenuity of mind, and consummate mastery of literary resource, lend a lash of the most cutting and immedicable keenness’. He remarks of Burne-Jones, on the other hand, that ‘his manner was very gentle, and utterly alien from any vaunting self-assertion. He was never in strong health, yet to call him an invalid might be going too far’.

Weeping for a Wombat

William shared a house with his brother for a while, along with Swinburne and the poet George Meredith. The Tudor House on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, alongside the Thames embankment, was one of a series of exemplary Aesthetic houses, although from all reports it was often in something of a state. William comments on his brother’s notorious habit of accumulating a menagerie of strange and diverse pets which roamed his garden. Amongst those he enumerates are ‘a barn-owl named Jessie…dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer…a mole…Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls…a raven, chameleons, green lizards and Japanese salamanders’. He passes over the Brahmin bull, which even Rossetti swiftly realised was an impractical proposition. Naturally, he also acquired a peacock or two, which were a particular pest for the neighbours. Apparently, they caused such resentment that a clause was added to future tenancy agreements to the effect that peacocks were not allowed on the premises. Rossetti wasn’t the most attentive pet owner, and most of his creatures were sadly short-lived. He was particularly devastated by the death of his wombats, creatures for which he seems to have had a particular fondness. They appear in many sketches, and on the frontspiece for the edition of his sister Christina’s lengthy poem Goblin Market which he illustrated (an exquisite page of which is on display here). He drew a rather touching ‘Self-Portrait of the Artist weeping at the Wombat’s Tomb’, in which the wee beasty lies on its back, paws curled up on its round belly. A noble classical tomb in the background reads 6th November 1869.

Morris was initially keen to follow in Rossetti’s footsteps, but like any emulating protégé, he soon found his own means of expression, which was directed towards design and writing rather than painting. He was, in fact, best known during his own lifetime as a poet. The shop with ‘The Firm’ of Morris, Marshall and Faulkner and Co. set up in Oxford Street to display their wares – chairs, tiles, cabinets, porcelain, stained-glass and tapestries – did much to inspire the idea of the beautifully decorated home. This was furthered by the opening of Liberty’s home furnishings and costume store in 1883 (unsurprisingly, it is one of the sponsors of the exhibition), which offered relatively affordable style (partly due to the fact that many of its goods were machine-made). The handmade ideal was always destined to be impractical, particularly if Morris’ desire that his goods were to be affordable by the ordinary worker was ever to be realised (it wasn’t). Once his business grew, he too adopted elements of machine production. Some degree of compromise was inevitable if this was to be a lasting proposition, and he could use the machinery of the industrial age on a human scale, and for noble ends.

Veronica Veronese - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The perfection of interior design was indicative of a general turn inward. Aesthetic painting largely avoided landscape, with portraits, historical, mythological or real, tending to be located inside. When it did venture outside, space was often filled with dense thickets and tangles of branch and vine, which gave the feeling of enclosure. The heavy green draperies of Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese and the dark wood of the furnishings give the room a shadowed, self-enclosed feel, the outside world completely blocked out. Veronica is left to sit idly caressing the strings of the violin on the wall, lost in some inner reverie. Nature, when it appears, is confined to vases or cages, as with the nasturtiums and canary here. As Whistler put it one of the more direct of his carefully sculpted epigrams, ‘nature is usually wrong’. It had to be extracted and re-arranged in order to form the perfect compostion. The yellows of the marigold and canaryoffset the predominantly tones of the curtains and the velvet green dress which Veronica wears. Whilst the model here is Alexa Wilding, the dress belonged to Jane Morris, whom Rossetti would later paint in countless guises, and with whom he would share an intimate and passionate friendship. Rossetti’s own room at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk is partially reproduced here, glimpsed through vertical peep-show slots to lend an authentic sense of voyeurism. Blue china plates are arrayed on shelves above the fireplace. Rossetti and Whistler vied with each other in their obsessive collection of blue china, and the craze spread to become one of the defining and most widely taken up elements of the Aesthetic repertoire. Oscar Wilde, whilst at Oxford, also amassed a fair few examples, and admitted ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’. An offhand and amusing quip, but also an insightful one. The Aesthete defined him or herself through their objects, until the objects began to control them. There’s a certain irony in the fact that Aesthetes sought to distance themselves from the commercialism of burgeoning mass-production, but accumulated fashionable objects with an enthusiasm which anticipated the consumer age whose seeds were being sown around them.

At home with Rossetti - Cheyne Walk interior. Painting by Henry Treffry Dunton

Rather more ominously, there are a couple of phials secreted amongst the blue china and brass plates, placed within easy reach. These might perhaps have contained the opiate drug chloral, to which Rossetti increasingly became addicted, and which, in combination with the whisky with which he washed it down, helped to wreck his health and lead to his early death. There is a chaise longue or sofa, upholstered in green velvet on one side of the fireplace across which to drape oneself (characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are always flinging themselves onto sofas upon entering a room). On the other side is a rectilinear Chinese chair with a moon design, a lute casually laid against it. It is illustrative of the pervasive influence of the Far East on Aesthetic taste. There are also heavy tapestried drapes to add an additional layer of medieval ambience to the diverse assemblage, and to shut out any external light or sound which might intrude on this artificially created tableau. This is the living space as artistic installation and by extension, life as art.

the Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love - Simeon Solomon

Rossetti and his circle were dealt a glancing blow by a well-publicized attack published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, pseudonymously penned by the poet Robert Buchanan. He accused Swinburne and Rossetti in particular of perpetrating what he called a ‘fleshly school’ of poetry and art, which displayed ‘morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’ and lacked what he deemed the necessary qualities of virility and tenderness which characterised ennobling art. These were the first signs of the negative and even actively hostile attentions which the Aesthetic Movement would increasingly attract; the accusations that it revelled in deviant, immoral sensuality. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris and Swinburne began to go their own ways. Morris even seemed to be in partial agreement with Buchanan, although for different reasons. He later opined, in an 1888 essay ‘The Revival of Handicraft’, that the Aesthetic Movement had retreated from any social engagement and indulgently lost itself in a passive contemplation of beauty, whether in its art or in the mirror. Another victim of stern Victorian censure was Simeon Solomon, the young Jewish artist shoes franky homoerotic illustrations and paintings aroused the displeasure of the critical and moral establishment, and who was arrested in 1873 and imprisoned for homosexual practises. Shamefully, his friends, including Rossetti and (in particular) Swinburne, who had encouraged him in the free expression of his sexuality, shunned him after his arrest, not wishing to be seen with someone who could damage their own artistic careers with the taint of association. His fate was a precursor of the Wilde’s martyrdom towards the end of the century, which also saw him shunned by many of his ‘friends’, and which effectively brought the Aesthetic Movement to an end. But Solomon didn’t share Wilde’s elegant and relatively swift decline, cushioned in a haze of absinthe and advocaat in the Hotel D’Alsace in Paris. He died alone and broken in the workhouse in 1905 (five years after Wilde’s exquisitely timed passing at the end of the century whose later years he had done so much to define) after years of poverty and alcoholism. His line drawing The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love (1885), included here, contains all the tenderness Buchanan might wish for, but not in a form of which he would approve.