Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-138
Author(s):  
Alexandra Warwick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris

William Morris and the Aesthetics of Manly Labour

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Aesthetic Development ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).

The Byzantine Revival in Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 270-282
Author(s):  
J. B. Bullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Byzantine Architecture ◽  
Byzantine Revival

The nineteenth-century interest in Byzantium was essentially a romantic revival following the Gothic revival, triggered by the imagination of Ludwig I of Bavaria and his passion for the Byzantine architecture of Italy. His acquisitional taste was taken up by his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in socio-political terms, and by Ludwig II on aesthetic terms. French interest in Byzantium was archaeological, connected to what was called Byzantine or Romanesque building in southwest France. Britain’s contribution was highly individualistic, depending on a small number of strong-minded characters who were willing to challenge the prevailing Gothic orthodoxies. Strengthened first by John Ruskin and then by William Morris, it shifted attention away from the “primitive” simplicity of Byzantine work to its simple majesty.

Victorian Aesthetics

2015 ◽  
pp. 560-579
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.

William Morris’s ‘Work-Pleasure’: Literature, Science and Fine Art

2018 ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Arts And Crafts Movement ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter seeks to elucidate nineteenth-century conceptions of art as fine art. Taking its cue from Raymond Williams’s account of a divorce of (fine) art from (technical) work, the chapter pursues various attempts to define the aesthetic specificity of the fine arts, including literature in the narrow sense, in relation to other ways of exercising skill, including the use of experimental methods in the sciences. In this way, it seeks to show that the idea of the aesthetic, despite all attempts to purify it, remained deeply entangled in a net of work, in which experiences of pleasure (or beauty) and playfulness had not yet been separated from material practices of making useful things. As is further explained, the idea of a mutual inclusiveness of pleasure and use was pivotal to the arts and crafts movement, especially to the creative practice of William Morris. Finally, the chapter pursues Morris’s concept of “work-pleasure”, as derived from his News from Nowhere, through a wider debate about the complex relations between the sciences and the (fine) arts.

Art Nouveau

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Applied Arts

From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production in graphics, furniture, and applied arts. Though it incorporated elements from a range of diverse sources, the most characteristic forms of Art Nouveau were those inspired by nature, but nature that had been adapted, stylized, and aestheticized to reflect the cultural climate of the turn of the century. The origins of Art Nouveau developed out of the ideas of several leading figures during the mid-nineteenth century in their efforts to reconcile art with the increasingly industrialized methods of production dominating in the applied arts. In Britain, William Morris advocated for a unity among art, design, and applied arts that valued handcraftsmanship in well-made objects made available to the middle classes. The Arts & Crafts movement sought to counter the array of poorly designed consumer goods seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in which individual objects were frequently overwhelmed by ornamentation.

Dirty Pictures: John Ruskin, Modern Painters, and the Victorian Sanitation of Fine Art

2002 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-139
Author(s):  
Eileen Cleere
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Sanitary Condition ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Pre Raphaelites ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Trafalgar Square

WHILE MY PROJECT IS BROADLY INTERESTED in the interdisciplinary work of what I will call sanitary art in nineteenth-century Britain, this essay is primarily concerned with a watershed moment in the production of that interdisciplinarity. In 1842, Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population; the following year, John Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters. Incomparable in subject, genre, and style, these texts would nonetheless participate in the same cultural project, producing between them a discourse of ''dirty'' art that challenged and eventually redefined nineteenth-century aesthetic standards. This essay argues that Ruskin employed the discourse and ideological necessity of sanitary reform from his earliest work, enforcing through his celebration of modern painters an aesthetic preference for the bright, clean colors of J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites over the pestilential tones and dark obscurity of the Renaissance Old Masters. Moreover, Ruskin's sophisticated preferences were circulated and popularized by a cultural event more generally accessible than Modern Painters. Isolating a mid-Victorian moment when the agitation for urban cleanliness began to dominate a variety of social discourses, this essay will also argue that Chadwick's powerful sanitary idea was channeled through a public controversy in the mid-forties about the aesthetic status of ''picture cleaning'' in the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. When the dust from this debate finally settled, it was swept away along with the dirty aesthetic theories that had accumulated over previous centuries. Left in its place was the thesis of Modern Painters, and a new standard of aesthetic hygiene for Victorian art.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

The Diggers and the Norman Yoke

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Clare A. Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
William Blake ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Middle Ages

During the English Civil War period, the Diggers asserted that social degree was a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the Bible, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appealed to the Middle Ages, suggesting that the Norman Conquest was England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta marked the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights. The Diggers’ distinct contribution to this discussion, taken up in the nineteenth century by radical thinkers such as Thomas Spence, was that property ownership should be communal. This idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others. The theory of the Norman yoke remained a significant influence on social and racial theory in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.

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