Image credit: Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library

The Rector's Garden, Queen of the Lilies 1877

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893)

Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library

A movement in the fine and decorative arts and architecture of the 1870s and 1880s, which manifested itself first in Great Britain and subsequently in the United States. Its defining beliefs were in the supremacy of the beautiful and the autonomy of a work of art, adapted from the French concept of ‘art for art's sake’. The artist who most closely approached these ideals was the American James McNeill Whistler, most famously in the Peacock Room he decorated 1876–7 for F.

The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900

Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 was the first major exhibition dedicated to Aestheticism. It highlighted the spectacular work produced by the artists, designers and architects of the late 19th-century, including James McNeill Whistler, William Morris and Thomas Jeckyll. Lead curator Stephen Calloway and other experts lead us through 'A world of beauty, flamboyance and faint danger ...' via the work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Oscar Wilde.

_{Video credit: Victoria and Albert Museum}