This weekend I went to ‘The Cult of Beauty- The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the latter half of the 19th Century, there was a clear movement away from Victorian conventions and a desire for beauty and refinement within interiors, architecture, art, painting and furniture design. The lead figures of this ‘search for a new beauty’, included the Pre-Raphaelites; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, as well as interior designers such as William Morris, and architects including Phillip Webb and Edward Godwin. The artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement believed in ‘Art for Art’s Sake’; work that solely existed to be beautiful. Artworks started to be less concerned with religion, stories or morals, but purely designed to offer pleasure for the viewer. This can be best seen in William Morris’s famous quote from Hopes and Fears for Art in 1883, ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.
