Collection: Aestheticism

Aestheticism, the Aesthetic Movement, ran principally in late Victorian Britain from the 1860s to the 1890s. Its central conviction, captured in the slogan "art for art's sake", held that beauty justified the work of art on its own terms, independent of moral, narrative, or didactic purpose. The movement overlapped chronologically with the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite painting and prepared the ground for British and continental Symbolism.

The painted side ran principally through James McNeill Whistler, Albert Joseph Moore, Frederic Leighton, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones. The illustrator Aubrey Beardsley extended the idiom into the 1890s. The decorative parallel ran through William Morris, Edward William Godwin, Christopher Dresser, and Charles Eastlake. The literary parallel ran through Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde.

The 1878 libel suit between Whistler and John Ruskin, prompted by Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, became the movement's defining public moment. The Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877, served as its principal exhibition venue.