Godwin whose involvement with the movement was extensive had a long affair with Ellen Terry from 1868-1874 designed some of the finest furniture in a Japanese mode.
He also designed this building, The White House, for the painter Whistler.
While Whistler himself, as we have seen, was hugely impressed by Japanese woodcuts that he had first seen on his trips to Paris.
Whister was also extremely interested in designing dress and this Japanese Aesthetic dress was created for Mrs Frances Lelyland the wife of a nothern millionaire Frederick Leyland. The picture above was hung in his famous or infamous 'Peacock Room' that he created for Leyland in 1877.
This came as a great shock to Leyland who had not approved or supervised the work. They quarrelled over the cost. He told Leyland that this would be remembered when Leyland was fogotten. Ultimately the interior was bought by the industrialist Charles Freer and after his death in 1919 went to the Freer gallery in the Smithsonian museum of art.
Equally under the spell of Japan was the outstanding designer Christopher Dresser. He started life as a botanist, but then toured Japan in the early 1876-7 and published his influential Art and Manufacture of Japan in 1882.
Running parallel to those central to the Aesthetic movement were members of Arts and Crafts groups and societies. One of the earliest was formed by A. H. MacMurdo who was an innovative and original designer. The cover for a book on churches is one of his masterpieces.
In 1882 he founded the Century Guild with its own journal The Century Guild Hobbyhorse.
W. R. Lethaby and others founded another group, The Art Worker's Guild in 1884 that sought to find a sympathetic unity among practitioners of different branches of art.
The Morris inspired guilds were extremely influence in Europe where the set the ball rolling for different varieties of Aestheticism in Holland, Germany, France, and Italy.
British Aestheticism became a way of life for some, and was much parodied in the press and elsewhere.
The most famous of these was Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience in which Aestheticism was represented as comic, false and affected. Nevertheless its notoriety gave much impetus to the movement, and it was possible to buy clothes modelled on those worn in the opera.
But as Aestheticism became more and more socially acceptable, so the possibilities of Aesthetic dress.
The aims and objects of its founders were those for which many women had long been arguing, and soon the whole movement became caught up in issues about female education and the female franchise.
Just as the Bloomer campaign in the mid 1850s had its opponents, so did rational dress. Some saw it as turning women into men.
Or worse, made out of women bicycling 'new' women who violated the fundamental priorities of Victorian society.
Beardsley like many artists of this period were much influenced by Japan.
and this and other mannerisms of his style were widely parodied. His illustrations for Juvenal, for example
were treated by Linley Sambourne thus where the implications are clear
Beardsley, however, took Aestheticism into new realms. He was not the only practitioner of Decadent art, but he was one of the most outstanding.
In his illustrations for Salome, he scandalized many readers.
and this together with the erotic relationship between Salome and John the Baptist outraged the British public.
When in 1905 Richard Strauss set Wilde's play to music in the opera, Salome, the public across Europe and America were startled and disgusted once again. So, with the Strauss, a movement that could be said to have started with the Pre-Raphaelites reached its apogee. It had no left the province on Aestheticism and was beginning on a new journey into something quite different.
