LECTURE 4: Aestheticism and the Palace of Art: Burne-Jones and the scandal of the Grosvenor Gallery

We left Aesthetic painting with Burne-Jone's picture The Lament of 1867. It conveys the sense of strong emotion, but has no narrative and no moral content. It cannot be placed in any exact historical period, but it lyrical use of colour is directly related to the musical element in the painting.

Burne-Jones, together with artists like Simeon Solomon and Rossetti were making their names in this new genre of painting when Jones ran into trouble with his Phyllis and Demaphoön (1870) at the Society of Painters in Watercolour. The members of the Society were offended by Demaphoön's nakedness and Phyllis's female assertiveness. Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca (1876) was in rather the same vein, a strong study of a powerfully sexualised Venus based on the figure of Jane Morris. He attached a sonnet which underlined the mystical element of the picture, but did not conceal its libidinous qualities.

At the same time Walter Pater was extending his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance (first published in 1873) with an essay on the Venetian artist Giorgione. Giorgione appealed to the Aesthetes because many of his paintings were meditative studies with no obvious narrative. We saw how, some years ago, Dante Gabriel Rossetti had been attracted to Giorgione's work in the Louvre. Now in a strong statement about the primacy of form over matter, Pater asserted that all art aspired to the subjectless condition of music.


To many people, Pater's ideas and those of some of his fellow Aesthetes, were extreme and possibly ridiculous, and one writer in particular, William Mallock, wrote a parody of the emergent ideas on art entitled The New Republic in which Pater featured as Mr Rose.

But the momentum around Aestheticism was gathering. Swinburne's poetry, Rossetti's and Burne-Jone's painting, and Pater's criticism were all becoming associated with values that seemed troubling to the Establishment. Prominent among those who were disturbed were the members of the Royal Academy who could find no place for the new painting on their walls, and to which, in any case, the Aesthetes did not want to submit their work. The reason was that the conditions for hanging works of art at the RA were very poor. The spaces were filled to capacity and many pictures were hung so high that it was impossible to see them. Even in the nineteenth century the situation had not improved very much. Frith's representation of the private view at the Academy in 1881 makes this clear.

Around 1876, Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay stepped in. He was a rich banker with a taste for modern art and he saw the dilema in which the new painters found themselves. They needed a purpose-built gallery with quite different conditions for the display of works of art.

Coutts Lindsay seeing himself as a latter day Medici, spent a huge amount of money building a new gallery in Bond Street that would be like no other. Opening in 1877, inside it exhibited a kind of Renaissance splendour where works of art had lots of space and room to breathe. Coutts Lindsay encouraged a whole range of new artists including women to exhibit in this new 'Temple of Art'.


Whistler showed 8 paintings, among them the famous Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket that had all the hall-marks of the Aesthetic style. 

Ruskin greeted it with disdain, publicly claiming:

The two men went to court over Ruskin's abusive remarks, and after a comic and protracted case (the details of which Whistler later painted), Whistler was judged to have won, though he was awarded on a farthing's damages. Whistler's reputation was damaged by Ruskin's attack, and it took some time to recover, meanwhile the 'lion' of the first few exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery was Burne-Jones who came back into exhibiting and back into the public eye.

The Mirror of Venus (1877) caused a considerable stir with its strange androgynous young female figures placed in a lunar landscape each one contemplating her own reflexion. Some saw this as an emblem of Aesthetic self obsession and narcissism. Vanity Fair was characteristic:

One of the most interesting reviews came from Henry James, though he was highly ambivalent in his attitudes. He responds to the originality of Burne-Jones' work, but he finds it mannered and unhealthy.

To others, Burne-Jones's paintings were the expression not just of ill health but of sexual perversion.

The Chant d'Amour (1878), with its suspicious French title, was thought to represent, metaphorically, post-coital langour. and even more offensive was Burne-Jones's picture Laus Veneris, derived from a poem by Swinburne of the same name, and closely connected to Wagner's opera Tannhauser.

The critics saw in Venus a sexually depraved figure, abandoned, subversive and disgusting.

Other response to what were perceived as the excesses of Aestheticism came in the form of jokes, cartoons, and parodies. These abounded, and often featured the appearance of world-weariness, langour, androgyny, and angularity of the figures mainly taken from pictures by Burne-Jones.