Victorian Art Exposed!

The shadow of the Victorians hangs heavy over the perceived history of 19th Century art, covering all with a moralistic rigidity as cumbersome as those embroidered cloths that were draped over the suggestive legs of grand pianos to avoid licentious thoughts entering the brain whilst listening to the strains of the German maestros.

The lovers of art most probably took their lead from the paternalistic tastes of an imported Royal family from Germany which grafted onto British Society a sense of duty, propriety and national pride all underscored by an underlying hypocrisy in which women were subjugated, children abused, and sex exploited at the very highest levels.

This course of lectures will seek to trace the development of Victorian art from the early stages of the fledgling monarchy to the very end of the century (fin de siècle), coming in with the young queen and going out with the old widow.

During this period there is a gradual evolution away from the staid, safe and ‘respectable’ representation to a revolt against the unimaginative formalism of the early part of the century by the young group of artists who form around the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their work both shocks and excites and lays the path for the final years of the period when there is a burst of Avant Guarde activity which embraces the new industrial class of patrons and inspires successive waves of experimentation rivaling the work of the Belle Epoque in France.

We will examine questions of taste and “in plain sight” misogyny and trace the quick progression of popular art which finds expression in galleries, books, magazines and on the very streets of late Victorian England posted on the walls and manifests itself in the everyday objects of the Victorian home.

It is a period in which art reflects the respectability of the Monarch’s family life and ends by reflecting the Hedonism of the heir to the throne in work of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.

Topics Include:

31 May - The Reign of Artists 10am-12midday ** new revised time for this session

A kaleidoscopic view of Victorian artists from Turner to Rennie Mackintosh

7 June - Sex and the Victorians

An examination of Victorian art that often goes hidden from view….like piano legs!

14 June - The Pre Raphaelites 

The revolutionaries who pioneered a style to rival the stuffiness and predictability of the Royal Academy

21 June - The Symbolists and Aesthetics 

The philosophical battle for beauty and taste……Art for Art’s sake. Artists go beyond the canvas into the mind and the decorous! 

28 June - Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau

The refashioning of ancient crafts and the innovation of organic imagery – backwards and forwards