Impressionism versus the aesthetic movement

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by David Park Curry

Nature's taking a backseat to art resulted in similar ideas manifested in a number of independent works made simultaneously Whiser's well-known Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Arts) of 1875 is a dark, mysterious canvas, its thin layers of pigment sparked by a shower of red, green, and gold. (24) Similarly, the dark glass goblet in Plate XVIII, made in Venice in the same year, imitates aventurine quartz, a natural material, by using flecks of silver foil covered with thin films of yellow, green, and red glass sealed with a final colorless overlay like a varnish on a picture. (25) In fully assessing Nocturne in Black and Gold, trivialized by John Ruskin (1819-1900) as a "pot of paint" flung in the public's face, we might recall that Black and Gold was not only part of a runic title for this highly abstract painting, but also a favored color scheme for ebonized aesthetic movement furniture enriched with stylized parcel-gilt patterns. Moreover, aesthetic movement commercial de coration illuminates a charge leveled during the infamous Whistler-Ruskin libel suit in 1878 that pictures like Nocturne in Black and Gold were little more than delicately tinted wallpaper. (26)

If the impressionists fully embraced subject matter drawn from modem life, aesthetes--the Pre-Raphaelite painters, designers such as William Morris (1834-1896) or Philip Webb (1831-1915), and even unknown artisans working for the popular market--shielded themselves with evocations of Renaissance and medieval times. For example, despite the misleading "Japonaise" stamped on its tile top, Venetian Gothic architecture (27) inspired the overall columnar shape of the plant stand shown in Plate XV, and a Greek title belies the Gothic inspiration for Talbert's imposing Pericles cabinet (P1. XVII). (28)

At the market's highest end, in the hands of Morris and Company or Herter Brothers or Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), surface is all. Despite their richness, individual objects were subsumed into the overall patterning typical of aesthetic movement interiors. Describing Stanmore Hall, an English Midlands mansion in Uxbridge decorated by Morris and Company in the early 1890s, one critic noted, "The large ornament and bold forms Mr. Morris delights in prove their power to blend into a perfect whole, elaborate but in no way overwhelming." (29) We can find a similar balance between patterning and the "perfect whole" in many impressionist canvases, not only in ambitious serial cycles such as Monet's intentionally decorative late water lilies, but also in myriad individual canvases by him and others.

Designers with differing viewpoints found common ground in the decorative surface as did various painters whose work is otherwise quite distinctive. Long before American realists espoused gritty urban subjects, some aesthetic movement reformers accepted technology and executed their designs for industrial production. Dresser's mass-produced toast or letter rack (P1. XX) which looks like a tiny Japanese bridge, is an example. Dresser realized his ideas for toast racks in 1881, only a few years after Whistler's Noctume: Blue and Gold--old Battersea Bridge (P1. XXI) achieved notoriety during the Whistler-Ruskin libel suit. The evocative painting is frankly indebted to Japanese woodblock prints, but, while the composition is japonesque, the brilliant blue color, interpreted by the influential French critic Theodore Duret (1838-1927) as characteristically Japanese, was actually a commercial product sold to Japanese printmakers by Europeans. (30) Whistler would probably refute any association between his picture an d Dresser's similarly arched (and similarly arch) toast rack. However, the atmosphere of publicity and commerce in which both artists labored invites us to consider how the two works resonate with each other, Of course, we can find picturesque bridges in the Asian taste among the follies in eighteenth-century gardens, and a japonesque bridge became one of Monet's favorite motifs in his garden at Giverny Even J. Alden Weir's asymmetrical, textured image of a modem steel bridge near his Connecticut farm takes on added resonance in this connection (P1. XIX). Weir's canvas is considerably more distanced through decorative patterning than such obvious sources as Monet's series of the railroad bridge crossing the Seine at Argenteuil, painted twenty years earlier. (31)