Impressionism versus the aesthetic movement

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by David Park Curry

(15.) Stephen F. Eisenman, "The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name," in Charles S. Molfett et al., The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874-1886 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), pp. 51-59.

(16.) Claude Monet cited in John House, Monet: Nature into Art (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986), p. 162. Whistler said of Nocturne: Blue and Gold--Old Battersea Bridge, "I did not intend to paint a portrait of the bridge, but only a painting of a moonlight scene. As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it." Of the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, the controversial painting that triggered the lawsuit, he told Ruskin's defense attorney, "If it were called 'A View of Cremorne' it would certainly bring about nothing but disappaintment on the part of the beholders. It is an artistic arrangement." See Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Smithsonian Institution Press and the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992), pp. 150-151 and 145-48.

(17.) Quoted in Nicole Savy's entry for Baudelaire in Dictionary of Art (Grove, New York, 1996), vol.3, pp. 392-393. For the full text, see Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modem Life and Other Essays, trans. and ext. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon Press, London, 1964), pp. 1-40.

(18.) See Sheila M. Smith, "Savages and Martyrs: Images the Urban Poor in Victorian Literature and Art," in Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and F. S. Schwarzbach (Pergamon Press, New York, 1980), pp. 14-28.

(19.) Christopher Dresser was not only Jones's apprentice but also a trained botanist Following his travels to Japan (which most aesthetic movement designers could not claim), Dresser published Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (London, 1882), and he also wrote a report for the Japanese government.

(20.) Owen Jones, Vat Grammar of Chinese Ornament: Selected front Objects in the South Kensington Museum and Other Collections (1867; Portland House, New York, 1987), Pl. XCII, "From a painted china Vase. A bold composition on the continuous-stem principle."

(21.) Linda Nochlin notes, "Probably the meet interesting, and significant, of all...split-offs or transformations of Realist values, as far as the painting of the future was concerned, was the transformation of the Realist concept of truth or honesty, meaning truth or honesty to one's perception of the external physical or social world, to mean truth or honesty either to the nature of the material--i.e. to the nature of the fiat surface--and/or to the demands of one's inner "subjective" feelings or imagination rather than to some external reality." She continues, "Truth to the nature of the materials was achieved at least theoretically first in England, in the realm of the decorative arts, where the role of subject and imitation of nature could more easily be played down than in the traditionally representational 'high' arts of painting and sculpture" (Nochlin, Realism [Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1971], p. 236).