The Cult of Beauty” at the V&A is an enlightening delight. It traces the aesthetic movement chronologically from its beginnings in the 1860s when it emerged as a product of an agreement among friends that art is the most important thing in life and that beauty is the key to how that life should be lived. It was a private reaction against the contemporary banality of The Royal Academy and more broadly against the crassness of a public taste that insisted that pictures should tell simple stories or point to obvious morals. These were to be supplanted by a concentrated, undiluted focus on the beautiful, often symbolized by the peacock with its pride in its own beauty. Subsequent rooms show how the aesthetic movement grew into a pervasive influence over all manner of fashion—the house beautiful, the furniture beautiful, the book-binding beautiful, and indeed the people beautiful in their beautiful clothes. What had begun as a reaction against ugly mass production became an industry itself—manufacturers tried to combine aesthetic quality with wide availability. The movement slid into decadence in the 1890s, but it was a vital decadence and its ideas still underpin much of the art and artifacts of our own century. The continued popularity of the products of the movement is indicated by the sheer array of accurate reproductions now on sale in the V&A shop.
The artists of the aesthetic movement sought an escape from a Victorian England they found alienating through an imagined magical past,