scholarly journals John Ruskin, William Morris and Walter Pater: From Nature to Musical Harmony in the Decorative Arts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martine Lambert-Charbonnier
Keyword(s):  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Musical Harmony

The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Eleonora Sasso
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Material Life ◽  
Space Analysis ◽  
World Theory ◽  
Narrative Poems ◽  
Earthly Paradise

This chapter examines the pervasive influence of Arabian marvel tales on Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River and Sesame and Lilies (1865), as well as on Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. More similarly to Marx’s ideological Orientalism, Ruskin and Morris sympathise with people’s misery, with their material life and the Arab townsfolk, and thereby with the criminal underworld. Ruskin’s ideological Orientalism is particularly evident in his lectures and autobiography whose rhetorical language may be analysed through possible world theory, Fauconnier’s mental space analysis and Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s cognitive theory of emotions (1987). By projecting such Oriental conceptual metaphors as East is poverty and East is corruption, Ruskin aims at sensitising his readers to the perils of imperialism. Morris’s fascination with the East is first and foremost connected with the Byzantine decorative arts and carpet-making. As founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), he promoted a campaign against the restoration of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the paramount example of Arab influence on Venetian architecture. His connection with the East can be better understood, however, by investigating the Oriental love scenarios in The Earthly Paradise, whose narrative poems seem to restructure the Arabian tales of the ‘Forbidden Chamber’ cycle.

William Morris and the Aesthetics of Manly Labour

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Aesthetic Development ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).

Victorian Aesthetics

2015 ◽  
pp. 560-579
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although the field of aesthetics was consolidated in the nineteenth century, its study has been shaped by two contradictory tendencies: (1) the insistence that the aesthetic realm needs to be autonomous, independent of the world of common experience; (2) the ethical or political insistence that autonomy is impossible. Starting from this characteristic antinomy, and tracing it back to early theoretical formulations in Kant and Schiller, this chapter illuminates the ways in which the constant pull between form and reality, or between art and experience, was a fundamental characteristic of aesthetics in the Victorian period. The writings of Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, William Morris, John Ruskin, and others show the challenges of negotiating a concept that at times seems the only thing reconciling one to the world and at other times seems to be pulling one away to an impossible realm outside human existence.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

scholarly journals William Morris, Cultural Leadership, and the Dynamics of Taste

2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Harvey ◽  
Jon Press ◽  
Mairi Maclean
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Cultural Leadership ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Social

This examination of the social processes that inform cultural production asks how tastes are formed, transmitted, embedded, and reproduced across generations. These questions are explored through a study of William Morris, his working methods and products, and their impact on the decorative arts in Victorian Britain and beyond. Through the exercise of cultural leadership, Morris gave physical expression to the ideals and sentiments of Romanticism, and this in turn gave rise to a community of taste reaching across class boundaries and generations. Morrisian products and designs, through the agency of his disciples, became institutionally embedded, emblematic of refinement and good taste. A process model of taste formation is deployed to explore the economic and social dynamics at work in the Morris case and more generally.

scholarly journals The Designer’s Eye: Ancient Spanish Ballads, Poetry, and the Rise of Decorative Design

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Nicholas Frankel
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Early Years ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Active Constituent ◽  
Perceptual Structure ◽  
Kelmscott Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Decorative Design

AbstractIn 1841 John Murray published a sumptuously ornamented edition of John Gibson Lockhart’sAncient Spanish Ballads.Murray’s new edition, printed using the very latest bookmaking technologies and pitched at a readership newly accustomed to paying exorbitant prices for book ornaments and illustrations, was radically different from the first edition of Lockhart’s ballads, which had appeared without accompanying ornament in 1823. Illustrated by the leading illustrators of the day and decorated throughout in multiple colors by the architect Owen Jones (who would go on to become famous as a Superintendent of the Great Exhibition and the author ofThe Grammar of Ornament), Murray’s edition represents a stunning departure in Victorian printing and a highpoint in mid-Victorian design generally. At the same time, it crystallizes a debate about the nature and application of artistic design that was beginning to emerge in the early years of Victoria’s reign and that would erupt with maximum vigor ten years later in the confrontation between John Ruskin and the South Kensington School. The tension between flat, stylized design and what Ruskin was later to term “truth to nature” is already palpable in the conflict between illustrations and ornaments to Murray’s book. However, it was the involvement of Owen Jones that especially distinguished the volume, as it gave Jones the opportunity to demonstrate in a practical way ideas about design, color, and style that he would theorize fifteen years later inThe Grammar of Ornament. Those ideas are especially resonant today, given recent work on the history of the book and the “bibliographic codes” of literature, since the effect of Jones’s work is to expose the textual condition of Lockhart’s poetry itself and to harness the eye as an active constituent in the act of reading. Fifty years before the work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Jones and Murray showed Victorian readers that a printed book might be a thing of real beauty and that poetry, no less than painting or architecture, is dependent on the perceptual structure of its textual vehicle.

The Byzantine Revival in Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 270-282
Author(s):  
J. B. Bullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Byzantine Architecture ◽  
Byzantine Revival

The nineteenth-century interest in Byzantium was essentially a romantic revival following the Gothic revival, triggered by the imagination of Ludwig I of Bavaria and his passion for the Byzantine architecture of Italy. His acquisitional taste was taken up by his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in socio-political terms, and by Ludwig II on aesthetic terms. French interest in Byzantium was archaeological, connected to what was called Byzantine or Romanesque building in southwest France. Britain’s contribution was highly individualistic, depending on a small number of strong-minded characters who were willing to challenge the prevailing Gothic orthodoxies. Strengthened first by John Ruskin and then by William Morris, it shifted attention away from the “primitive” simplicity of Byzantine work to its simple majesty.

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