Aestheticism

[3] Writing in The Guardian, Fiona McCarthy states that "the aesthetic movement stood in stark and sometimes shocking contrast to the crass materialism of Britain in the 19th century.

Though the term "aesthetic" derives from Greek, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750) made important use of it in German before Immanuel Kant incorporated it into his philosophy in the Critique of Judgment (1790).

Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.These ideas were imported to the English-speaking world largely through the efforts of Thomas Carlyle, whose Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays and Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) introduced and advocated aestheticism while also, if not marking the earliest use of the word "aesthetic" in the English language, certainly popularising it.

[6] The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–1868, in which he stated that one had to live life intensely, and seek beauty.

Some claim that it was created by the philosopher Victor Cousin, although Angela Leighton notes that it was used by Benjamin Constant as early as 1804 in the work On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (2007).

The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages.

[citation needed] Predecessors of the Aesthetes included John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and some of the Pre-Raphaelites who themselves were a legacy of the Romantic spirit.

However, their approach to Aestheticism did not share the creed of 'Art for Art's Sake' but rather "a spirited reassertion of those principles of colour, beauty, love, and cleanness that the drab, agitated, discouraging world of the mid-nineteenth century needed so much.

In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne (both influenced by the French Symbolists), James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[11] Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes as he is influenced by older, decadent individuals.

Artists associated with the Aesthetic style include Simeon Solomon, James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Albert Joseph Moore, GF Watts and Aubrey Beardsley.

Thus, "beautiful things became the sensuous set pieces of a drama in which artists were not like their forebears a sort of crew of anonymous stagehands, but stars.

Consequently, aesthetes made idols of portraits, prayers of poems, altars of writing desks, chapels of dining rooms, and fallen angels of their fellow men.

Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church in upstate New York, is an important example of exoticism in the Aesthetic Movement decorative arts.