Artistic Circles: Design and Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement

Artists’ houses and their gardens formed a distinct and influential strand in Victorian architecture and decoration, eliciting public interest and coverage in the popular press of the day. The artist’s home and its contents were essential components of the Aesthetic Movement, in which artists – as home-owners, interior designers, producers and consumers – drove the movement into the mainstream. Artists such as Frederic Leighton, G.F.Watts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones were the product of the phenomenon of the Victorian art world which brought fame and public adulation to its most successful exponents.

Artistic Circles: Design and Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement takes the unique approach of examining Aestheticism from a social perspective and reveals how the art movement influenced the development of domestic building and homemaking for an emerging section of Victorian society, the educated middle-class professional.