The Aestethic Movement. Prelude to Art Nouveau.

Despite the popularity of certain aspects ofVictorian art, the belief has grown that the Victorian period as a whole was a Philistine age i which the low standards in all the visual arts was relived only by the work of William Morris and tha fin de secle Art Nouveau, with its own brand of poetic gloom, heralded te dawn of the enlightenment of the twentieth century. Admittedly a high proportion of what was produced in England during the nineteenth century in the fields of the decorativ arts and of architecture was unatractive, but this oversimplification is open to question on at least two grounds. It presupposes that the work of the twentieth century is of necessity superior to that of our immediate forebears and it compleetely ignores the geuine modern style of the Vicotrians, the Art or Aestethic Movement of the eighteen-seventies. The movement, beginning with the work of a few architects and designers in the sixties, gathered force until it embraced every art form from the greeting card to dmestic architecture.