Victorian Painting

Victorian Painting

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points

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Victorian Painting

• It is the painting of Great Britain that corresponds to the Victorian era, the era of Queen Victoria (from 1837 to 1901), when the United Kingdom became a great world power due to its industrial development and its imperialist policy. It was an era of constant progress, which, like all progress, implies riches and splendor but also misery.
• This supremacy makes the “British spirit” more British than ever. A spirit that usually includes solemnity, elegance, arrogance, dispassion (the so-called “British phlegm”), and imperturbability. But above all, a definite conservatism when it comes to morals and the rules of society. “Victorian” means imperialistic pride, rigidity, and some hypocrisy as well.
• There is a curious reaction in art: instead of reflecting its own time, like all art, it takes refuge in epochs of past splendor. It is pure nostalgia for distant times, idealized with a lot of imagination and color. It is an escape from the grayness of industrialization, from brutal materialism, and from the ugliness of the modern world.
• Many artistic currents coexisted, sharing this longing for the beauty of a world that was no longer what it used to be. There was the neoclassical movement, which reproduced Greco-Latin antiquity with a good dose of sensuality (as shown in the painting above). Another important movement was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose interest was placed in medieval times (an idealized historical moment which was a splendorous moment full of glory for the British).
• Victorian artwork has no heirs. The arrival of the avant-garde bursts violently, and the past is buried by modernity. Perhaps that is the reason why many great painters of that era have been underrated for decades. Only recently have they been valued again.

Representative Artists: Leighton, Alma-Tadema (Neoclassical movement). Waterhouse, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). Brown, Morris.

Image: The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888). Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Recommended links:

Flaming June (1895), Frederic Leighton.

Timeline: Moments of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), John William Waterhouse.

Ofelia (1851/52), John Everett Millais.

Artistic Movements I: from Classical Antiquity to Rococo.

Artistic Movements II: from Neoclassicism till the end of the 19th century.

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