Aestheticism (also the Aesthetic Movement) was an art movement in the late 19th century which privileged the aesthetic value of literature, music and the arts over their socio-political functions.[1][2] According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to serve a moral, allegorical, or other didactic purpose, a sentiment exemplified by the slogan "art for art's sake." Aestheticism originated in 1860s England with a radical group of artists and designers, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It flourished in the 1870s and 1880s, gaining prominence and the support of notable writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture, as many Victorians believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles.[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."[4]
Aestheticism was named by the critic Walter Hamilton in The Aesthetic Movement in England in 1882.[5]By the 1890s, decadence, a term with origins in common with aestheticism, was in use across Europe.[3]
Aesthetic literature
The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, with an ideal of beauty. His text Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was very well regarded by art-oriented young men of the late 19th century. Writers of the Decadent movement used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), the origin of which is debated. Some claim that it was invented by the philosopher Victor Cousin, although Angela Leighton in the publication On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (2007) notes that the phrase was used by Benjamin Constant as early as 1804.[6] It is generally accepted to have been promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, who interpreted the phrase to suggest that there was not any real association between art and morality.
One of many Punch cartoons about æsthetes
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. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George MacDonald's conception of art as something moral or useful, "Art for truth's sake".[7] Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it only needed to be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and synaesthetic/Ideasthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Music was used to establish mood.[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. There are a few significant continuities between the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy and that of the Aesthetes: Dedication to the idea of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’; admiration of, and constant striving for, beauty; escapism through visual and literary arts; craftsmanship that is both careful and self-conscious; mutual interest in merging the arts of various media. This final idea is promoted in the poem L’Art by Théophile Gautier, who compared the poet to the sculptor and painter.[8] Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones are most strongly associated with Aestheticism. 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.”[9] This reassertion of beauty in a drab world also connects to Pre-Raphaelite escapism in art and poetry.
In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne (both influenced by the French Symbolists), James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These writers and their style were satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience and other works, such as F. C. Burnand's drama The Colonel, and in comic magazines such as Punch, particularly in works by George Du Maurier.[10]
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. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant of aesthete society at Oxford, describe the aesthetes mostly satirically, but also as a former participant. Some names associated with this assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, A.E. Housman and Anthony Powell.
Aesthetic fine art
Canaries by Albert Joseph Moore, ca. 1875–1880. He was among a group of artists whose work was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London.[4]
Artists associated with the Aesthetic style include Simeon Solomon, James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Albert Joseph Moore, GF Watts and Aubrey Beardsley.[4] Although the work of Edward Burne-Jones was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery which promoted the movement, it is narrative and conveys moral or sentimental messages hence falling outside the movement's purported programme.
Aesthetic decorative arts
Aesthetic Brass Table by Charles Parker Company
Aesthetic Movement antiques at Florian Papp, New York City
According to Christopher Dresser, the primary element of decorative art is utility. The maxim "art for art's sake," identifying art or beauty as the primary element in other branches of the Aesthetic Movement, especially fine art, cannot apply in this context. That is, decorative art must first have utility, but may also be beautiful.[11] However, according to Michael Shindler, the decorative art branch of the Aesthetic Movement, was less the utilitarian cousin of Aestheticism's main 'pure' branch, and more the very means by which aesthetes exercised their fundamental design strategy. Like contemporary art, Shindler writes that aestheticism was born of "the conundrum of constituting one’s life in relation to an exterior work" and that it "attempted to overcome" this problem "by subsuming artists within their work in the hope of yielding—more than mere objects—lives which could be living artworks." 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."[12]
Government Schools of Design were founded from 1837 onwards in order to improve the design of British goods. Following the Great Exhibition of 1851 efforts were intensified and oriental objects were purchased for the schools teaching collections. Owen Jones, architect and orientalist, was requested to set out key principles of design and these became not only the basis of the schools teaching but also the propositions which preface The Grammar of Ornament (1856), which is still regarded as the finest systematic study or practical sourcebook of historic world ornament.
Jones identified the need for a new and modern style that would meet the requirements of the modern world, rather than the continual re-cycling of historic styles, but saw no reason to reject the lessons of the past. Christopher Dresser, a student and later Professor at the school worked with Owen Jones on The Grammar of Ornament, as well as on the 1863 decoration of the oriental courts (Chinese, Japanese, and Indian) at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), advanced the search for a new style with his two publications The Art of Decorative Design 1862, and Principles of Design 1873.
Production of Aesthetic style furniture was limited to approximately the late 19th century.[citation needed] Aesthetic style furniture is characterized by several common themes:
Ebonized wood with gilt highlights.
Far Eastern influence.
Prominent use of nature, especially flowers, birds, ginkgo leaves, and peacock feathers.
Blue and white on porcelain and other fine china.
Ebonized furniture means that the wood is painted or stained to a black ebony finish. The furniture is sometimes completely ebony-colored. More often however, there is gilding added to the carved surfaces of the feathers or stylized flowers that adorn the furniture.[citation needed]
As aesthetic movement decor was similar to the corresponding writing style in that it was about sensuality and nature, nature themes often appear on the furniture. A typical aesthetic feature is the gilded carved flower, or the stylized peacock feather. Colored paintings of birds or flowers are often seen. Non-ebonized aesthetic movement furniture may have realistic-looking three-dimensional-like renditions of birds or flowers carved into the wood.
Oscar Wilde lectured on the "English Renaissance in Art" during his North America tour in 1882
Contrasting with the ebonized-gilt furniture is use of blue and white for porcelain and china. Similar themes of peacock feathers and nature would be used in blue and white tones on dinnerware and other crockery. The blue and white design was also popular on square porcelain tiles. It is reported that Oscar Wilde used aesthetic decorations during his youth. This aspect of the movement was also satirised by Punch magazine and in Patience.
In 1882 Oscar Wilde visited Canada, where he toured the town of Woodstock, Ontario and gave a lecture on May 29 titled "The House Beautiful".[13] In this lecture Wilde exposited the principles of the Aesthetic Movement in decorative and applied design, also known at the time as the "Ornamental Aesthetic" style, according to which local flora and fauna were celebrated as beautiful and textured, layered ceilings were popular. An example of this can be seen in Annandale National Historic Site, located in Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada. The house was built in 1880 and decorated by Mary Ann Tillson, who happened to attend Oscar Wilde's lecture in Woodstock. Since the Aesthetic Movement was only prevalent in the decorative arts from about 1880 until about 1890, there are not many surviving examples of this particular style but one such example is 18 Stafford Terrace, London, which provides an insight into how the middle classes interpreted its principles. Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church in upstate New York, is an important example of exoticism in Aesthetic Movement decorative arts.[14]
See also
Arts and Crafts movement
Ideasthesia
Aestheticization of politics
Aestheticization of violence
SAMUEL P. GAGE, cashier of the People’s Saving Bank Company, of Mt. Gilead, Ohio, was born in Morrow county, Ohio, October 2, 1850, and is a representative of one of the pioneer families of this locality. His parents, William F. and Mary J. (Price) Gage, passed the greater part of their lives in Morrow county. William F. Gage was born in Woodbridge, New Jersey, a son of Phillip and Deborah (Flood) Gage, with whom when a boy he came to Ohio and settled near Sparta, in Bennington township, Morrow county, where he grew to manhood and married. He owned one hundred and forty acres of land in Bennington township, to the cultivation and improvement of which he devoted his energies for many years, up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1898. Politically he was a Republican, radical and enthusiastic, and for years was active in local politics. He was a staunch member of the Methodist Episcopal church, as is also his widow, now eighty years of age. Her parents, John Price and wife, were natives of Pennsylvania. Of the children of William F. and Mary J. Gage we record that J. P., the eldest, is a resident of Kansas; Samuel P., next in order of birth, is the subject of this sketch; Eliza A. is the wife of William Hunt of Morrow county; P. W. is a resident of Delaware, Ohio; and Elsworth is engaged in railroad business at Alexander, Ohio.
Reared on his father’s farm, Samuel P. Gage attended district school until he was sixteen years of age, after wihch [sic] he was a student at Galena High School and Cardington High School and later spent two years at Lebanon, Ohio, where he took a course in the National Normal University. In the meantime he taught school, beginning when he was eighteen, and by this means paid his own way while he pursued his higher studies. All told, he taught school sixty months, a part of this time being principal of a private school. And his experience as teacher added to the value of his service when he was made a member of the School Board of Mt. Gilead.
In 1873 Mr. Gage built the Central House at Marengo, Ohio, which he operated for eight years, and at the same time filled the office of township clerk. In 1881 he was elected clerk of Morrow county. He was the incumbent of this office two terms, having been re-elected, and served in all six years. Afterward, for a period of six years, he was secretary and treasurer of the Hydraulic Press Manufacturing Company. Then he engaged in banking. For eleven years he was cashier of the National Bank of Morrow County, and at the end of that time he was one of the organizers of the People’s Saving Bank Company, which began business April 23, 1904, and of which he has from that date held the position of cashier. At the present writing, 1911, this bank has a deposit of two hundred thousand dollars, and its officers are as follows: Dr. W. B. Robinson, president; W. M. Carlisle, vice president; Dr. N. Tucker, second vice president; S. P. Gage, cashier; A. C. Duncan, assistant cashier; and Z. A. Powers, teller.
During his successful business career Mr. Gage has accumulated considerable property, including two valuable farms in Morrow county, one of two hundred and eighty acres in Gilead township and the other, four hundred and forty acres in Bennington township, and residence property at Mt. Gilead and Columbus. He and his family reside in their pleasant home on Cherry street Mt. Gilead. Mrs. Gage, formerly, Miss Alice Sherman, born April 18, 1851, is a daughter of Daniel Sherman and previous to her marriage was engaged in teaching. She and Mr. Gage were married in 1872, and they are the parents of one son, Ralph P., born January 5, 1875, who is a graduate of both the Mt. Gilead High School and Delaware College, he having received the degree of A. B. at the age of twenty-one years. He is now engaged in the practice of law at Los Angeles, California.
Like his father before him, Mr. Gage is an active and influential member of the Methodist Episcopal church. He is a member of the official board, and at the time of the building of the Methodist church edifice in Mt. Gilead he served as chairman of the building committee. Fraternally he is identified with Mt. Gilead Lodge, No. 169, I. O. O. F., and Encampment No. 59, and in the latter was a member of the board of trustees. Mr. and Mrs. Gage were charter members of the Rebekahs at Mt. Gilead, Ohio, Lodge 352. They have crossed the continent of America twice, visiting their son.
Source: History of Morrow County, Ohio by A. J. Baughman - Vol. II - Chicago-New York: The Lewis Publishing Co. - 1911 – pp. 482-484
Contributed by a Generous Genealogist.
Mount Gilead is a village in Morrow County, Ohio, United States.
It is located 41 miles (66 km) northeast of Columbus. The population was 3,660 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Morrow County and the center of population of Ohio.[6][7] The village was established in 1832, eight years after white settlers arrived in the region. Before their arrival, the forest was a hunting area for the Shawnee tribe.
Located in the center of the village is Morrow County's historic World War I Victory Memorial Shaft, unique in the United States, and Mount Gilead State Park is nearby on State Route 95. Other areas drawing tourism include the Amish farms, shops and stores east of Mount Gilead, near Chesterville and Johnsville. Mount Gilead is also home to the Morrow County Hospital.
History
19th century
Settlement
The first settler to make Mount Gilead (Mt. Gilead) home was Lewis Hardenbrook, in 1817, though it was then called Whetstone and was located in Marion County. In 1824, Judge Jacob Young drew out the village; the plan consisting of 80 lots and also included a public square. Several years later, in 1832, Henry Ustick added an additional 70 lots to the village as well as an additional public square. The original public square was then referred to as the south square and the newer square, the north square. Many years later, in 1919, the north public square would become home to the Victory Shaft World War I Monument. This monument was given to the county for having the highest per capita war bond sales during a two-year period.[8] Charles Webster built the first cabin in the village in December 1824. He served as the first Postmaster and operated the Post Office from the cabin, as well. In 1832, a measure was proposed to change the name of the town. Residents were asked to vote between the names Warsaw and Mt. Gilead. Mt. Gilead was chosen by a significant margin and the village was incorporated by state legislature several years later in 1839.[9]
In 1848, Mt. Gilead was almost unanimously chosen to be the county seat for the newly formed Morrow County, Ohio. Morrow County was formed from parts of surrounding Marion, Knox, Richland, and Delaware counties. Given the village's elevated status as the county seat, village leaders enhanced many areas of the town's appearance by creating streets and clearing them and performed other improvements.[10]
Railroad
Soon after being named county seat, there was talk of building a rail line that would pass through Mt. Gilead between Cleveland and Columbus. Officials opened stock purchases and began preparations for the build. Tensions between villagers and railroad officials broke down the negotiations and the rail station was re-located to Cardington, several miles south of Mt. Gilead, and opened for business in 1851. The railroad would pass Mt. Gilead two miles to the west, in what is now known as Edison. Nearly 30 years later, Mt. Gilead did get a rail spur through the village, named Mt. Gilead Short Line Railway. The Short Line opened in 1880.[9]
Industry
From its beginnings, industry has been a main support for Mt. Gilead. Various mills were an early staple in the village history, followed by a tile factory and with technological advances, eventually the still well known Hydraulic Press Manufacturing Company or HPM.[9] HPM maintained some level of operations in Mt. Gilead until 2011, when it was moved to Marion.[11]
Media
Mt. Gilead had two media sources available to them in the 19th century, Democratic Messenger and The Whig Sentinel. Both papers began publishing in 1848 and both papers experienced a name change around 1860 with The Sentinel becoming The Morrow County Sentinel and The Messenger becoming The Union Register. The Union Register was published until 1971, while the Morrow County Sentinel is still in existence today.
Historic sites
Four properties in Mount Gilead are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the floral hall at the county fairgrounds, Levering Hall, the Morrow County Courthouse, and the James S. Trimble House.[12] Levering Hall in particular is distinguished by its ornate Italianate architecture and its place as the center of community life for several decades.[13]
Victory Memorial Shaft
The Victory Shaft was erected in Mount Gilead's town square in December 1919, following World War I. It was presented as a gift from the federal government to Morrow County citizens to thank them for purchasing more war bonds per capita than any other county. Warren G. Harding, a Senator who would later be elected President, was the keynote speaker at the dedication.