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A contribution to: Scrutinizing Beauty

Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Daisy Gudmunsen

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the Arts and Crafts Move­ment’s aspiration to the symbolic, often spiritual potential more traditionally associated with the finer arts of painting and sculpture blossomed in a vibrant and fruitful praise of ornament, technique, and design. In the context of a fast-developing material culture, the aesthete’s worship of beauty and cult of form reverberated through a perplexing world of urban modernity obsessed with surface decoration, images of floral-carpeted rooms, and highly ornate, heavily gilt publishers’ bindings. The leading artistic principle of the time was a prime commitment to the ‘sense of the beautiful’, and the motivation to produce both useful and visually appealing objects lay at the heart of one commercially and artistically thriving enterprise: book illustration. From William Morris and Walter Crane, to Walter Pater and Aubrey Beardsley, this paper considers the place of book illustration in the broader context of the artistic revival of fin-de-siècle surface decoration practices and the aesthetic and design theories that fuelled them.

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