No aspect of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism is neglected in The Cult of Beauty, the V&A’s homage to the movement. Every art form, from painting to photography, poetry to pottery, is represented, and the decorative arts, the V&A’s strongest genre, are out in force. The exhibition succeeds in plunging the viewer into the world of the aesthete. Paintings are positioned next to contemporary cabinets with nearby wallpaper and fabric samples completing the effect. The origins of Aestheticism - Byzantine, Persian, Classical, and Medieval – are carefully picked out in the context of the display. Re-imagined sitting rooms and studies are dotted throughout the exhibition, and one of the most unusual reconstructions is that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s bedroom.

The room is recreated using studies of Rossetti’s house by Henry Treffry Dunn. Near the reconstruction hangs an example, Rossetti’s bed, as if reflected in a convex mirror. The curators have evidently attempted to echo this in their own version, as it is visible only at oblique angles through three oddly shaped windows. While the objects used are impressive, the set-up feels forced, as do the peacock projections throughout the gallery, an unsubtle attempt to enforce continuity and cohesion.

One of the most striking arrangements greets the visitor in the first room; a wall devoted to beautiful women. The idealised half-length portraits include some of the most recognisable paintings of the period, and provide a powerful introduction to the sentiment of the exhibition. Other paintings, including some of the most recognisable masterpieces of the late Victorian age, are hung against veridian walls, evoking the colour of the ‘greenery yallery’ walls in theGrosvenor Gallery, founded in 1977 by Lord Lytton. The establishment and success of the Grosvenor Gallery seemingly brought Aestheticism, and its admirers, into the mainstream. In the same year, however, Whistler brought his landmark libel case against John Ruskin. The trial confirmed that which those at the heart of the movement were already aware - that Aestheticism, the Cult of Beauty, had neither doctrine nor key ideology. This is a point that the curators of The Cult of Beauty are keen to emphasise throughout; that the movement was organic and natural in its development.

The collection of Whistler paintings and etchings is magnificent, enough to form an exhibition in their own right. A lesser-known artist whose work can be regarded as a pinnacle of the Aesthetic movement alongside Whistler’s is Albert Moore, whose work is so entirely devoted to the decorative that even his figures are part of an ornate pattern. Reading Aloud of 1883 appears to be a narrative work and is even titled as such, but upon closer study reveals itself to be an incredibly elaborate design.

The exhibition is nicely bookended by Frederic Leighton’s The Sluggard. Seen in the introduction as a model, large and incongruous, it reappears in the last room, reduced in scale but not in impact, as one of the many copies of the sculpture that were produced for display in private homes. This particular example illustrates the robust nature of the movement, which despite having faded in fashion, endured in the popular consciousness. Aestheticism survived without a doctrine because of its beauty, which was, in the end, itself powerful enough to endure.

Until Jul 17

CHLOE SCOTT