J.W. Waterhouse Exhibitions
Heaven on Earth: The Religion of Beauty in Late Victorian Art
Heaven on Earth is a major exhibition at the new Djanogly Art Gallery (University of Nottingham Arts Centre). It looks at the ideal of the Beautiful in late Victorian art, and provides a new perspective on a period in British art which continues to have wide appeal.
The 1860s witnessed both a disenchantment with what had come to represent mainstream Victorian art, and also the beginnings of a re-enchantment with the idea of High Art, the ideal of Art for Art’s sake. Common to late Victorian artists as outwardly diverse as Rossetti, Waterhouse, George Frederic Watts, Burne-Jones and Evelyn de Morgan is the notion that art might provide a particular kind of experience, evoking an apparently timeless ideal of the Beautiful through its appeal to the imagination and its visible connection with the past. Early Renaissance art, brought into public awareness by the Pre-Raphaelites, continued to be important for later Victorian artists, in terms of both style and subject-matter, as a means of distancing art from the banalties of everyday Victorian life.
« View all John William Waterhouse Exhibitions