Wilde and Aestheticism:

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Wilde and Aestheticism Talk on the Wilde Side
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Characteristics of Aestheticism

• Belief in Art for Arts Sake
• Appreciation of Beauty at the expense of utility
  and social value
• Pursuit of Pleasure Worship of the Senses (The
  New Hedonism)
• High Culture Upper Class aesthetic,
  anti-philistine, public
• Reaction against Realism, Didacticism, and
  Morality that characterised earlier and even
  concurrent cultural fashions
• Anti-Natural belief in the ornate, extreme
  artifice, performance, and exotic
• Symbols the peacock feather (exotic), the
  butterfly (beautiful and transient), the
  sunflower/orchid (beautiful, exotic), masks
  (artifice, theatricality, disguise)
• In a nutshell, Walter Pater to burn always like
  a hard gemlike flame

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• The studio was filled with the rich odor of
  roses, and when thelight summer wind stirred
  amidst the trees of the garden there came through
  the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or
  the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering
  thorn.From the corner of the divan of Persian
  saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as
  usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
  could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and
  honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose
  tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the
  burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs and
  now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in
  flight flitted across the long tussore-silk
  curtains that were stretched in front of the huge
  window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese
  effect, and making him think of those pallid
  jade-faced painters who, in an art that is
  necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
  swiftness andmotion. The sullen murmur of the
  bees shouldering their way through the long
  unmown grass, or circling with monotonous
  insistence round the black-crocketed spires of
  the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the
  stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of
  London was like the bourdon note of a distant
  organ (PDG 43).

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The Aesthete,Punch, 1880s
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A Tea Pot Aesthete
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Various Wilde types, Punch
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Edward Linley Sambourne,Wilde as
Sunflower, Punch
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Manson The Wilde Aesthetic
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• Oscar or Harry? 
• I have nothing to declare except my genius. 
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as
  nothing can cure the sense but the soul. 
• I have put my talent into my works. I have put
  my genius into my life.
• The first duty in life is to be as artificial as
  possible. What the second duty is no one has yet
  discovered.
• Being natural is simply a pose, and the most
  irritating pose I know.
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a
  great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
• The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
  romance.
• Men marry because they are tired women, because
  they are curious both are disappointed.
• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the
  death. One or the other of us has to go.
• Modern morality consists in accepting the
  standards of the age. I consider that for any
  man of culture to accept the standards of his age
  is a form of the grossest immorality.
•  

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• Oscar or Harry? 
• I have nothing to declare except my genius.  W
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as
  nothing can cure the sense but the soul.  H
• I have put my talent into my works. I have put
  my genius into my life. W
• The first duty in life is to be as artificial as
  possible. What the second duty is no one has yet
  discovered. W
• Being natural is simply a pose, and the most
  irritating pose I know. H
• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a
  great deal of it is absolutely fatal. W
• The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
  W
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
  romance. W
• Men marry because they are tired women, because
  they are curious both are disappointed. H
• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the
  death. One or the other of us has to go. W
• Modern morality consists in accepting the
  standards of the age. I consider that for any
  man of culture to accept the standards of his age
  is a form of the grossest immorality. H
•