ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the unacknowledged continuities between Aesthetic painting (1860–1900) and Bloomsbury painting, which have been largely neglected on account of the elision of much late Victorian painting by Bloomsbury art theory. In particular, it intends to explore the revival of Greek or “classic” forms in the academic-cum-Aesthetic painting of the 1860s and the later persistence of such forms in a number of paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Central to the late Victorian Aesthetic pictorial trends is a conflation of the academic, neo-Winckelmannian Greek ideal and the formalist tendency of Aestheticism, which led a number of artists or art critics of the time – such as Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, Sidney Colvin, Walter Pater, or Oscar Wilde – to value these “Greek” forms “for their “abstract” quality. A number of artworks by Bell and Grant display a striking awareness of Aesthetic paintings, mostly through these Greek forms. However, both Aesthetic and Bloomsbury paintings express tensions and paradoxes as far as the treatment of the body and what Vanessa Bell the “human associations” called is concerned.
