ABSTRACT
Roger Stein, writing of the Aesthetic Movement in America, has shrewdly observed that, ‘in many respects the Aesthetic movement was a women’s movement. Women were among the leading producers of aesthetic goods, and insofar as the movement was primarily directed toward the domestic realm, they were also its chief consumers.’1 Although few women on the other side of the Atlantic attained the celebrity of the interior decorator and textile designer Candace Wheeler or her daughter Dora, designer and painter, who was portrayed by William Merritt Chase surrounded by the evidence of her artistry (the sumptuous décor and superb blue pot),2 women in Britain were also commissioning, producing and consuming aesthetic artefacts across a wide economic spectrum. They included Frances Leyland, who posed for Whistler in 1873 in a dress inspired by one in a painting by Watteau, and made especially for this occasion,3 and Carrie Footer, wife of the eponymous hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody of 1892, who bought a piece of silk from Liberty’s with which to drape the photographs on the parlour mantelpiece of their home at ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway.4 However, most of the authors who have written about the Aesthetic Movement in Britain have a different emphasis. For art historians like Robin Spencer and Lionel Lambourne, the chief protagonists of the Aesthetic Movement were the painters James McNeill Whistler and Albert Moore, the architects Edward William Godwin and Richard Norman Shaw, and the designers Walter Crane and Christopher Dresser.5
By contrast, historians of architecture and design have done considerably more to chart the networks underpinning the endeavours of artists, designers and architects, and have helped to ground this movement for design reform more securely in the specific historical and cultural context from which it sprang.6
Their work has revealed that what Mark Girouard characterised in 1977 as a generation in revolt against the tastes of their parents was also a generation which was involved in much broader areas of social change.7 One of these areas was the expansion of the activities of women beyond the domestic sphere and the negotiation of new roles for them in the years between the second Reform Bill of 1867 and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882.8
