4 – NEW – Nature, Gender, Form: New Approaches to the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetic Movement, and Arts & Crafts
Online
Course 4 – Summer School online
Monday 9 – Friday 13 June 2025
Dr Thomas Hughes
£395 or £445 with visit
This course also offers an optional visit on Saturday 14 June 2025, for an extra £50 fee as noted above
Course description
The art, design and architecture of Victorian Britain, from 1848 until the close of the nineteenth century, underwent profound transformations, from channelling religious and literary narratives to imagining a realm of pure aesthetic experience, one of strange pleasures and sensuous, sometimes shocking forms.
Taking in painting, drawing, design, architecture, book illustration and poetry, this course introduces recent approaches to the key works and figures of the period, including John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. We begin with a fundamental question: what did these young artists’ decision to turn away from the Academy and to paint ‘nature’ have to do with the dramatic changes happening to their environment?
As Pre-Raphaelitism evolved slowly and unevenly into the Aesthetic Movement, how did new thinking about nature, by Charles Darwin and others, open artists’ eyes? Far from being a retreat from the world, we will explore how ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ gave artists and makers freedom to imagine new ways of being. At the end of the century, Arts & Crafts emerged as a vision for living alongside nature, especially in the textiles of William Morris and the architecture of C. R. Ashbee and Philip Webb. We will also consider how Orientalism, albeit problematically, opened up new ways of imagining gender and sexuality, and there will be an optional trip to Leighton House at the end of the course. Throughout we will consider the poetry of many of these artists and their associates, such as Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and collaborations between poets, writers and artists.
How to book
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If you have any questions please email us at short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk
Lecturer's biography
Dr Thomas Hughes is an art historian specialising in nineteenth-century art and aesthetics. He has published widely on John Ruskin, and has also written on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater and Marcel Proust, and on subjectivity and language in Michael Baxandall and T. J. Clark. Thomas is writing a book from his PhD, which was completed in 2018 at The Courtauld, where he also taught for a number of years. Essays on Victorian reimaginations of Michelangelo, and on Ruskin, J. M. W. Turner and realism, are forthcoming.