Victorian Radicals


Book Description

Drawn from Birmingham Museums Trust's incomparable collection of Victorian art and design, this exhibition will explore how three generations of young, rebellious artists and designers, such as Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, revolutionized the visual arts in Britain, engaging with and challenging the new industrial world around them.




Design & the Decorative Arts


Book Description

Now available in trade paperback for the first time, the V&A's acclaimed Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain 1500-1900 has been published in three separate volumes. Victorian Britain 1837-1901 tells the story of design and the decorative arts in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. With an empire that embraced a fifth of the earth's land surface and a quarter of its people, Britain was the workshop of the world. London was rivalled only by Paris as a focus for international interest in design and the decorative arts and British products could be found across the globe. Victorian self-confidence seemed boundless, but optimism about the human capacity to transform the material world was matched by a spiritual disquiet that found powerful expression in design and the decorative arts. Victorians despaired at the endless tide of new things that surged forth from factory and workshop, they agonized about the way those things looked and they were disturbed by the degraded conditions endured by the workers who made them. Yet in their efforts to confront these problems, they produced some the masterpieces of Victorian design. Lavishly illustrated and unmatched in its coverage, this book explores design and the decorative arts from a number of points of view. It assesses their place in the wider history of Victorian Britain. It examines style, the question of how things looked. It asks who led taste; who decided what was to be considered beautiful, fashionable and desirable. It looks at how fashionable things - from houses to clothing - were used. It asks what was new, examining new products and innovations in the ways they were made. Together, the chapters provide an indispensable resource for the study of design and the decorative arts in Victorian Britain.




Design and the Decorative Arts


Book Description

London was rivalled only by Paris as a focus for international interest in design and the decorative arts. By the nineteenth century, British design was widely admired and copied. Its products could be found right across the globe, from palaces and stately homes to the living rooms of ordinary people.".







Introduction to Victorian Style


Book Description

This is an analysis of the work of all the major designers, architects Thomas Cubitt and George Gilbert Scott, harbinger of Modernism Christopher Dresser, the 'anti-Victorian' William Morris - and examination of the anonymous artifacts, from dolls' houses to tableaux morts, which decorated the victorian home. This book also offers an explanation of the complex interrelationship of different styles throughout the period: neo-Classicism, Renaissance Revival, French Rococo, Queen Anne and High Victorian Gothic. Also featured is a discussion of the influential role of the Royal family, as arbiters of taste and objects of veneration. Throughout, the generous format allows over 200 beautiful colour photographs and illustrations to be shown to their full potential. Alongside the art and architecture of the period are shown more unusual artifacts of the time. Overall this is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in the style and attitudes of the Victorian era.




Under Glass


Book Description

Wax : "Beauties from the beehive"--Shell work : "Flowers from the sea" -- Hair work : "Hair today, hair tomorrow" -- Nature contained : "Birds, dogs, frogs, and monkeys too!" -- Feather work : "Birds of a feather" -- Beautiful in death : "Skeleton leaves and phantom bouquets" -- Wool work : "Have you any wool?" -- Glass whimsies : "Confections in glass" -- Fancy that! : "Paper, muslin, silk, bead, and seed work" -- Automata : "Musical mechanical masterpieces" -- Esoterica -- Gone but not forgotten.




Victorian Patterns and Designs in Full Color


Book Description

The last and one of the most important of the great chromolithographic collections of the Victorian era, this magnificent volume first appeared in 1892. Spans a wide spectrum of ornamental styles: Greek moldings and pilaster designs; medieval roof ornamentation, "masonry" patterns; Renaissance coffer and panel ornamentation; Japanese fret bands; and more.