Abstract
Though much private discussion surrounding the decoration for the new Houses of Parliament focused on technical matters of painting, decisions about how to proceed largely hinged upon issues of aesthetic appropriateness and even taste. This chapter shows how such matters of “taste” encode political as well as aesthetic orientations to British figuration. It surveys exchanges of letters among Prince Albert and his circle as well as reviews focusing on taste, and argues that the deliberately eclectic artworks and furnishings designed for Victoria’s garden pavilion were, in some respects, revolutionary for the time. Ultimately, the pavilion reveals the hybridization of Victorian taste, itself a discursive expression of conflicting political and aesthetic goals that only resolve in the practical encounters with Victorian buildings, art, and objects.
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Notes
- 1.
Since Steegman’s book was published, developments in critical and aesthetic theory have, needless to say, radically expanded the conceptual possibilities for approaching a topic as rich and challenging as “Victorian taste.” As Denise Gigante’s 2005, Taste: A Literary History, exhaustively demonstrates, the gustatory metaphor inherent in the term since classical times itself now openly calls for analysis as one that reductively interprets what we normally consider to be a matter of refined and exclusively intellectual pleasure, in the cruder language of bodily functions. Other such developments range from those visible in the work of Marxist and new historicist thinkers deeply interested in the politics or ideology of taste, including critics and theorists as varied as Theodor Adorno, Hans Robert Jauss, Bourdieu, Eagleton, and Jukka Gronow 1997 in his important book, The Sociology of Taste.
- 2.
Ames observes that “[Prince] Albert had seen Comus, perhaps for the first time, at Covent Garden on 9 March 1842, and it was from that charming and moral masque that he asked eight artists to choose subjects and paint frescoes in” the octagon room. He then notes, “In one of the side rooms the younger Doyles, sons of the famous John (‘H.B.’) and brothers of Richard Doyle [whose Punch drawings Victoria admired] frescoed in 1844 some subjects from Sir Walter Scott, and in another room there were Pompeian arabesques” (53).
- 3.
For a virtual recreation of this room, see https://sydenhamcrystalpalace.wordpress.com/
- 4.
“Report from the Select Committee on Fine Arts; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index.” Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be Printed, 18 June 1841.
- 5.
At the time of Mazois’s death in 1826, only two volumes of Les ruines de Pompéi had been produced and more than 400 drawings were still unpublished. Franz Christian Gau edited the remaining parts of Mazois’ work, completing it in 1838, and the murals in the Pompeii room can be traced to lithographs from Mazois.
- 6.
See Zimmerman’s 2008 detailed discussion of this topic, passim.
- 7.
Works Cited
Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale: 2005. Print.
Gronow, Jukka. The Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Zimmerman, Virginia. Excavating Victorians. Albany: State U of New York, 2008. Print.
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Harrison, A. (2017). The Garden Pavilion: A Portal to Victorian Taste. In: Victoria's Lost Pavilion. The Digital Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95195-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95195-6_5
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