Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life. Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multi-disciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century. 

The experience of colour underwent a significant change in the second half of the nineteenth century, as new coal tar-based synthetic dyes were devised for the expanding textile industry. These new, artificial colours were often despised in artistic circles who favoured ancient and more authentic forms of polychromy, whether antique, medieval, Renaissance or Japanese. However faded, ancient hues were embraced as rich, chromatic alternatives to the bleakness of industrial modernity, fostering fantasized recreations of an idealized past. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the complex reception of the colours of the past in the works of major Victorian writers and artists. Drawing on close analyses of artworks and literary texts, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple facets of the chromatic nostalgia of the Victorians, as well as the contrast between ancient colouring practices and the new sciences and techniques of colour.

Reflecting Walter Pater's diverse engagements with literature, the visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and biographical projects show Pater as fully responsive to the emergence of modern consumer culture and the changes in readership in Britain and the United States. New critical views of rarely studied texts enhance the image of Pater as a cosmopolitan aesthete dialoguing with contemporary culture. Conceptual analysis of his texts brings new light to the aesthetic paradox embodied by Pater, between artistic detachment and immersion in the Heraclitean flux of life. Finally, aestheticism is redefined as proposing new artistic and linguistic synthesis by merging art forms and embracing interart poetics.

This volume tackles the role of smell, under-explored in relation to the other senses, in the modern rejection, reappraisal and idealisation of antiquity. Among the senses olfaction in particular has often been overlooked in classical reception studies due to its evanescent nature, which makes this sense difficult to apprehend in its past instantiations. And yet, the smells associated with a given figure or social group convey a rich imagery which in turn connotes specific values: perfumes, scents and foul odours both reflect and mould the ways in which a society thinks or acts. Smells also help to distinguish between male and female, citizens and strangers, and play an important role during rituals. The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination focuses on the representation of ancient smells — both enticing and repugnant — in the visual and performative arts from the late 18th century up to the 21st century. The individual contributions explore painting, sculpture, literature and film, but also theatrical performance, museum exhibitions, advertising, television series, historical reenactment and graphic novels, which have all played a part in reshaping modern audiences' perceptions and experiences of the antique.

This volume tackles the role of smell, under-explored in relation to the other senses, in the modern rejection, reappraisal and idealisation of antiquity. Among the senses olfaction in particular has often been overlooked in classical reception studies due to its evanescent nature, which makes this sense difficult to apprehend in its past instantiations. And yet, the smells associated with a given figure or social group convey a rich imagery which in turn connotes specific values: perfumes, scents and foul odours both reflect and mould the ways in which a society thinks or acts. Smells also help to distinguish between male and female, citizens and strangers, and play an important role during rituals. The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination focuses on the representation of ancient smells - both enticing and repugnant - in the visual and performative arts from the late 18th century up to the 21st century. The individual contributions explore painting, sculpture, literature and film, but also theatrical performance, museum exhibitions, advertising, television series, historical reenactment and graphic novels, which have all played a part in reshaping modern audiences' perceptions and experiences of the antique.

Charlotte Ribeyrol presents a fascinating (book)case study exploring the story of an extraordinary object, William Burges’s (1827–1881) Great Bookcase. No fewer than 13 major artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, and Albert Moore, took part in the painting of this unique piece of furniture, which has now returned to the Ashmolean Museum after an absence of over 80 years. Ribeyrol throws new light on the chromophilia of the “Pre-Raphaelite� architect William Burges and his key role in shaping aesthetic debates about color in the 1860s. This crucial decade, which saw the advent of the first synthetic dyes, transformed the experience of color for many painters and poets in Burges’s circle. Interweaving art, literature, and chemistry, Ribeyrol reads the eight painted panels of the Great Bookcase in the context of this ‘color revolution’, which brought to the fore new approaches to color while simultaneously triggering a revival of the polychromy of the Pagan and Christian past. Drawing on pioneering interdisciplinary research and featuring new photography throughout, this book provides a definitive account of one of Burges’s most cherished and complex artworks.   Exhibition Schedule: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (September 2023–February 2024) 'The Colour Revolution: From Turner to Whistler'