Antique Mirror in Faux Bamboo and Walnut Frame, 1890s

Description

A faux bamboo walnut mirror of beautiful warm tones, together with it’s original hanging chain in the Chinoiserie/Aesthetic Movement style. … more A faux bamboo walnut mirror of beautiful warm tones, together with it’s original hanging chain in the Chinoiserie/Aesthetic Movement style. Refreshed and revived by professional restorers this piece is in good condition. The Aesthetic Movement was influenced heavily by the stylised renditions of China and Japan, and referenced it through many objects, fabric and wall hangings. The Aesthetic Movement in Britain (1860 – 1900) aimed to escape the ugliness and materialism of the Industrial Age, by focusing instead on producing art that was beautiful rather than having a deeper meaning – ''Art for Art''s sake''. The artists and designers in this ''cult of beauty'' crafted some of the most sophisticated and sensuously beautiful artworks of the Western tradition and in the process remade the domestic world of the British middle-classes. A few key members of Rossetti''s circle took a keen interest in the design arts, seeking to transform banal and pretentious furnishings and domestic objects of the middle-class home. with a refined sensibility to line and geometrical form or, in the case of William Morris, with a feeling for natural ornament and harmonious colour, these designers aimed to produce chairs and tables worthy of the name ''Art Furniture'' and to create ceramics, textiles, and wallpapers entirely unlike ordinary ''trade'' wares. These were to be quality household goods that would please the eye of the artist and grace the houses of Aesthetic patrons, collectors and connoisseurs. It was argued that if furnishings were refined enough in form, materials and their quality of making, and carefully considered in colour, they – and the decorative arts in general – could rise to a new level and blur the Royal Academy''s longstanding strict division between the ''fine'' arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and so-called artisan crafts – decorative arts design and fabrication. less