This artistically self-conscious and highly fashionable British movement of the late 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s drew on a variety of sources. These included the work of artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, designers linked to the Arts and Crafts Movement and the work of Japanese artists and designers whose work became increasingly influential from the 1850s onwards. Oriental sources also provided British artists and designers such as James McNeil Whistler and E. W. Godwin with sources of inspiration that provided an alternative to the prevailing historicism characterizing much contemporary Victorian work. In fact, ‘Art Furniture’ was a term frequently adopted in design periodicals, signalling an alternative contemporary ‘artistic’ outlook to the prevalent commercialization of the past favoured by many contemporary Victorian manufacturers and consumers. The terms ‘Art Industries’ and ‘Art Potteries’ were also indicative of the preoccupations of a style that was satirized by George Du Maurier in the periodical Punch and W. S. Gilbert in the operetta Patience. The latter, subtitled an ‘Aesthetic Opera’, was first staged by D'Oyly Carte in 1881 with costumes supplied by Liberty & Co. Arthur Liberty's store opened in Regent Street, London, in 1875. Liberty's played a leading role in the commercialization of Aesthetic, especially oriental, goods, although a number of other London stores such as Swan & Edgar and William Whiteley also opened their own oriental departments in order to capture the attention of fashion-conscious metropolitan consumers. Amongst the purveyors of ‘art industry’ products were Howell & James, W. B. Simpson & Sons, and Christopher Dresser's short-lived Art Furniture Alliance which opened in London in 1880 for the sale of furniture, metalware, and other decorative artefacts with attendants wearing Aesthetic dress. In addition to those characteristics already identified, other ingredients of the Aesthetic sensibility included the literary, ‘art for art's sake’ outlook of the poet and writer Oscar Wilde and the sensual illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. Typical stylistic motifs included the sunflower, the lily, the peacock, and the stork as well as all kinds of oriental birds and fish. Many of the ways in which such motifs permeated the lives and possessions of fashionable society may be seen in the book illustration of artists such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane.
