Désirs & volupté à l'époque victorienne

The Victorian era: brick factories, London under smog, a tiresome puritanism. The leading world power is the United Kingdom, led by the intransigent Queen Victoria – it has an austere, monochrome image.

But the work of many of the period's painters is incontrovertible proof of a countercurrent, an overload of sentimentality devoted to women. Fatale, object of desire, she symbolised an ideal of absolute beauty. Placed far from household drudgery, she becomes a heroine, even a goddess, against a background which oscillates between antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Orient of A Thousand and One Nights.

It’s all voluptuousness. The woman first of all, with her milky skin, incandescent hair, soft curves and floating, revealing garments. But also the overwhelmingly luxurious settings, full of silks, fountains and flower petals. With a fanatic refinement and a sense of consummate one-upmanship, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Moore, Rossetti and the rest composed hymns to beauty and harmony that were as grandiloquent as the factories of the industrial revolution were lugubrious.