# Oscar Wilde, living up to his China

I went to see [The Cult of Beauty - The Aesthetic Movement
1860-1900](http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/cult-of-beauty/) at
the V&A on the weekend, and very enjoyable it was too. The idea of the
[Aesthetic Movement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism) seems to
be that art need not have a purpose–whether it be didactic or moral or
social–it need only be beautiful. And so its practitioners went about
painting beautiful pictures, making beautiful furniture, and wearing
beautiful clothes. As you might expect, a Victorian movement that not
only lacked intellectual depth, but asserted it unnecessary, attracted a
good deal of satire and parody.

Indeed, one suggestion for the cause of the movement’s decline was that
“satire and parody overwhelmed the movement”–a possibility that is
damning even in its “could be true” form. Gilbert and Sullivan went to
the trouble of writing an entire comic opera in this spirit
([Patience](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience_(opera)>), but I
particularly like the efforts of <cite>Punch</cite>. The cartoon below,
“The Six-Mark Tea-Pot” is [George du
Maurier’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_du_Maurier) response to
Oscar Wilde’s remark to visitors that he finds it “harder and harder
every day to live up to my blue china.”

<img alt="George du Maurier, The Six-Mark Tea-Pot" src="/lately/images/the-six-mark-tea-pot-400.jpg" width="700" height="1127">

**The Six-Mark Tea-Pot**

_Aesthetic Bridegroom_. “It is quite consummate, is it not?”

_[Intense
Bride](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_Proserpine.JPG)_.
“It is indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!”

([source](http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/exhibits/wilde/3oxford.htm))