A thing of beauty is a joy forever, said Keats, and he never spoke a truer word. And how he would have loved the exhibition I've just been to at the V&A -- The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. In fact, as well as enjoying the many luscious painted women on show, he'd probably have felt very much at home with some of it, because the Pre-Raphaelites, who figure largely here, were very much influenced by his late Romantic pseudo medievalism. (Sorry -- off with the mortarboard).
The V&A certainly knows what its doing when it puts on these major exhibitions. I've never been a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, but after seeing the best of them on display today -- Watts, Burne Jones and many more -- and seeing them in context, with their intelligent, informative and mercifully brief descriptions attached, I felt like I'd got the point at last. The star of the show for me, as far as painting was concerned, was the wonderful James McNeil 
Whistler, many of whose delicate, subtle portraits are on display -- three of the series called Symphony in White, an extraordinary portrait of Thomas Carlyle looking, I thought, desperately sad, and many many more. The Museum has even rustled up a life-size digital replica of Whistler's famous Peacock Room, which I was lucky enough to see in it's full glory in the Smithsonian many years ago.
But there's far more here than just paintings. Photographs, sculpture, pottery, jewellery, wallpaper, household objects, books, furniture, clothes -- you name it, the whole world of the bohemian late nineteenth-century is here on display. If you stand still beside some of the exhibits you can even hear some poems being read -- my eyes filled with tears listening to Yeats' poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
In fact I found the whole thing an amazingly emotional experience -- I felt 
almost sick at times, if you can understand that, from the sheer glorious intensity of it all. And how I long now for a house to decorate in the style of the Aesthetic Movement -- how about a Peacock frieze, some William Morris wallpaper, a Christopher Dresser 
teapot on a little bamboo table...and me dressed in ivory silk, artfully draped so that I don't need my corsets...
I don't suppose this is going to happen in a hurry. But I am so glad I went -- and if you get the chance, please go too. You won't regret it.
The images comes from the exhibition website -- I hope the V&A won't mind.
