Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately off-putting: intermittent mustard-coloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore’s paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader’s attention, despite the additional disadvantage that her subject had an uneventful life.
Albert Moore (1841-93) was an important figure in the Victorian neo-classical revival, which in painting meant endless pictures of nude or draped beauties in a style derived from ancient Greece and Rome — none of it looking in the least classical, usually because the subject matter was clearly an excuse to paint a pin-up. But Moore, who began as a recorder of nature in the all-inclusive style advocated by John Ruskin, genuinely aspired to aesthetic perfection. His female idylls, a hybrid of classical and Japanese art, never arouse a prurient thought, least of all when fully frontal in the buff — six-pack diaphragms and chaste non-naturalism making them disconcertingly manly and inhumanly statuesque.
After dabbling with truth to nature Moore briefly earned a reputation as a mural painter. Although only in his early twenties he was asked to submit proposals for the major public commissions of the time, notably the Houses of Parliament and the Albert Memorial. Rejection made him abandon public work, but designing for architecture had profoundly affected his painting. His quest for figurative beauty was henceforth based on the eternal rules of geometry, to the degree that Asleson — and all Moore fans — see him as an abstractionist manqué, born before his time.
Moore became a leading light of the art for art’s sake movement, which opposed Ruskin’s moralistic advocacy of self-improving factuality, and was a close friend of Whistler, the leading advocate of aestheticism in England.
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