Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Recently I went to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I was a little bit disappointed with the show.  It had received very good reviews, and I was expecting something spectacular.  Individually some of the paintings were first rate, but there was a lot of what my father would call "old tat". 

High points included:

Gentle Spring by Frederick Sandys, which had all the clichés in it (rainbow, butterflies, prominent young woman's breasts etc) but somehow seemed to work.

Laus Veneris by Burne-Jones - the maiden second from left looks at you with very shrewd eyes; the seated figure exhibits a desolate melancholy so profound she seems exhausted by it; the knights in the background seem as indistinguishable one from another as a modern boyband.

The superb Nocturne blue and gold by Whistler (there was a lot of Whistler in the exhibition, not all of it to my liking). 

Chaste nudes by Albert Moore plus his languid Midsummer from the Russell-Cotes Museum.

Bath of Psyche by Frederick Leighton (plus his Countess Brownlow which I have seen at Belton House, at the Leighton exhibition some years ago, and now here).

Best of all a watercolour of St Marks in Venice by Ruskin.

All individually worth seeing, but as a whole the exhibition didn't hold together.  The theme of aestheticism wasn't really proven (which is not to say that it cannot be proved, just that this exhibition didn't really do the job).  Also the lighting was gloomy (not sure why this was, as it didn't add anything).