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Journal of Design History 1998 11(2):127-144; doi:10.1093/jdh/11.2.127
© 1998 by Design History Society
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Ornament as Idea: Indirect Imitation of Nature in the Design Reform Movement

BARBARA WHITNEY KEYSER

Queen's University Kingston, Ontario


  Abstract

This paper places the theories of the Victorian design reform movement in the intellectual context of Victorian science. Recent scholarship in history of science treats romantic science sympathetically; viewed in this light, design reform can be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile modern science and ancient wisdom as applied to art and design. Victorian theories of design were poised on a knife-edge between classical, humanistic theories of art and modernism. Their use of arguments from the natural philosophy of their day was not positizrism, because mid-Victorian science was not positivistic. The result was a now-lost but rich conception of indirect imitation of nature—a hybrid of romantic nature aesthetics and a British tradition of practical Platonism. While the conceptions underlying the principle of indirect imitation of nature are obsolete, its richness, complexity and application of ideal beauty to decorative objects offer a constructive alternative paradigm to the extremism of twentieth-century abstraction and purism—indeed, the very impurity of Victorian design theory acquits it of the charge of scientism.

Key Words: design reform movement • design theory • Dresser • Christopher • Great Britain • ornament • Schools of Design


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