A New Road to Modernity: Thomas Jeckyll‟S Design Innovations or the Reformation of the Mid-Victorian Decorative Arts through the Japanese Culture

Abstract

Through the numerous upheavals of the course of design and decorative arts in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, the emergence of a new style which was based on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Japanese culture combined with the British tradition, stood out. The so-called Anglo-Japanese Style within the  Aesthetic Movement broad framework, although mainly associated with the decoration rather than with the structure of objects, ushered innovative approaches to abstraction and geometry in design, thereby defining, in a way, Modernity itself. Although there were many representatives of this new style, the less known architect and designer Thomas Jeckyll, constituted through his work, the culmination of that new world order by contributing in a silent but meaningful way to an emerging new design aesthetic reality. This article intends to research through important mid-Victorian period historic events and new ideologies of the time the effect of Jeckyll’s Japanese culture driven innovations on the evolution of the British decorative arts towards the era of Modernity.