Beads (study)

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Artist: Albert Joseph Moore (British, 1841–1893)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 11 3/4 x 19 1/4 inches (29.8 x 48.9 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Albert Moore was a close associate of James McNeill Whistler and, like him, rejected the Victorian narrative tradition in favor of figurative pictures that used color, line, and pattern in an effectively abstract manner that emulated musical compositions. Victorian viewers often complained that his canvases were devoid of meaning, but Moore’s paintings were meant to be allusive and decorative, matched to wallpapers and furniture so that ordinary people could “live with art.”

To his supporters he was the quintessential artist of the aesthetic movement. Ironically, he had a defender in the art critic John Ruskin, who valued Moore’s color and careful compositions, but Moore testified for Whistler in his famous libel suit against Ruskin in 1878. In turn, Whistler praised Moore as “the greatest artist that, in the century, England might have cared for and called her own.”

Text: Yale Center for British Art.