Victorian virtues

The fight has gone out of Victorian- bashing as a pastime. The high moral aims and low double standards of so much 19th-century culture, characterised by unsmiling portentousness and once regarded by Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford et al. as a ‘shriek’, pale alongside the emptiness of modern celebrity worship. ‘Victorian’, which once meant ugly, silly or undesirable, has come to suggest the opposite — and so a harmlessly malicious parlour game falls by the wayside.

But the massive swell of the 19th century continues to throw up genius oddities. Take Henry George Alexander Holiday, who died 80 years ago this year after a career that embraced notable successes as both a painter and a designer of stained glass. Holiday was a follower of just about everyone — from Burne-Jones and Albert Moore to Gladstone and Mrs Pankhurst. His horrible painting ‘Dante and Beatrice’, of 1883, was among the most frequently reproduced images of its day. It testifies to Holiday’s fascination with the life of Dante and the history of medieval Florence — and, less predictably, to his impassioned opposition to corsetry. In 1892, Holiday became editor of Aglaia, the journal of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union. Four years later, the Union staged a tableau vivant in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall inspired by ‘Dante and Beatrice’ and its wide-waisted, loose-skirted womenfolk.

Aglaia was only a hobby for Holiday. By 1892 he had become patron of his own stained-glass works. For 30 years previously he had designed stained-glass windows for Powell’s Glass Works, replacing his artistic mentor Edward Burne-Jones. In stained glass Holiday found his métier. His first-rate draughtsmanship and assured sense of colour were ideally suited to the medium (a growth area in the 19th century). Holiday completed upwards of 300 commissions, many in the States.