The Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition of the ‘Cult of Beauty’ reflects how art spread into everyday life in the Victorian period What was the aesthetic movement? If we do not know now we certainly will within the next few weeks as the V&A’s latest blockbuster exhibition gets into its stride and Londoners are overwhelmed with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers and blue and white chinoiserie, symbols of an art movement gorgeous in its detail, shimmering in surface and verging on the decadent. Even for its admirers the aesthetic movement comes to have a rather claustrophobic feel. The movement started in a small way in the 1860s in the studios and houses of a radical group of artists and