The artistic hearth: the fireplace in the American aesthetic movement.

Inspired by the slogan l'art pour l'art, the followers of the aesthetic movement achieved a brief period of cultural efflorescence that reached its height in the United States in the 1880s. (1) In the visual arts, the movement produced objects in which fundamental formal qualities such as shape, line, texture, and color were emphasized to maximize their aesthetic effects. Proponents of the aesthetic movement, which was more an outlook than a style, sought to elevate taste and make art a part of daily life, especially homelife. (2)

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At the hearth, opulent visual effects were married to meaning. The artistic hearth was a multimedia extravaganza composed of materials such as wood, tile, glass, and mirror and furnished with objects valued for both their artistry and their personal associations. It was also a site of family rituals, and, together, the form, the furnishings, and the experience of spending time around the hearth were an expression of artful domesticity (see Fig. 1). When he put a broad brick fireplace under a low timbered ceiling in the front hall of the house he designed for John and Frances Glessner in Chicago, Henry Hobson Richardson created an emphatic architectural statement (see Fig. 2). But, when the Glessners carried a burning fire from the hearth of the old house to the new, they created meaning. John Glessner later wrote:

 
The fire on the hearth typified the home, so we carried the living fire 
from the hearthstone in the old home at Washington and Morgan Streets, 
and with that started the fire on the new hearth, accompanied by a 
little ceremony .... the life in the new house must be a continuation of 
the life so happily lived in the old.... And so it was with the fire: 
the old did not go out, the new merely continued its warmth and 
glow. (3) 

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The artistic hearth was a natural outgrowth of the era's veneration of the home. (4) The American response to increasing industrialization and urbanization during the post-Civil War era included the separation of the workplace from the domestic sphere. Middle-class men went to work in factories, shops, and offices, while women remained in the house, raising children and safeguarding the moral underpinnings of American culture. As the so-called cult of domesticity evolved through the late nineteenth century, many women began to pursue the artistic aspects of cultural life more vigorously. They sought art education, founded arts organizations, and made art, much of it to adorn their own residences. An artistic housewife might design and sew her own curtains, paint her own ceramics, perhaps even draw portraits of her family. Such activity sprang from a deep-seated belief that the character of the house had a profound influence upon its inhabitants. The aesthetic movement prompted Americans to make the mental leap that beautiful surroundings, in and of themselves, would elevate the soul. Thus, women, who shouldered primary responsibility for domestic life, enlisted aesthetic forces as they shaped their houses, thereby shaping their families and the entire society. Creating a beautiful home was a moral act.