Edwardian Opulence at Yale: ‘As If a Viennese Hussar Had Suddenly Burst Into an English Vicarage’

The Yale Center for British Art has hosted Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, the first major international exhibition in more than a generation to survey visual and decorative arts in Britain during the reign of King Edward VII (1901–1910). The exhibition immerses visitors in the sumptuousness of British art and society immediately before World War I, while encouraging them to consider the multifaceted character of the era that fostered such material lavishness.

Painting: Charles Wellington Furse, Diana of the Uplands, 1903–04, oil on canvas, Tate Britain. All photography from: ‘Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the 20th Century’

On view are approximately one hundred seventy objects, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, furniture, jewelry, costume, and decorative arts by both British and international artists and designers, such as William Orpen, John Singer Sargent, William Nicholson, and Carl Fabergé. The exhibit closes on June 2, 2013.

Edwardian Opulence has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and  features key loans from private collections and public institutions around the world, including The Royal Collection, the collections of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Rothschild, Tate Britain, the South African National Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria,Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Collection Cartier in Geneva.

Painting by Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), Portrait of a Lady (Mrs. Lionel Phillips), 1903, oil on canvas, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.

Sandwiched between the Victorian era and the Great War, Edwardian England — lately made popular by the wildly successful British series, Downton Abbey, — has been difficult to define, characterized by marked dualities. One view holds that the period was a lingering coda of the Victorian era that resisted the advent of the Modern. The opposite view maintains that it was a period of tremendous social and technological change that affected every aspect of British life.