Victorian Sentimentality at the Tate
Victorian art is often criticised for being sentimental, but what does this mean? And is sentimentality always a bad thing?
A new Tate Britain Display focussing on Victorian Sentimentality has been devised by Nicola Bown, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, Victoria Mills, Research Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge and Tate Britain curator Alison Smith.
Victorian art is often criticised for being sentimental, but what does this mean? And is sentimentality always a bad thing? This display brings Victorian sentimentality into the spotlight and considers a much maligned and misunderstood phenomenon.
Why has sentimentality come to seem so unforgivable? It might simply be a result of snobbery directed against art that appeals to popular taste, or because the emotive themes that recur in sentimental art - childhood and especially child death, forsaken love, animals, sunsets, heart-rending stories and pathetic scenes - now seem hackneyed. Alternatively, it could be the way the pictures invite (or manipulate) the viewer into an emotional response, using narrative, colour, light and shade and recurring symbols such as scattered flowers.
The term ‘sentimental’ was first used in the eighteenth century, when the cultivation of feeling became fashionable. This display traces the development of sentimental art from its mid-Victorian heyday to its transformation into Symbolist emotional imagery at the end of the nineteenth century.
Find out more
- Tate Britain: Victorian Sentimentality
- Listen to a panel discussion on Victorian Sentimentality by the display curators
- MA Victorian Studies at Birkbeck
- Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies