Emilia Dilke’s Journey from Art Philosophy to Art History

Abstract This chapter is on Emilia Dilke’s writings on philosophy of art. In the 1860s, Dilke thought that artworks inescapably express their social and historical circumstances and that art is better as art the more it distils its time. Dilke also believed that in the modern world art had separated inevitably from morality and religion. She therefore supported aestheticism, arguing that art should be made for beauty’s sake and not subordinated to moral purposes. In the 1870s, she made a new distinction between several uses, or kinds of value, that artworks can have. The best artworks have properly aesthetic value and transcend history, but most artworks have only historical value as expressions of their eras and these artworks must be studied art-historically, not philosophically. Overall, Dilke made a cogent case for aestheticism several years before Walter Pater, negotiating between aestheticism and historicism in a unique way.