sought-out

Updated: May 5, 2025

In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediævalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense.

Various - Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878