The King Drinks (Jordaens, St Petersburg) The King Drinks (Jordaens, St Petersburg) The King Drinks or The Bean King is a c.1638 painting by Jacob Jordaens, now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Its history is unknown before 18 August 1762, when it was sold at the Wirman auction in Amsterdam. It was resold at the sale of J. van der Mark's collection on August 25 1773. By the end of the 18th century it was already in Alexander Bezborodko's collection, from which it was inherited by Nikolai Alexandrovich Kushelev-Bezborodko, who in turn left it to the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts. It
History of aesthetics before the 20th century refers to Greek philosophers as the earliest source of formal aesthetic considerations. Plato believed in beauty as a "form" in which beautiful objects partake and which causes them to be beautiful. He felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the "Metaphysics", Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and