The artist in “The Palace of Art” anticipates the Decadent movement in content, theme and style. The idea of a retreat to a man-made structure in which nature subjects itself to reinterpretation and compartmentalization by the artist for the artist's pleasure approaches the heart of Decadence. Nature does retain the privileged position as the source of revitalization and beauty for the artist that the Romantics built up in the decades before “The Palace of Art” came out, but not without the complication of the palace as the container of nature and a strong undertone of darkness and mystery.
The hunter in the “gaudy summer-morn” described in the first stanza in the sequence of rooms runs up against stark contrast in the next room, which is “all dark and red” with “some one pacing there alone,/ Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon” ("The Palace of Art"). The description of the first morning as “gaudy” implies a distaste for the idealized brilliance of the idyllic scene and anticipates the turn to darkness, in shade and tone, of the next room. Dark colors and the unsettling solidarity of the mysterious character create a deep and rich contrast that forces the mood elicited by the poem to reverse direction.
The alliteration of the line “Lit with a low large moon” contributes to the darkness and fluidity of the seaside scene's mood. It also calls attention to itself and the artist's sheer delight in the aesthetics of the language. The unresolved plot of the pacing figure in the scene leaves little room for interpretation of meaning on the surface level, but the texture and tone of the stanza creates all the meaning that the speaker needs to convey to the audience for them to appreciate the emotional value of decadent art for art's sake.
The unsettling uncertainty of the scene—and the composition of the scene with the sea, moon and solitary figure—provides a template for later works by a diverse set of artists including Charles Robinson, Syndey Sime and William Hope Hodgson. Robinson's “The Rising, Watching Moon” illustrates a collection of children's stories, but a sense of mystery and anticipation pervades the image as the solitary child walks through the moonlit world. The moon in Sime's “Buried in the Mud” illuminates an eerie nighttime funerary scene the depicts the sort of creepy, dark activities that seem likely to happen in moonlight but would never happen under the full light of the morning sun. Hodgson's The Night Land represents perhaps the purest exploitation of this natural fear of the night, and it relies on the perpetual anticipation of danger and death that goes hand-in-hand with the inability to clearly perceive the surrounding world.
Nature still plays an important role in these decadent scenes, but the desired effect directly opposes the Romantic dependence on nature as a source of serenity, beauty and respite. The more sinister scenes in “The Palace of Art” provide both aesthetic and thematic contrasts to the sunnier scenes within the poem as well as previous works of art that rely on natural landscapes as static refuges rather than dynamic, and potentially threatening, settings.
The wide range of styles and moods evoked in “The Palace of Art” demonstrates both the poet's artistic range and the ability of art to affect readers with a wide spectrum of moods and emotions, even within a single work of art and without altering the verses' form. Subsequent artistic movements tend to reflect a preference for one prevailing mood or another. “The Palace of Art,” by compartmentalizing its myriad scenes, evidences the spectrum of effects that can be achieved by a single work of art and the wide range of works that a single piece of art can influence.
