The Style in the decorative arts which eventually came to be known as Art Nouveau was made possible by a number of outstanding writers on aesthetics during the nineteenth century, notably John Ruskin and William Morris in Britain, and Léon de Laborde and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc in France. What these writers had in common was a rejection of the crass materialism which had reached it apogee in many of the exhibits at the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851.