Summary of Ancients
Bejeweled with color, saturated with spiritual fervor, the paintings and engravings of The Ancients are amongst the most rapturous works of Romantic art produced in Britain during the 19th century. The Ancients were a group of young artists based in the south of England who cohered around the inspirational figure of William Blake. Also inspired by classical, Biblical, and Medieval and Renaissance imagery, the group was active for around a decade, meeting mostly at the house of their leading member Samuel Palmer in Shoreham, Kent before the ties of collective creativity gradually loosened. Their influence can be sensed across a wide sweep of Romantic art, from the Pre-Raphaelites to twentieth-century artists such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- The Ancients formed the first "brotherhood" in modern British art, an indirect influence on the many modernist and avant-garde groupings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dressing in long, monk-like robes and committing to a shared program of artistic and spiritual labor, their visible adherence to a shared cause was echoed in the pronouncements and artistic output of any number of later movements, although their ideals were rooted in a vision of antiquity rather than an avant-garde grasping at the new.
- The Ancients were one of the most significant movements in British Romantic landscape painting. They rose to prominence at a time when that school was flourishing thanks to artists such as Turner and Constable. But whereas those painters' works precipitated a turn towards Naturalism and Realism in the depiction of the natural world, the spiritual intensity of The Ancients and the influence of Blake gave their work a proto-Expressionist quality of formal and tonal distortion which was entirely without equal.
- Although somewhat neglected in their lifetime, during the twentieth century the work of The Ancients, and particularly Palmer, inspired a new generation of Romantic landscape artists. Painters such as Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, John Piper, and John Minton, saw in The Ancients' work the same combination of Romantic richness and compositional daring that they were attempting to muster.
Overview of Ancients
The Ancients produced color-filled landscapes and evocative, gothic engravings and etchings. Inspired by William Blake, their work has an almost psychedelic richness and intensity which has appealed to generations of artists and art lovers. However, with the exception of their leader Samuel Palmer, they remain more obscure than the artists they influenced, notably the Pre-Raphaelites and Romantic modernist painters such as Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and John Piper.
