The Idyllic school (also known as the Idyllists) was a 19th-century art movement of British artists—both painters and illustrators—whose depictions of rural landscapes combined elements of social realism and idealism. Van Gogh's well-known admiration for the group was shown in letters to his brother Theo, and in his collection of their work extracted from contemporary British newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic. Nowadays the Idyllist school is seen as one of the earliest manifestation of the social realism movement in art
List of idyllist artists
- John William North ARA RWS
- Frederick Walker ARA RWS
- George John Pinwell RWS
- Robert Walker Macbeth RA RWS
- George Hemming Mason ARA
- Arthur Boyd Houghton
- Hubert von Herkomer RA
- Richard Jefferies (writer)
See also
References
- Terry W. Strieter. Nineteenth-century European art: a topical dictionary (Greenwood, 1999), p.109.
- According to Oliver Tonks, idealism in art is an attempt "to realise visually something that, owing to nature's negligence, never existed, but might exist in a perfect world" (Scribner's Magazine, October 1912)
- R W Macbeth (Cambridge Book and Print Gallery).
- A fishmonger's shop by R W Macbeth.
Further reading
- Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustration: The Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians (Lund Humphries, 1996)
- Donato Esposito, Frederick Walker and the Idyllists (London: Lund Humphries, 2017)
- Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolours (Hudson Hills, 1992), p. 55.