Idyllic school

The Idyllic school (also known as the Idyllists) was a loose and informal group of British artists, not quite an art movement, in the later 19th-century, from about the early 1860s to the 1870s. Watercolour was typically their main medium, though several also painted in oils, and several also worked as illustrators in line drawings, which had an important bearing on their styles; their paintings were also often reproduced as prints.[1]

Their subjects usually included figures, more prominently than in traditional British watercolour landscape painting, and are generally set in relatively restricted spaces, whether outside or in interiors. The wide panoramic views typical of many Victorian watercolourists of the day are rarely seen; many outdoor subjects are set in a garden with high walls; this can be seen as a reflection of their training as illustrators. They adopted some of the precision and intense concentration on detail of the Pre-Raphaelites, but avoided their medieval settings and reliance on subjects from literature, with some exceptions, especially in works by George John Pinwell. Most of their pictures had contemporary settings in terms of costume, though buildings tended to be old and unpretentiously picturesque. They often have a balance between social realism and idealism, and a narrative interest in what the figures are doing or thinking, which arises purely from the painting rather than any source in literature.[2]

The name Idyllists was only given to them in the 1890s by critics, after the group had mostly moved on to other styles, or died:[3] by 1875 Mason, Walker, Pinwell, and Houghton had all died.[4] The name seems to come from the book Idyllic Pictures (1867), an anthology of illustrations from The Quiver, each accompanied by a poem, many of which were published for the first time. However, in 1871 a critic wrote "Mr. North and Mr. Macbeth both belong to the school of which in this country Mason and F. Walker are the chiefs, and Mr. Pinwell the lieutenant – the school which aims at making pictorial idylls out of the unpromising materials of lowly life in town and country".[5] The noun form "Idyllism" is very rarely found. The term, in whatever form, has not been found a necessary one by some historians; the standard histories of English watercolours by Martin Hardie and Graham Reynolds do not use it at all, despite discussing the principal figures. But recent books include it in their titles.[6]

Van Gogh's well-known admiration for the group was shown in letters to his brother Theo, and in his collection of their work cut from contemporary British newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic.[7]

List of Idyllist artists

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Newall, 83
  2. ^ Newall, 83-92; Lanigan
  3. ^ Newall, 83; Lanigan
  4. ^ Lanigan
  5. ^ Lanigan
  6. ^ See further reading
  7. ^ Lanigan

References

  • Lanigan, Dennis T., "The Idyllic School", "The Victorian Web"
  • Newall, Christopher, Victorian Watercolours, 1987, Phaidon Press, ISBN 0714828114

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.
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