Neo-Romanticism

During the 1920’s young British artists began to re-discover the work of their Romantic antecedents. With the outbreak of World War II, Britain's very survival was seriously threatened. In 1940 the government launched a scheme to record by drawing, painting and by print a record the changing face of the towns and villages across the country. What was produced, intentionally or otherwise was a veneration of the romantic past and the cultivation of a supernatural, idealistic or even prophetic sense of the British landscape together with a yearning for beauty and innocence, that in all conveyed an arcadian existence.

This project became known as ‘Recording Britain’ and employed very many fine young artists of the period. Under the rather blurred label of ‘Neo-Romanticism’ they included Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, F.L. Griggs, Leslie Hurry, David Jones, John Minton, Paul Nash, John Piper, Ceri Richards, Graham Sutherland and Robin Tanner. In all more than 1500 pictures mainly in watercolours that have over the years been widely exhibited and form part of national collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

It became an isolated movement that was to waver with the advent of American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art of the 1950’s and 1960’s. A small revival began with Peter Blake and the brief movement of the Brotherhood of Ruralists in the late 1970’s. The subsequent resurgence of figurative painting, and a general reassessment of man's relationship with his natural environment, encouraged a revival of interest in Romanticism and, with the commencement of the new millennium, British art saw a revival of the Neo-Romantic spirit, with many of the older artist’s finding even greater favour with dealers and collectors in addition to newer names.