he Idyllic School was one of the major art movements in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. This circle of loosely defined artists, formed around Frederick Walker in particular, was active since the 1860s and was certainly recognized as a distinct group early on by contemporary critics. The Saturday Review, for instance, as early as 1872 labelled them the "school of the future" (534). The formal term "Idyllist" for the group was not coined, however, until 1895 on the occasion of an exhibition of paintings, prints and drawings by George Heming Mason, George John Pinwell, and John William North held at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham. Walker and Mason were generally held to be the founders and leaders of this group, which in addition to Pinwell and North, also principally included Robert Walker Macbeth and Cecil Gordon Lawson. The Times acknowledged who the leaders of this school were In 1869. When discussing the work of J. W. North the reviewer noted: "He belongs, in a word, to that small but distinguished family of English artists of which Walker and Mason are the heads." 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" (4). Other artists who have occasionally been included within this circle include William Small, the brothers Charles and Townley Green, Arthur Boyd Houghton, and Hubert von Herkomer. The origin of the term "Idyllist" may stretch back to the publication of a reprinted anthology of illustrations from The Quiver entitled Idyllic Pictures that first appeared in 1867.
Donato Esposito, Paul Goldman, and Christopher Newall have all pointed out the debt that many of these artists works owe to their early work as commercial illustrators in black and white for books and periodicals. Many of the principal artists in the group had first met when articled to, or working for, the master wood-engraver Josiah Wood Whymper. These included Walker, Pinwell, North, Houghton, and the Green brothers. Many had also worked together doing illustrations for the periodical The Graphic which had started publication in 1869. Lawson and Macbeth, for instance, were introduced to Walker, Pinwell, and North through their illustrative work for The Graphic. The Idyllists contributed illustrations to many of the leading periodicals of the time including Once a Week, Good Words, The Cornhill Magazine, The Argosy, and The Quiver. Some of the most memorable illustrations by the group are to be found in books such as A Round of Days published in 1866 and Wayside Posies: Original Poems of the Country Life published in 1867. As Esposito has pointed out: "The illustrations produced by the Idyllists proved to be highly influential, reaching a wider audience than their later exhibited watercolours and paintings, and were issued in great numbers. These illustrations also had an immediate impact on their contemporaries" (28). Their illustrations were admired, not only by British artists, but also by foreign artists including Vincent van Gogh who had lived in London between 1873-75.
Goldman, when discussing the Idyllists as illustrators, pointed out their differences from Pre-Raphaelite illustrators:
As the number of Pre-Raphaelite designs declined, and their contributors became ever more desultory, so another loose grouping of artists arose to take their place. Known as the Idyllic School these practitioners, in general, possessed a more pragmatic approach to the art of illustration, and several realized that the genre was the one to which their talents were best suited, and indeed saw it as a career. They were interested in Pre-Raphaelite ideas, and had imbibed some of them, but they also made subtle changes in emphasis which on occasion led them close to the sentimental and even the banal…Although it should be stressed that "Idyllic" is used for convenience rather than strict accuracy, it seems to crystallize several characteristics which these artists shared. They were less interested in a 'remote past', a dreamy, medieval world peopled by knights, swooning mistresses and tales of legend far from reality or everyday life which the Pre-Raphaelites perfected. Instead they created scenes which were more earthbound but, at their best, were no less poetic or intense. They often depicted a harmonious rural life with decent, but poor people, apparently leading simple, noble existences far from urban squalor. In their own way, although they concentrated more on contemporary mores, their treatment of them was as unrealistic and imagined as anything the Pre-Raphaelites ever created. [115]
The Idyllists work as black and white illustrations definitely had a lasting influence on their later work in oils and watercolours. Esposito clearly recognized this: "Clarity of narrative, legibility of composition, love of telling detail, thorough and speedy draughtsmanship learned from their time under Whymper, combined with a sympathy for the impoverished classes, characterised their work throughout their careers" (13). Newell has commented:
The formative experience of designing illustrative plates for books or magazines had a direct bearing on the aesthetic preoccupations of a younger generation of artist. The images that they drew, and which were transferred into black and white wood-block engravings, were composed in direct and legible forms which generally filled the overall picture space. To some extent these considerations influenced the watercolour subjects of the illustrators, which in any case were often worked-up versions of subjects originally treated as black and white illustrations. A painted view was no longer supposed to correspond minutely to the subject under scrutiny, and realism was not accepted as an absolute standard…The Idyllists painted figurative subjects in domestic or landscape settings. Walker and North favoured the thematic treatment of scenes from contemporary life. Pinwell retrained the practice of giving imaginative form to historical or literary texts. None of the Idyllists painted pure landscapes; North's landscapes without figures…derive from his later years after Walker and Pinwell had died. They all occasionally painted in oil, but their most intimate and characterful works were watercolours, and these represent the last great achievement of the Victorian tradition of bodycolour technique. The Idyllists were concerned with the union of figures with their immediate surroundings, rather than with the material analysis of the physical world attempted by the Pre-Raphaelites. The view that was offered of landscape remained restricted; human activities were observed within a confined foreground and at close range"
(Newall, Victorian Watercolours, 83). The idyllists early on especially frequently reworked their designs for illustration into finished oil paintings or watercolours although they "refined and reimagined the composition with the introduction of colour. [Esposito, Idyllists, 18]Newall felt the Idyllists were one of the innovators in late Victorian art:
"Certain characteristics may, however, be regarded as quintessential attributes of late Victorian painting. The detachment and objectivity with which Pre-Raphaelite watercolourists viewed the landscape gave way to a feeling of greater involvement with the subject. It was no longer sufficient for a painter to provide literal information about the physical world. Watercolourists sought to convey their emotional response to the landscape, the feelings of sentiment that reveal the painter's involvement with the scenery represented. The means adopted to achieve this end were many and various, from the evocation of the poetic mood of landscape observed at dusk to the description of a labourer's strenuous experience of his surroundings while hedge cutting or mowing. The concept of "truth in nature" was superseded in a way that Ruskin himself had anticipated. Watercolourists of the late Victorian period sought to reveal the landscape in terms of human experience, and the products of their art were judged accordingly to the authenticity and honesty of that representation. Among the artist who were seen as inheritors of the technical objectives of the Pre-Raphaelites but who at the same time sought to bring sentiment into landscape painting were many who had previously depended for their livelihood on the engraving trade…The experience of designing illustrations influenced the subsequent landscape painting of these artists. They had been encouraged to think in terms of an unfolding narrative and to devise means by which a static image would illuminate a text. Whereas the landscape painters in the pre-Raphaelite Circle – John Brett, J. W. Inchbold, Thomas Seddon, A. W. Hunt – generally conveyed no more than a hint of story or of esoteric literary or historical allusion in their landscape watercolours, the works of most painters who had trained as illustrators lent themselves to narrative interpretations or were carefully orchestrated to highlight picturesque motifs…Walker's figures are central to his purpose in a way that the more decorative and sentimental figures of Birket Foster seldom are. Walker wanted his audience to identify with those figures and through them understand and appreciate the reality of the countryside…He tried to endow his figures with a casualness that conveyed the figures' indifference to, or unawareness of, the artist's intrusion on the scene. Equally, the arrangement of pictorial elements was not to appear contrived or too carefully considered but should convey something of the haphazard quality of the real world. Composition was, according to Walker, "the art of preserving the accidental look" [Newall, Victorian Landscape, 54-55]
Newall once again pointed out the importance of this group's early involvement with illustration to their later works:
Whereas Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters were committed as a matter of principle to a uniform clarity and precision of detail across the surface of their compositions, the illustrators often achieved apparently analogous effects that simply reflected the practical exigencies of wood engraving. On the one hand, the illustrator was restricted to a small pictorial area into which all the elements of the composition must be compacted, and on the other the patterns of line making up these forms had to be spread across the entire space to achieve maximum legibility. Large areas of sky, for example, were not easily conveyed in line, whereas the representation of the rectilinear shapes of buildings, or the indented horizon of hill country were well suited to engraving. Many illustrators, who turned to watercolours, continued to look for subjects in which they could spread a uniform pattern over the entire expense of the sheet. [Newall, Victorian Landscape, 55]
Esposito has characterised the goals of the Idyllic School:
The Idyllists sought the perfection of the world around them, a distillation of all that was beautiful from the seemingly ordinary and mundane. Simple narratives dominated their subject matter, and were usually fused with a powerful sense of the emotive potential of color. The Idyllists formed an important bridge in British art between the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1850s and the Neo-Romantics of the 1920s and 1930s. They sought to reinvigorate artistic practice away from strong narratives, and to anchor their art in lived experience. Britain at this time was in a period of great social and political transformation. The rapid growth of urban centres and industrialization led to widespread inequality and urban poverty. The Idyllists spoke to this lost "innocence" and its lasting impact on both rural and urban communities. Thus themes of hardship and dispossession were taken up and explored. [7]
Later as the Idyllists became more independent of illustration they exhibited their oil paintings and watercolours in London at the Royal Academy, the Dudley Gallery, the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (Old Water-Colour Society), and the Grosvenor Gallery. A number of the group achieved status as academicians. Mason was elected A.R.A. in 1868. Walker was elected A.R.W.S. in 1864, R.W.S. in 1866, and A.R.A. in 1871. Pinwell was elected A.R.W.S. in 1869 and R.W.S. in 1870. North was made A.R.W.S. in 1871, R.W.S. in 1883, and A.R.A. in 1893. Houghton was elected A.R.W.S. in 1871. Macbeth was elected A.R.W.S. in 1871, R.W.S. in 1903, A.R.A. in 1883, and R.A. in 1903. The premature death of many of the leading exponents of the Idyllic School, however, limited the impact of this group somewhat. Mason died in 1872 and Walker, Pinwell, and Houghton in 1875. To lose so many of its leading members within such a short period of time was obviously a crushing blow to the movement as a whole.
Bibliography
A Catalogue of Pictures and Sketches by George Mason, A.R.A., and George John Pinwell, A.R.W.S., Exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, March 1895, 8.
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017.
"Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Times (June 18, 1869,) 4.
Goldman, Paul. "The Idyllic School." Chapter 3 in Victorian Illustration. Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1996, 115-208.
Newall, Christopher. " The Idyllists and Other Illustrators." Chapter 6 in Victorian Watercolours. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1987, 83-102.
Newall, Christopher. "Innovation and Conservation in the Later Victorian Period." Chapter 4 in Wilcox, Scott and Christopher Newall. ">Victorian Landscape Watercolours. New York: Hudson Hills Press Inc., 1992, 53-62.
"The Society of Painters in Water-Colours." The Times (May 5, 1871): 4.
"The Water-Colour Exhibitions." The Saturday Review XXXIII (April 27, 1872): 533-34.
Created 28 April 2023