Brotherhood of Ruralists

The Brotherhood of Ruralists is a British art group founded in 1975 in Wellow, Somerset, to paint nature. Their work is figurative with a strong adherence to 'traditional' skills. Painting in oil and watercolour predominate, with mixed media assemblage, printmaking, ink and pencil drawing also being common. It has been described as "a kind of late twentieth-century reinvention of William Morris's arcadian craft guilds."

The group was founded when Peter Blake and his then wife Jann Haworth moved to Wellow, having obtained permission to convert the disused Wellow railway station into a house. Other founding members were David Inshaw and two other couples: Ann Arnold and Graham Arnold, and Annie Ovenden and Graham Ovenden. The name "Brotherhood of Ruralists" was suggested by author Laurie Lee, a supporter of the group. Some members were never happy with "brotherhood", since it implied an all-male membership.

According to Peter Blake, it was formed,

in opposition to the scholarly nature of contemporary art which believed that paintings were only really valid if they addressed social questions. Our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting. We admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, the English landscape and the Pre-Raphaelites.

The group define a "ruralist" as "someone who is from the city who moves to the country". The Brotherhood came to wide public attention following a BBC TV documentary, Summer with the Brotherhood, which was broadcast in 1977.

Unlike the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group did not promote (nor adhere to) a manifesto. Each artist's own techniques and work remains diverse with a common evocation of a mystical response to the observance of nature and rural life. Some of their output is intensely personal and sometimes surrealist in arrangement. Nevertheless, they expressed a common dissatisfaction with abstraction and radical avant-gardism in art. Ovenden expressed distaste for the abstract New York School, which he described as "at best decorative and at worst little different from ... neurotic daubings."

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