Ancients (art group)

Like Nazarenes and Barbus, they promoted the wearing of special revivalist costume, though only Palmer seems often to have worn it in practice; it seems to be shown in some portraits of Palmer by Richmond such as the bust-length miniature and chalk drawing (1829, both National Portrait Gallery), which shows a round-necked pleated smock under a coat with a loose untidy collar and lapels, combined with somewhat Christ-like long hair and a beard.

[3] Unlike Blake they were mostly High Tory in politics, but equally distrustful of the modern mercantile society booming around them, and looked back to an idealized ruralist past.

Christiana Payne, in the Grove Dictionary of Art, states, "Their subject-matter was drawn from the Bible, or from a vision of a golden age of pastoral innocence and abundance that had both Christian and Vergilian overtones.

[8] Both the Nazarene Brotherhood and the Barbus were able to attempt communal living in abandoned monasteries outside Rome and Paris respectively, but these convenient possibilities on the continent in the Napoleonic period were not available in the London of the 1820s, so Palmer encouraged long-term stays at his house in Shoreham or elsewhere in the village.

Most members had commitments of work or family in London that meant their visits were of weeks if not days, and only William Palmer and Welby Sherman seem to have stayed longer.

In a letter to Palmer years later he wrote that "I ought to remember that I was not one of the monthly-meeting elite— when at the Platonic feast of reason and soul only real Greeks from Hackney and Lisson Grove were admitted".

He knew Charles (Karl) Aders, a German businessman living in London who had an important collection of early Northern paintings, including a copy of the Ghent Altarpiece, which Linnell enabled the group to visit.