Brotherhood of Ruralists

The Brotherhood of Ruralists is a British art group founded in 1975 in Wellow, Somerset, to paint nature.

Painting in oil and watercolour predominate, with mixed media assemblage, printmaking, ink and pencil drawing also being common.

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.

We admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, the English landscape and the Pre-Raphaelites.

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.

[3] Critic Tom Lubbock objected that "they didn't see that their imagination of mystical, deep, England had already been fully colonised by commercial imagery.