Edward Calvert
The Chamber Idyll
(1831)
Tate
George Richmond
Christ and the Woman of Samaria
(1828)
Tate
The Ancients was the name the group gave to themselves. The implication of the name was that as the Industrial Revolution burgeoned they were looking back to a better age.
Their leader was Samuel Palmer and the other chief figures were Edward Calvert and George Richmond. For a few years between 1826 and 1834 they gathered in the idyllic Kent village of Shoreham where Palmer owned a house. Their work expressed a mystical vision of nature, in Palmer’s case deeply Christian, in Calvert’s tinged with pagan delight in the erotic.