The Ancients

The Ancients were a circle of English visionary artists that formed in the 1820s around the poet and artist William Blake in the last years of his life, before his death in 1827. Young followers, among them Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond, reverently called Blake "the Divine One" and drew inspiration from his spiritual, anti-materialist outlook and his illustrations to Virgil. The group's name reflected their conviction that the ancient past was artistically and spiritually superior to their own age of industrialisation. The centre of their activity was the village of Shoreham in Kent, which they called the "Valley of Vision": there Palmer created his most poetic landscapes, saturated with mystical light and filled with the moon, ripening cornfields, and shepherds. The work of the Ancients combined Romantic spirituality with close observation of nature and later influenced English landscape painting and the revival of interest in Blake.