Provenance:
- Private collection to 2009

Exhibited:
-The Brotherhood of Ruralists and The Pre-Raphaelites, Leicester Galleries, 2005

Nicolas Usherwood describes how Ann Arnold paints scenes that are very much part of her daily life, but seen at a particular and intense moment.(1) A member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, the spirituality of the English landscape is perhaps the most important element within Ann Arnold’s work.

Ann Arnold was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the daughter of naval architect Edmund Telfer. She studied at Epsom School of Art from 1956-9 and began her career as an art therapist, becoming a founder member of the Association of Art Therapists. In 1961, she married fellow artist Graham Arnold. The couple moved to Ashington in Sussex, where they lived until 1974. They currently live in Shropshire, where they moved back in 1986. She was elected academician at the newly formed South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in 2000.

(1) Christopher Martin, The Ruralists, Academy Editions, London, 1991, page 91

In 1975, Sir Peter Blake, Graham and Annie Ovenden, Graham and Ann Arnold, together with David Inshaw and Jann Haworth set out to cultivate a new Romanticism, abandoning London for the West Country. Their paintings are spiritual celebrations of the landscape that uphold the great tradition of visionary painting in Britain exemplified by JMW Turner, Samuel Palmer, Madox Brown and Paul Nash.

The Ruralists' retreat to the West Country was a cathartic retreat which mirrored the romantic dream of their Pre-Raphaelite fore-fathers. Each group had sought solace and inspiration from an unspoilt time or place. Each held within their hearts Ruskin's plea to young artists in the close of Modern Painters: go to Nature… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing. The traditions they idolised were romantic and mystical, with strong literary associations. The Brotherhood of Ruralists instinctively acknowledged the common ethos between their fellowship and that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Both groups were seven young artists, spiritually bound by shared ideals and dreams which they had found themselves unable to cultivate in a climate of rigid academic institution and banal criticism.

In 1976, the Ruralists' inaugural exhibition was held at the Royal Academy, where a century before Dante Gabriel Rossetti had first laid eyes on Holman Hunt's Eve of St. Agnes: the spark that led to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the Ruralist exhibition, Graham Ovenden showed his Portrait of Peter and Juliette Blake, a labour of love and his homage to the Ruralists' vision. Behind the sitters, beyond the brick wall can be glimpsed the magical sweeping hills and fresh spring skies of their 'mystic arcadia'. Peter's daughter, Juliette, personifies the 'girl-child', which Graham describes as a part of nature, an organic part of nature, and therefore has the same validity as a growing tree.(1) The Ruralists, like the Pre-Raphaelites, placed as much importance upon their figurative work and portraiture as on their studies directly from nature. Crucially, Graham Ovenden explains of his figurative paintings, the portrait is the living human organism within it. The environment is only very secondary to the situation.(3)

The Ruralists' next groundbreaking exhibition, in 1980, was titled Ophelia(4), a favourite theme shared with the Pre-Raphaelites. The following year the Brotherhood of Ruralists presented a major groundbreaking exhibition which was supported by the Arts Council and travelled to Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow and London. In 1983, the group worked on a project entitled The Definitive Nude, to compliment Peter Blake's retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

Within a few years of its formation, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood went from seven members to four. Just so with the Ruralists, when, between 1981 and 1984, Jann Haworth, Peter Blake and David Inshaw went their separate ways. The Ruralists reunited in 2003 to hold a magnificent and powerful retrospective, The Brotherhood of Ruralists: A Celebration of Three Decades, in Wales at the Machynlleth Museum of Modern Art (The Tabernacle). They also held another exhibition with the Leicester Galleries in 2004. Ann and Graham Arnold and Graham Ovenden and Annie Ovenden continue to live in the heart of the English countryside to glorify in the nuances of nature.

(1)Graham Ovenden in an interview with Sir Alastair Johnston on the 11th September 1999

(4)The exhibition travelled between which travelled between Cambridge and Bristol City Art Gallery

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