The New English Art Club

by john ward
At its founding in 1886, the alternative title proposed for The New English Art Club was “The Society of Anglo-French Painters”, a title that clearly expresses the organization’s original inspiration. The young British painters who founded the group imitated progressive French Realist and Impressionist styles of painting, and painted the new subjects French painters had found in lives of people of the lower classes, in rural retreats and in modern city life. william bowyer.
Looking for an alternative system to that offered by the conservative Royal Academy of British Art, kate by paul hedley and below
they were also impressed by the new ways Parisian artists had found to exhibit outside of the traditional Salon. Accordingly they established their group as an organization where decisions about faircloughs skyscape
who could join or exhibit with the group were decided by majority vote, not by a tightly controlled jury favoring one particular style.

One hundred and twenty-five years later, The New English Art Club, established “by artists, for artists,” still thrives, and still embraces painters working in diverse styles and media. The art world and Club’s role within it, however, have changed completely. Rather than acting as a venue for the most avant-garde art movements, the New English Art Club now champions the figurative tradition, upholding, in one member’s words, “the value of direct observation coupled with inventiveness, painterliness and imagination.”