ABSTRACT
Assertions of a surviving and innately English visionary tradition linking back through the Pre-Raphaelites – also conscious distorters of space – to Samuel Palmer and to Blake were especially significant. The period from 1910 to the outbreak of war has frequently been described in terms of artistic and cultural synchronicity, a sustained revolt against standards of civilized good taste, conservatism and tradition. While connections between both Gauguin's Tahitian idylls and Spencer's Cookham paintings have been drawn, the artist himself and numerous supporters favoured links with the symbolic, semi-religious pastorals of Samuel Palmer. A consequence of this taste for the unusual, the exotic, the mysterious, the pure and the unsullied was that actual rural life and its history was subordinate to artists' and their public's own idealized perceptions of a secure, harmonious order set in some distant past or special place.
