Graham Ovenden is the foremost living painter of the British landscape, in the traditional and visionary sense. Although a love of the landscape runs deep within British art and underlies twentieth century British abstract painting, there have only existed a few artists whose sense of spirituality within the countryside emerges with true vision in their work.

Abandoning London in 1975 for the West Country, Graham Ovenden co-founded a group of artists whose aim was to cultivate a new Romanticism. Openly acknowledging the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, more important, Samuel Palmer and ‘The Ancients’, they called themselves ‘The Brotherhood of Ruralists’. Alongside Graham Ovenden and his wife Annie were Sir Peter Blake, Graham Arnold, Ann Arnold, David Inshaw and Jann Haworth.

Graham Ovenden’s magical paintings of the countryside around his neo-gothic house on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall are mystical celebrations of nature. Each one is painted with tiny brushes in painstaking glazes, layer upon layer, in true Pre-Raphaelite technique. Graham is a fervent admirer of Ruskin and his famous dictum from the close of the first volume of Modern Painters: Go to Nature … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing. Though inspired by the natural world he does not follow Ruskin literally, for it is perhaps William Michael Rossetti’s description of Pre-Raphaelite principles that has become his true guide:

To have genuine ideas to express, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them, to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.