The spirit of place: Nine Neo-Romantic artists and their times

In the 1930s, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and John Piper—three little-known painters in England—began a movement in the world of art whose repercussions we can only now appreciate. The influence of the Neo-Romantics on the world of art is beyond doubt: Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, David Kossoff, and Frank Auerbach all owe their renown to the great tradition of oil painting nurtured by Nash, Sutherland, and Piper. Malcom Yorke argues that the Neo-Romantics themselves traced their inspiration to the English Romanticism of William Blake and Samuel Palmer.