Ann Arnold
Member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists whose paintings captured a 1970s country idyll
ANN ARNOLD, who has died aged 79, was a painter and a founding member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a movement formed by several London artists who retreated to the West Country during the mid-1970s to paint the English landscape. The Brotherhood had no specific manifesto but was a meeting of minds inspired by William Morris’s craft guilds and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Laurie Lee, a champion of their bucolic vision, suggested the name.
Included in their number were Peter Blake and his wife at the time Jann Haworth, Graham and Ann Arnold, David Inshaw and Graham and Annie Ovenden. Their joint venture began in 1975 when Blake and Haworth moved to Wellow, a few miles south of Bath, and converted a derelict railway station into a house. Others set up nearby.
The Arnolds settled in Devizes where they created a studio. Ann Arnold explained that the move “helped to heal the sore of loneliness and isolation of the individual without feeling overwhelmed by society at large”. Her painting style, like that of her fellow brothers, was out of sympathy with the times. Eschewing the prevailing taste for abstraction and social commentary, she focused on figurative and landscape works often with spiritual and mystical elements such as lone farmers, herons and horses. Her painting The Brotherhood of Ruralists at Coombe (1977) depicts the members gathered together in an orchard, illustrating her love of community.
“For Ann Arnold these feelings have always become apparent in her painting’s intense focus on people and their presence in the landscape and in the relationship between the rhythms and events of their lives,” wrote Nicholas Usherwood, author of
The Brotherhood of Ruralists. He noted her “soft, dense, feather-like brushstroke and keening, highpitched colour”. Her landscapes were shot through with turquoise, mauve and apple green.
At the Brotherhood’s inaugural exhibition in 1976 at the Royal Academy the reception was initially frosty. They were dismissed as a bunch of “flower power” hippies. By the mid-1980s the idyll was over as the better-known fellows – Blake, Hawarth and Inshaw – left the region. Ann Arnold continued to show her work in the area; anywhere, she noted, “from a barn to a major gallery”.
She was born Ann Telfer on January 4 1936 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her father, Edmund Telfer, was a naval architect.
Ann studied at Epsom School of Art (1956-59). She began her career as an art therapist and was a founder member of the Association of Art Therapists. It was at Epsom that she met the artist and teacher Graham Arnold, later recalling that she had been immediately smitten by him when she saw him cycling past her. He, in turn, thought she was “a very innocent country girl”. They married in 1961.
The couple were well matched; Ann Arnold’s light jolly presence was a counterpoint to what one writer described as her husband’s “Gothic” qualities. After their marriage the couple moved to Ashington in Sussex, where they lived until the mid-1970s before relocating to Wiltshire.
The Ruralists acknowledged that their work harked back to a lost, idealised artistic tradition (and they were maligned by some critics as a result). Summing up their approach, Peter Blake said: “Our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting. We admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket.”
The Ruralists followed up their 1976 exhibition at the RA with a show on the theme of Ophelia and, in 1981, staged a large travelling exhibition supported by the Arts Council which took their works to Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow and London. In 1983 they supplemented the Peter Blake retrospective at the Tate with the group presentation The Definitive
Nude, after which the Brotherhood became much reduced in number.
The remaining Ruralists continued to exhibit regularly, particularly in the West Country. Last year the Catto Gallery in Hampstead presented a selection of new work by both of the Arnolds and Annie Ovenden. In later life Ann Arnold and her husband lived in Shropshire and often travelled to France to research the Celts.
In 2000, she was elected as an academician of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts.
A major retrospective of the Ruralists’ work was held at the Tabernacle, Machynlleth (a former Wesleyan chapel converted into an arts centre), in 2003, in which all the members exhibited. “My ‘rural’ preference is undoubtedly Ann Arnold, whose ability to imbue country landscapes with her own rich imagination is direct and unsurpassed,” enthused Roderic Dunnett in The Spectator, adding that she was “the epitome of what you’d expect a Ruralist to be, without the slightest hint of the kitsch sentimentality that might attend it”.
She is survived by her husband.