Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, a group of British artists found themselves turning inward—toward the haunted countryside, ruins of war, and a tradition of visionary art rooted in British soil. They became known, not through any formal alliance, but through a shared sensibility that critics would later term Neo-Romanticism.
Coined by critic Raymond Mortimer in 1942, the label captured the emergence of a mood more than a movement—one shaped by the isolation of wartime, nostalgia for the pre-industrial past, and a resistance to the rationality of both realism and international abstraction.
Imagining a British Landscape
The core of the Neo-Romantic vision was the idea of the particular—a term championed by John Piper to describe the singular, the local, and the poetic. This stood in contrast to the universal claims of abstraction or the detachment of the Euston Road School's realism. Instead, artists like Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Paul Nash sought out emotionally charged landscapes, crumbling churches, twisted trees, and ancient paths steeped in memory.
Their inspirations came not from Paris or New York, but from Blake, Palmer, Turner, and Fuseli—nineteenth-century artists who had explored dream states, mythic terrains, and the darker folds of the imagination. Surrealism also lingered at the edges of Neo-Romantic work, evident in the sometimes uncanny, otherworldly quality of their forms.
War and a Wounded Land
The Second World War intensified this tendency. Bombed cities, darkened skies, and national uncertainty deepened the Neo-Romantic attachment to the idea of a threatened, fragile Britain. Artists like Piper and Sutherland were officially commissioned to document the home front, producing emotionally resonant images of ruin and resilience. Their works were not documentary so much as elegiac—imbued with atmosphere, absence, and a deep feeling for place.
From Reverie to Rejection
By the 1950s, however, the mood had shifted. The growing influence of American abstraction, the post-war push toward modernisation, and a younger generation’s desire to look outward meant that Neo-Romanticism fell swiftly out of fashion. Its poetic melancholy, its provincialism, even its visual lushness came to be seen by some as outdated or overly sentimental.
And yet, the best of Neo-Romantic work remains deeply affecting—attuned to memory, rooted in place, and rich with a kind of quiet defiance.
Neo-Romantics and the Borough Group: A Shared Terrain
Though David Bomberg and his students at the Borough Polytechnic were not associated with the Neo-Romantics, the two movements shared certain preoccupations—especially a sensitivity to place and a commitment to painting London in the aftermath of war. John Piper’s wartime images of ruined churches, broken masonry and spectral cityscapes resonate with the Borough Group’s own explorations of Blitzed London.
Bomberg himself had a complex relationship with Romanticism. While he rejected its mysticism, he believed passionately in the spiritual force of landscape and the expressive power of paint. Like Piper, he resisted the intellectualised detachment of abstraction and instead demanded from his students an emotional, embodied engagement with their subjects—what he called the spirit in the mass.
The Borough Group’s post-war paintings, like those of the Neo-Romantics, are also shaped by Britain’s broken terrain, but filtered through Bomberg’s intense, physical vision—a different kind of Romanticism, perhaps, forged not in reverie but in struggle.
Further Reading:
John Piper, British Romantic Artists, 1942
Exhibition: Romantic Moderns (Barbican, 2011)
Neo-Romantic Art: British Art in the Forties (Tate archive)