Their subjects usually included figures, more prominently than in traditional British watercolour
landscape painting, and are generally set in relatively restricted spaces, whether outside or in interiors. The wide panoramic views typical of many Victorian watercolourists of the day are rarely seen; many outdoor subjects are set in a garden with high walls; this can be seen as a reflection of their training as illustrators. West, North and Pinwell all met when training with the leading
wood engraving artist
Josiah Wood Whymper, and then later worked for the large firm
The Brothers Dalziel. This usually involved producing monochrome drawings in ink, to be cut as
wood engraving blocks by specialist cutters. They adopted some of the precision and intense concentration on detail of the
Pre-Raphaelites, but avoided their medieval settings, very strong colours, and reliance on subjects from literature; Pinwell was an exception to this last. Most of their pictures had contemporary settings in terms of costume, though buildings tended to be old and unpretentiously picturesque. They often have a balance between
social realism and idealism, and a narrative interest in what the figures are doing or thinking, which arises purely from the painting rather than any source in literature. The members who survived to work in later decades, some into the next century, developed in various ways, including these directions. ,
An Old Bowling Green (Halsway Manor, Somerset), 1865, watercolour,
British Museum Andrew Wilton saw the group as creating "a new breed of work in which the expresssive burden is shared more evenly between figures and background, and in which a deliberately 'psychological' atmosphere is aimed at". He says that they often concentrate on concatenations of intensely observed detail rendered in colours that maintain a consistent tonality over the whole surface of the work. This, combined with their use of a thick, rather muddy bodycolour, gives rise to a flat dense atmospheric effect ...a quiet, flat, tonality ... distinctly of its time [which] creates a new aesthetic based on the juxtaposition of equal tones in a sort of twilight ... in which human drama may occur. , ''A Seat in
St James's Park'', 1869, watercolour and bodycolour, NSW Art Gallery, 41.9 x 60.2 cm In this respect the group can be seen as looking forward to "the lush but subdued colour schemes of the
Aesthetic Movement" and beyond, while also representing an early manifestation of the
social realism movement in art. The group avoided the more idealized and sentimental treatment of (mostly) rural and female figure subjects aleady developing in the hands of
Myles Birket Foster RWS, 1825 – 1899, who was already well-established by the 1860s, and later continued by
Helen Allingham RWS, 1848 – 1926, both like the Idyllists originally illustrators who then turned to watercolour. However these both knew West and respectively influenced, helped and were helped by him. They also treated social issues, and themes such as human mortality, but in a less stark and despairing fashion than social realist artists, who were already prominent before the 1860s, both in printed illustrations and in oils, but less so in watercolour.
The Mitherless Bairn (1855) by the Scottish painter
Thomas Faed was a great success at the
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, one of a number of pictures on the theme of infidelity and unmarried mothers. The three paintings in
Past and Present (1858) by
Augustus Egg,
Rossetti's
Found (begun 1854) and
GF Watts's
Found Drowned (1858) are other examples. Watson summarizes the most common subjects as "fallen woman, the death of a child or breadwinner, hard work and emigration or the pathos of old age". Those in the group who continued to work as illustrators reached a considerably wider audience than the public attending exhibitions, which were mainly in London, although the several watercolour shows organized by the societies were in this period well-attended and widely reviewed in the press.
Van Gogh's well-known admiration for the group was shown in letters to his brother Theo, and in his collection of their work cut from contemporary British newspapers, such as the
Illustrated London News and
The Graphic. ==Names==