Bristol school

The Bristol School was an informal grouping of artists associated with the city of Bristol in the west of England in the early 1800s who drew inspiration from the local landscape, particularly the River Avon and the picturesque Avon Gorge. Unlike academic associations, it was more a fellowship of amateur and professional artists who went out together on sketching excursions to scenic spots around Bristol and held evening sketching meetings to exchange ideas. The leading figure of the circle was the Irish-born painter Francis Danby, whose poetic, often twilit and moonlit landscapes set the mood for the whole group; alongside him worked Edward Villiers Rippingille, Samuel Jackson, and James Johnson. The Bristol School artists cultivated a Romantic attitude to nature, an attention to atmospheric effects of light and melancholy mood, drawing on the example of Claude Lorrain and early English landscape. Although the group never achieved national fame, it became an important centre of provincial Romantic landscape and left behind a distinctive regional tradition.