Group of British painters and engravers active in the 1820s and 1830s. Samuel Palmer, the central figure of the group, first referred to ‘the Ancients’ in a letter to George Richmond in May 1827. They were drawn together by their admiration for William Blake and for ‘the grand old men’—artists of the Renaissance, especially Dürer and Michelangelo—in preference to ‘the moderns’, the naturalistic landscape painters of the day. They met at Blake’s house in London, stayed with Palmer in Shoreham, Kent, and continued their association with monthly meetings in London in the 1830s. The work of Palmer, Richmond and Edward Calvert in the 1820s and early 1830s represents their aesthetic ideals most fully: it is generally small in scale and elaborately worked, employing archaic media and a primitive, linear style. Their subject-matter was drawn from the Bible, or from a vision of a golden age of pastoral innocence and abundance that had both Christian and Vergilian overtones.