Cranbrook Colony

The Cranbrook Colony was a group of artists who settled in Cranbrook, Kent from 1853 onwards and were inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters. They have been referred to as 'genre' painters as they tended to paint scenes of the everyday life that they saw around them in the rural area of Kent where they lived, typically scenes of domestic life; cooking and washing, children playing and other family activities. The group started with the painter Frederick Daniel Hardy who liked the countryside around Cranbrook and settled there in 1853. He was joined there after four years by his mentor, Thomas Webster, their studio being an old house in the High Street, of which Hardy occupied the ground floor. The group evolved in a rather loose and informal manner. Other artists who soon joined Hardy and Webster were Frederick Hardy's brother George Hardy, John Callcott Horsley, and George Bernard O'Neill (who married Horsley's cousin Emma Callcott), with George Henry Boughton and Augustus Mulready frequently visiting.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Cranbrook Colony”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Cranbrook Colony is artist colony in Cranbrook, Kent, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶