The New English Art Club

The New English Art Club (NEAC) is a distinguished artists' society that was founded in 1886 as an alternative to the Royal Academy. It emerged from a collective desire among young British artists to break away from the Academy's perceived preference for classical academic technique and style, and overly sentimental and moralistic subjects that had become popular with the generation following in the footsteps of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The group of artists who initially set up the NEAC shared artistic roots in French Impressionism but the organisation came to be associated with with a broader support for figurative painting based upon the study of nature. Against a backdrop of popular twentieth-century abstract and conceptual artistic movements, the NEAC has maintained a reputation for supporting sincere, skilful, nuanced and sensitive British art throughout the decades.