Page 35 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Samuel Palmer: Harvest Moon 1833
“John Linnell (1792–1882) not only supported William Blake in his later years, but also introduced promising young artists to him, including several who went on to form the Ancients, a group with aims similar to those of the later Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”...”Several show common themes and style with Palmer and the Ancients, such as this rich golden pastoral, The Sheep Drive (1863).” (Eclectic Light co https://eclecticlight.co/2017/01/08/tygers-eye-from-william-blake-to-the-ancients-and-moderns/
My absorption with Blake and the Ancients, is because their work was the first in modern times to begin to tackle issues of what we now call ‘environmentalism’ - their shared passion in the English countryside (with Linnell it was the area around Shoreham in Kent) as I have said (above), expressed their sense of the fragility of a way of life and an agriculture already beginning to change (rick-burning by agricultural workers in the 1830s).
Despite efforts by individuals like William Morris, Walt Whitman, Ernst Haeckel (‘ecology’ 1886), Arthur Tansley (British Ecological Society 1913) and Vladimir Varnadsky (‘biosphere’1926), it wasn’t until the late 1960s - 130 years later - that we began to understand the danger of rampant capitalism mutating into consumerism - and its real impact on our environment. I try to map in this book, the most important of the media/art artefacts that marked this dawning realisation...