Cranbrook Colony of Artists

The Colony was established c. 1854 and was disbanded c. 1900. It was an informal community of artists associated with the eponymous Kentish Town, where several artists passed their summers painting genre scenes arguably inspired by Dutch and Flemish masters working in the seventeenth century. As a group, in spite of many talents, the Colony never made a contemporaneous impression on the Victorian public perhaps due to the refusal to accept scenes of everyday life as serious subject matter.

The main protagonists of the group comprised founder Frederick Daniel Hardy, his brother George Hardy, John Callcott Horsley, Thomas Webster, (1800-1886), George Bernard O'Neil, Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844–1904) and George Henry Boughton.