The rural idyll is a powerful force in the British national imagination. This highly original and vibrant study will examine how key moments in art history have shaped the concept of the idyll and how contemporary artists continue to access and often challenge this concept.

Verity Elson is curator at Compton Verney; Rosemary Shirley is an art historian who has written about topics as diverse as litter, motorways, folk customs and scrapbooks; Jeremy Buchardt is a historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century English rural society. Alice Carey is a curator with a particular interest in farms, who creates art and science collaborations and describes farming as “the umbilical cord of human-earth relations”; Nick Groom is an historian whose The Seasons (2013) was a Book of the Year in the Observer. Steven Parissien is Director of Compton Verney.