The Clique (art group)

The Clique was a short-lived group of English artists active during the late 1830s, united by their dissatisfaction with the “stuffy traditionalism” of the Royal Academy, where they had met as students. Its principal members included Richard Dadd
English painter of the Victorian era , noted for his depiction of fairies and other supernatural subjects. Most were completed while he was an inmate of Bedlam and Broadmoor lunatic asylums., Augustus Egg, Alfred Elmore, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O’Neil, John Phillip and Edward Matthew Ward.^[1]

The Clique has been described as “the first group of British artists to combine for greater strength and to announce that the great backward-looking tradition of the Academy was not relevant to the requirements of contemporary art”.^[2] The group held weekly meetings at which a subject was chosen and each member made a monochrome sketch, from which the best sketch of the evening was chosen by a disinterested guest,^[3] over some beer and cheese.^[4]

In 1841 members of the Clique attempted to set up an exhibiting society for young artists, in opposition to the Royal Academy, and in the following year the Painters’ Etching Society, but without much success. Unlike the later Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodGroup of English artists formed in 1848 to counter what they saw as the corrupting influence of the late-Renaissance painter Raphael., members of the Clique shared no common aesthetic or stylistic ideals.^[4]

Dadd’s incarceration in 1843, after murdering his father, essentially brought the association to a close.^[4]