Idyllic School Artist. The Idyllic school was a 19th-century art movement of British artists, both painters and illustrators, whose depictions of rural landscapes combined elements of social realism and idealism. Van Gogh's well-known admiration for the group was shown in letters to his brother Theo, and in his collection of their work extracted from contemporary British newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News and The Graphic. Nowadays the Idyllist school is seen as one of the earliest manifestation of the social realism movement in art.