According to Brandon Taylor, the early public exhibitions of art organised in London in the 1760s aimed to present 'Britishness' or 'Englishness' in order to 'define a set of values for visual culture' and that 'the terms were often interchangeable' ( Taylor, Art For The Nation, p.1). This can still be identified in Ruskin 's writings some sixty years later. For example in 1859, he refers to The Society of British Artists (along with the New Water-Colour Society) as one of 'two important societies of English Artists' ( Works, 14.241). (see also the English School). This lack of any distinction beween 'English Art' and 'British Art' was also continued by Cook and Wedderburn who refer to the late series of Oxford lectures entitled The Art of England (1884), as 'the Oxford lectures on contemporary British artists' ( Works, 14.xix). In the mid twentieth-century the concept of 'Englishness' was explored in Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (1956). This identified such characteristics as naturalism and conservatism, but according to Wolff (2000), 'the 'Englishness' of visual art is only now being taken as a topic of analysis' ( Wolff, The 'Jewish mark' in English painting, p. 180). Indeed a current view suggests that: 'To write 'British' when we mean 'English' is a form of cultural imperialism' ( Corbett and Perry, English art 1860-1914, p.213).