The spectator gazes into landscapes as intensely felt in their own way as the passionate canvases of Van Gogh. These little framed boxes, like theatrical sets, their cardboard-cut-out horizons thrown high by the footlights, their moons hanging like lanterns amid foliage unruffled by winds, present a hermetic realm that feels at once far removed from reality and yet, at the same time, full of fresh relevance.
‘A preference for the present as a matter of taste is a pretty sure sign of mediocrity,’ Palmer told his friend Stephens in 1875. He was not concerned with the merely current. That particular view of genius, he declared, was fit only for ‘dogs and cats, which are eminently remarkable for their sympathy with the present’. Rather, he believed along with Samuel Johnson that it is only that which ‘makes the past, the distant or the future predominate over the present’ which ‘advances us in the rank of thinking beings’. ‘The best poets and painters appeal to this faculty and instinct within us,’20 he declared.
Time has proved Palmer to be among that superlative number. This is not simply because his pictures of lost pastoral idylls showed British Modernists a possible way forwards or because, as several reviewers of the British Museum’s bicentenary exhibition suggested, his works can still find significance in a contemporary era which, sensing the threat of ecological catastrophe, finds a freshly relevant environmental message in his belief that humanity could live in harmony with nature. It is because Palmer discovered an entirely original way to show us our world anew. This is what lends his most-loved pictures their timeless appeal. We look at our landscapes through the lens of his eye. To see a line of trees silhouetted against the twilight, to watch a harvest moon rising over the fields, to gaze at the evening star shining above a steeple is to remember his images. His mystical visions are entwined with our living experience. His spiritual messages suffuse our surroundings. They deepen and enrich our perceptions, thus advancing us, as Johnson put it, in the rank of thinking beings. An artist cannot hope for any greater accomplishment.
If British tradition had ever encompassed the making of icons, they would not have been so different from Palmer’s tiny glowing pastorals. Condensed in the golden patches of his peaceful sepias, in the luminous landscapes of his Shoreham works, in the intricate densities of his tenebrous etchings, is a vision which expands the reaches of the human spirit. ‘The soul,’ as he always knew he would one day discover, is ‘larger than the whole material universe.’21
Portrait of Samuel Palmer by Charles West Cope, 1884.
Bibliography
Abbreviations Used in Notes
L Lister, Raymond (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Palmer, Vols 1 and 2 (Oxford, 1974)
L&L Palmer, A. H., The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer (London, 1892)
1824 Sketchbook Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824, edited with an introduction and commentary by Martin Butlin (London, 2005)
AHP A. H. Palmer’s unpublished notes, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Letters to Martin Hardie Correspondence between A. H. Palmer and Martin Hardie relating to Samuel Palmer, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Sources
Abley, Mark, The Parting Light: Selected Writings of Samuel Palmer (Manchester, 1985)
Ackroyd, Peter, Blake (London, 1999)
———London: The Biography (London, 2000)
Arts Council, Samuel Palmer and his Circle: The Shoreham Period (London, 1956)
Ayrton, Michael, British Drawings (London, 1946)
Baskin, Leonard, Blake and the Youthful Ancients (Northampton, Mass., 1965)
Bate, Jonathan, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000)
Bennett, Shelley M., ‘The Blake Followers in the Context of Contemporary English Art’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, Vol. 46 (1983)
Bentley, G. E. (ed.), Blake Records (Oxford, 1969)
Bindman, David, ‘Samuel Palmer’s “An Address to the Electors of West Kent”, 1832 Rediscovered’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, XIX (1985)
Binyon, Laurence, The Followers of William Blake (London, 1925)
Blayney Brown, David, Samuel Palmer 1805–1881: Loan Exhibition from the Ashmolean Museum Oxford (London, 1982)
Bulwer Lytton, Edward, England and the English (London, 1833)
Butlin, Martin (ed.), Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824 (London, 2005)
Calvert, Samuel, A Memoir of Edward Calvert Artist by His Third Son (London, 1893)
Cecil, David, Visionary and Dreamer (Princeton, 1969)
Clark, Kenneth, Blake and Visionary Art (London, 1973)
———Landscape into Art (London, 1949)
Cobbett, William, Rural Rides (London, 2001)
Crouan, Katherine, John Linnell – Truth to Nature, Introduction and Catalogue to Martyn Gregory Exhibition (London, 1983)
Cumberland, George, Thoughts on Outline (London, 1796)
Dickens, Charles, Pictures from Italy (London, 1846)
Drury, Jolyon, Revelation to Revolution: The Legacy of Samuel Palmer (Kent, 2006)
Erdman, David V. (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York, 1988)
Evans, Mark, ‘Blake Calvert – and Palmer? The Album of Constantine Ionides’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 144, September 2002, pp. 539–49
Fenwick, Simon, The Enchanted River: Two Hundred Years of the Royal Watercolour Society (London, 2004)
Finch, Mrs Eliza, Memorials of the Late Francis Oliver Finch (London, 1865)
Flaxman, John, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1829)
Gilchrist, Alexander, The Life of William Blake (London, 1863 and 1880)
Gilpin, William, An Essay Upon Prints (London, 1768)
———Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views, (Edinburgh, 1791)
Goldman, Paul, Samuel Palmer, Visionary Printmaker: A Loan Exhibition from the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (London, 1991)
Goodman, Kevis, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge, 2004)
Grigson, Geoffrey, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (London, 1947)
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, An Autobiography . . . and a Memoir by his Wife (London, 1897)
———Etching and Etchers (London, 1869)
Hamilton, James, Turner: A Life (London, 1997)
Hardie, Martin, ‘The Etched Work of Samuel Palmer’, The Print Collector’s Quarterly, 3/1, 1913
———Water-Colour Painting In Britain: The Romantic Period (London, 1967)
Harrison, Colin, ‘Treasures of the Ashmolean Museum’, Apollo, Vol. CXLV (May 1997)
———Samuel Palmer (Oxford, 1997)
Herring, Sarah, ‘Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham Drawings in Indian Ink’, Apollo, Vol. 148m, I, 441 (November 1998) pp. 37–42
Hill, Christopher, The English Revolution (London, 1949)
Hind, A. M., A Short History of Engraving and Etching (London, 1911)
Hutchinson, Sidney C., The History of the Royal Academy (London, 1968)
Keating, Tom, The Fake’s Progress, (London, 1977)
Keynes, Geoffrey (ed.), The Letters of William Blake (Oxford, 1980)
Keynes, Geoffrey; Fawcus, Arnold; Lister, Raymond; Reynolds, Graham, Samuel Palmer, a Vision Recaptured: commemorative handbook for the Palmer exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1978–9.
Kirwan, Daniel Joseph, Palace and Hovel: Or Phases of London Life (London, 1870)
Leslie, C. R., Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London, 1951)
Linnell, David, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co: The Life of John Linnell (Sussex, 1994)
Lister, Raymond, Catalogue Raisonné of Samuel Palmer (Cambridge, 1988)
———Edward Calvert (London, 1962)
———George Richmond: A Critical Biography (London, 1981)
———Samuel Palmer and ‘The Ancients’ (Cambridge, 1984)
———Samuel Palmer and His Etchings (London, 1969)
———Studies in the Arts, ed. Francis Warner, (Oxford, 1968)
; ———The Paintings of Samuel Palmer (Cambridge, 1985)
Malins, Edward, Samuel Palmer’s Italian Honeymoon (Oxford, 1968)
Matthews, Mike, Captain Swing in Sussex and Kent: Rural Rebellion in 1830 (Hastings, 2006)
Melville, Robert, Samuel Palmer (London, 1956)
Moore, T. Sturge, ‘Samuel Palmer’s Happiest Designs’, Apollo, 1936, pp. 329–35
Morgan, D. H., Harvesters and Harvesting 1840–1900 (London, 1982)
Norman, Frank and Geraldine, The Fake’s Progress: Being the Cautionary History of the Master Painter and Simulator Mr Tom Keating (London, 1977)
Olson, Roberta J. N., Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art (New York, 1985)
Olson, Roberta J. N. and Pasachoff, Jay M., Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries in British Art and Science (Cambridge, 1998)
Palmer, A. H., ‘The Story of an Imaginative Painter’, The Portfolio, Number 15 (1884), pp. 145–51
Palmer, Samuel, An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil, with illustrations by the author (London, 1883)
Patterson, Annabel, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, 1987)
Payne, Christiana, ‘John Linnell and Samuel Palmer in the 1820s’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. CXXIV, No. 948, March 1982
Peacock, Carlos, Samuel Palmer: Shoreham and After (London, 1968)
Porter, Roy, London: A Social History (London, 1994)
Pressly, William, ‘Samuel Palmer and the Pastoral Convention’, Record of the Art Museum Princeton University, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1969
Richmond, George, ‘Notes on Edward Calvert’, The Athenaeum, 25 August 1883
Roget, J. L., History of the Old Water Colour Society (London 1891, reprinted 1972)
Ruskin, John, Modern Painters, 5 vols (London, 1846)
Stephens F. G., Memorials of William Mulready, RA (London, 1890)
———Notes by Mr F. G. Stephens on a Collection of Drawings, Paintings and Etchings by the Late Samuel Palmer (London, 1881)
Stirling, A. M. W. (ed.), The Richmond Papers, from the Correspondence and Manuscripts of George Richmond, RA, and his Son Sir William Richmond, RA, KCB (London, 1926)
Story, Alfred, The Life of John Linnell, 2 vols (London, 1893)
Tomory, Peter, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (London, 1972)
Tromans, Nicholas (ed.), The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (London, 2008)
Twining, Louisa, Recollections of Life and Work; Being the Autobiography of Louisa Twining (London, 1893)
Vaughan, William, Art and the Natural World in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Kansas, 1990)
Vaughan, William; Barker, Elizabeth E.; Harrison, Colin, Samuel Palmer 1805–1881: Vision and Landscape (London, 2005)
Warner, Francis (ed.), Studies in the Arts, (Oxford, 1968)
White, Malcolm and Saynor, Joy, Shoreham: A Village in Kent (Shoreham, 1989)
Wilcox, Timothy, Samuel Palmer (London, 2005)
Yorke, Malcolm, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times, (London, 1988)
Notes
Chapter 1: The Palmer Family
1 L1023
2 L62
Chapter 2: Early Years
1 L518
2 AHP
3 L63
4 L592
5 L686
6 In his essay ‘The Nation of London’
7 Ibid.
8 L871
9 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 81
10 L1015
11 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 7
12 L860
13 L860
14 L899
15 L993
16 L&L4
17 L118
18 Daniel Joseph Kirwan, Palace and Hovel: Or Phases of London Life, p. 32
19 L&L5
20 L870
21 L636
22 L581
23 L828
24 L701
25 L49
26 L676
Chapter 3: The Beginnings of an Artist
1 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 75
2 L313
3 L&L99
4 L756
5 L39
6 L795
7 L735
8 L745
9 L876
10 L894
11 L308
12 L&L6
13 Inscribed by the artist on the verso
14 L823
15 L177
16 L982
17 L926
18 William Gilpin, Essay Upon Prints, 1768, p. 11
19 L&L15
20 L872
21 Ibid.
22 L651
23 L&L6
24 L516
25 L842
26 As Samuel Johnson described him
27 John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture, 1829, Lecture VI, ‘Composition’
28 L&L7
29 Examiner, No. 742, 24 March 1822
30 L677
31 L805
32 L892
33 L&L14
34 Ibid.
Chapter 4: John Linnell
1 Alfred T. Story, The Life of John Linnell, Vol. 1, p. 26
2 David Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell, p. 10
3 Ibid., p. 10
4 Ibid., p. 37
5 Ibid., p. 45
6 Ibid., p. 69
7 The Times, 24 January 1882
Chapter 5: The Sketchbook of 1824
1 L&L14
2 Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and the English, p. 239
3 C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, p. 12
4 L&L13
5 L393
6 L&L15
7 L74
8 L824
9 Ibid.
10 L&L13
11 L&L14
12 L880
13 L706
14 L&L15
15 L&L14
16 1824 Sketchbook, p. 114
17 L217
18 L74
19 Ibid.
20 L836
21 L837
22 F. G. Stephens, Memorials of William Mulready, p. 3
23 L&L12
24 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 59
25 L993
26 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 1
27 Ibid., p. 14
28 Ibid., p. 55
29 Ibid., p. 175
30 Ibid., p. 101
31 Ibid., p. 5
32 Ibid., p. 89
33 Ibid., p. 48
34 Ibid., p. 140
35 L&L15
36 L862
37 Sketchbook, 1824, p. 28
38 Ibid., p. 17
39 Ibid., p. 1
40 Ibid., p. 2
41 Ibid., p. 5
Chapter 6: William Blake
1 David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 565
2 G. E. Bentley (ed.), Blake Records, p. 311
3 Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p. 13
4 Peter Ackroyd, Blake, p. 39
5 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p. 95
6 Bentley (ed.), Blake Records, p. 517
7 See William Blake, The Four Zoas
8 Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 406
9 Blake in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
10 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 350
11 Bentley (ed.), Blake Records, p. 313
12 Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 507
13 Bentley (ed.), Blake Records, p. 51
14 Ibid., p. 249
15 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p. 52
16 George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline, p. 1
17 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 203
18 L509
19 Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 325
20 Ibid., p. 231
21 Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of William Blake, p. 8
22 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 336
23 L506
24 Ack
royd, Blake, p. 325
25 Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 736
26 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 312
27 Story, The Life of John Linnell, Vol. 1, p. 228
Chapter 7: Palmer Meets Blake
1 L574
2 L&L9
3 L507
4 L824
5 L510
6 Bentley (ed.), Blake Records Supplement, p. 290
7 L507
Mysterious Wisdom Page 39