Samuel Palmer
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Samuel Palmer (born Newington, London, January 27 1805 - died Redhill, Surrey, May 24 1881) was an English landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in English Romanticism and produced visionary pastoral paintings.
Early life
Born in London, Palmer was the son of a bookseller, and was raised by a pious nurse. Palmer painted churches from around age twelve, and first exhibited Turner-inspired works at the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen. He had little formal training.
The Shoreham years
Through John Linnell, he met William Blake in 1824. Blake's influence can been seen in the works he produced over the next ten years or so, which are generally reckoned to be his greatest. These works were oils of landscapes around Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in the north of the county of Kent. He purchased a cottage and lived there from 1826 to 1835, depicting the area as a demi-paradise, mysterious and visionary, and often shown in sepia shades under moon and star light. There Palmer also associated with the group of Blake-influenced artists known as The Ancients (including George Richmond and Edward Calvert). They were among the few who ever saw the Shoreham paintings since, as a result of attacks by critics in 1825, he only ever opened those portfolios to selected friends.
Marriage, good health, Italy
After returning to London in 1835, Palmer's work became less mystical and more conventional. He had been disillusioned by the rural discontent of the early 1830s, and decided that he needed to produce work which was more in line with public taste if he was to earn an income. He began to turn to watercolour, then gaining great popularity in England. His health had also returned, and he was recently married to Hannah daughter of John Linnell. He sketched in Devonshire and Wales at around this time. Then in 1837 the couple embarked on a two-year honeymoon to Italy, where his palette became brighter, sometimes to the point of garishness. On his return to London Palmer sought patrons with limited success, and was sometimes obliged to work as a drawing master.
The later work
His best late works include a series of large watercolours illustrating Milton's poems L’allegro and Il penseroso and his etchings, a medium in which he worked from 1850 onwards, including a set illustrating Virgil. From the early 1860s he gained some measure of critical success for his later landscapes, which once again had a tinge of the early Shoreham work about them. Financially secure at last, he moved to Furze Hill House in Redhill, Surrey from 1862.
Burning the Shoreham work
His son destroyed large amounts of the Shoreham work in 1909, burning: "a great quantity of father's handiwork ... Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate". The destruction: "included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days".
Rediscovery
He was largely forgotten until being rediscovered in 1926 through a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it took until the 1950s for his reputation to really start to recover. His reputation now rests mainly on his Shoreham work, but some of his later work has recently received more appreciation.
His style was frequently mimicked by the art forger Tom Keating.
Further reading
- Raymond Lister. The Paintings of Samuel Palmer. (1986).
External links
