Palmer is relatively unknown artist who after a lifelong struggle died unrecognised and yet he has influenced some of the greatest English painters.
To understand Palmers ‘visionary’ works you need to have experienced the southern English pastoral landscape, to have sat on a hill at twilight, or walked the wooded lanes and seen the moon rising low above hill sides. To have heard the bleating of sheep, or experienced the fragrance of wild honeysuckle growing in the hedgerows. Because this landscape at certain times of the day becomes enchanted and has an atmosphere and aura like no other. To Palmer it literally was a ‘New Jerusalem’ touched by the divine hand of God a landscape of religious intensity and this was the key to Palmer’s genius of vision that he combined the reality of the landscape with an intense poet like spirituality.
Samuel Palmer was born in 1805 into an eccentric and relatively poor family that had turned its back on the modernity of early 19th Century England. He had a very religious upbringing and was taught and sheltered at home but his childhood was a happy one and he was close to his parents.
Samuel showed a propensity for art from an early age and his work was fairly ordinary until in 1824 when he met William Blake. Blake’s work and vision had a profound effect on the young artist and his circle of friends who paid regular visits to Blake, who by now had become almost a Deity in their eyes.
When Palmer’s fathers bookselling business failed he and Palmer moved to a picturesque village in Shoreham, Kent in the beautiful Darrent valley. Here Palmer found what he called his ‘Valley of Vision’. His friends who had christened themselves, ‘The Ancients’ and declared their motto to be ‘Poetry and Sentiment’ and Blake visited him there in the house that Palmer named, ‘Rat Abbey’. They talked of art and poetry usually reciting favourite verses loudly whilst walking in the moonlight. The frightened local rustics called them ‘extollegers’ (astrologers), because of their strange antics.
The period that Palmer was in Shoreham was to see his visions and dreams depicted in beautiful watercolours. His view of the English countryside was infused with a golden light and heavenly aspect. It was in his eyes the New Jerusalem and the cornfields, pollarded water meadows and hop gardens and the steeply wooded valley are depicted in an almost biblical way, yet losing none of their essential Englishness.
His studies of moonlight subjects are quite beautiful and very poetic. His favourite authors were Virgil and Milton and he returned time and again to their works seeking inspiration and we an see their influence in several of the Shoreham works.
Such intensity of vision cannot last and he eventually returned to London and then followed the worst twenty years of his life. He married and had three children but tragically lost two to illness. His wife was the daughter of the artist John Linnell who never ceased trying to bully Palmer into changing his style to a more popular one but Palmer refused and remained quite poor. Even when he visited Italy for two years he still refused to bow to pressure to paint in a grander style for the British tourists. In the end his father in law bought him a house in Redhill, Surrey called Furze Hill House and provided him with an income. Palmer did not like it as it was too suburban but he was now free of money worries and he retired to a small studio in the house surrounded by his antiquities. To this reclusive world, his friends visited and they reminisced about Shoreham. Memories that Palmer was to rely on more and more in his later years.
In 1867 he began etching and the resultant works that he produced in this period until his death rank equal to anything he had produced whilst at Shoreham. The etchings were for Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. In these beautifully crafted etchings we see all of the artists poetic ambition brought to life in exquisite detail. They capture not only an English landscape but also a fantasy world and in them we see reflected his trips to Wales and Italy.
Samuel Palmer died in 1828. He is buried in a small churchyard in Reigate in Surrey.
‘The visions of the soul, being perfect, are the only true standard by which nature must be tried.’
Samuel Palmer
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