Samuel Palmer

British, 1805 - 1881

BiographyEnglish landscape painter. About 1824, through John Linnell, Palmer met William Blake whose influence was profound and long-lasting. Recollections of Blake's Virgil wood engravings (1821) and his Book of Job copper engravings (1825) appear in Palmer's striking visionary landscapes from the mid- to late 1820s. Imbued with his knowledge of the Bible, Milton, Virgil, and Bunyan and set in the Kent countryside around Shoreham, where he mainly lived 1826–35, they contain huge full or crescent moons, dense, luxuriant vegetation, and no hint of the modern world: The Valley Thick with Corn (1825; Oxford, Ashmolean). Palmer used pen and ink and varnished brown wash, and also watercolour. More prosaic, florid landscapes followed in the 1830s, particularly during and after his honeymoon trip to Italy (1837–9). He exhibited at the Society of Painters in watercolours, and in 1850 joined the Etching Club. His later years (from 1862 he lived in Redhill) were spent on landscapes inspired by Milton and Virgil, regaining some of his visionary insights, especially in his few but brilliant etchings, an inspiration to British Neo-Romantic artists in the 1920s and 1930s.

Pidgley, Michael. "Palmer, Samuel." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1950 (accessed May 1, 2012).

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