The Lonely Tower by Samuel Palmer, before 1881. © The Huntington Library.
Paul Fitzpatrick took off on a flight of fancy to the British Museum, where he saw visions of pastoral perfection by Samuel Palmer.
The 200th anniversary of the great English Romantic painter Samuel Palmer is marked this week by the opening of a large-scale retrospective of his work. Vision and Landscape, at the British Museum until 22 January 2006, brings together some 200 paintings and prints by the artist.
The first major show of his work for nearly a century traces Palmer’s development and sets out to re-establish him as a visionary artist in the tradition of (his friend and mentor) William Blake.
"There are some artists who give us a new way of seeing," said curator William Vaughan. "Samuel Palmer is one of these. He painted familiar scenes. Yet he painted these in a way that had never been done before."
Early Morning by Samuel Palmer 1825. © The Ashmolean Museum.
The exhibition is roughly divided into two halves: The Visionary and The Victorian. The earlier period includes his best-known work from when he lived at Shoreham in Kent. It was here that he and fellow artists set themselves up as a breakaway community known as The Ancients – their mission to celebrate the divine in nature. The landscape he depicts in 'Late Twilight' and 'A Hilly Scene' is mysterious; other-worldly shapes shifting in moonlit rural idylls.
Images and writings by the figures that inspired him (including Dürer, Blake and the poet Milton) show how Palmer evolved his own style and world-view. Blake's illustrations for The Book of Job had a particularly profound and lasting influence.
The Magic Apple Tree by Samuel Palmer, c.1830. © Fitzwilliam Museum.
Though his work tends toward the more conventional during the middle period, later on Palmer produced a series of masterly engravings on which he was still working at the time of his death in 1881. Two great, late etchings – The Bellman and The Lonely Tower – show a mystical sense of the wonder of nature; the latter work also pre-figures a more modern theme of alienation.
His innovation and boldness of vision made him a hero to the British Neo-Romantics in the 1930s. Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland all looked to Palmer as a founding influence. Today, too, artists and writers as diverse as Iain Sinclair, Lucien Freud, Susan Hill and Andy Goldsworthy acknowledge Palmer in their work.
With Vision and Landscape it's hoped that these pastoral scenes of light and shadow will bring Samuel Palmer to a wider audience.
