The Works of Samuel Palmer

by Colin Harrison

The art of Samuel Palmer is essentially a discovery of the 20th century. Although he exhibited widely during his lifetime, and found buyers for some of his watercolors and etchings, it was not until the retrospective exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926 that the general public were able to enter the uniquely personal world of Palmer's early years at Shoreham. Since then, his influence on a generation of English painters including Nash, Sutherland, John Piper, and F.L. Griggs, the publications of Geoffrey Grigson, Raymond Lister and others, have made him one of the most popular of English artists. The collection of paintings, drawings, watercolors, and etchings by Samuel Palmer in the Ashmolean Museum is the most important in the world. It is especially rich in the early works of the Shoreham period, from c. 1824 to 1835, notably the haunting self portrait and the unique group of six sepia drawings of 1825, which represent the 'visionary landscape' at its most intense.

Genres: Art, Art History

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

About the author

Colin Harrison is a crime novelist. He is a vice president and senior editor at Scribner.
He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with his wife, the writer Kathryn Harrison, and their three children (Sarah, Walker and Julia).

He attended: Haverford College, BA 1982; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. MFA 1986

His short nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Vogue, Salon, Worth, and other various publications.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across Samuel Palmer through my interest in Wm Blake. Palmer was one of a small group of young artists who hung out with and learned from Blake in his ornery and feisty and strange old age, around the time he did the weird drawings like Ghost of a Flea. It must've been fascinating to be there...

As far as I know Palmer is the best known of this small group of Blakean disciples, and around the relatively short time he was sitting at Blake's feet he created his best known woodcuts and paintings, like The Lonely Tower, most of which are dense little pastoral worlds of visionary landscapes where everything, even inanimate things, is charged with some kind of universal life force and interconnected and woven together like a living tapestry. They really look like visions of a new earth, where money has no significance and you could just reach out and grab a clod of earth and eat it for dinner. If you're susceptible to this kind of thing, then there's not much better than Samuel Palmer.

But of course he lost this intensity of vision after a few years, but he was still able to create some lovely pastoral landscapes, some of which are colored in such a heightened pitch that they look like proto-pre-Raphaelite paintings, and in fact I think he had an influence on those painters.

Late in life he had another resurgence of his visionary abilities, only less intense and maybe not as authentic, but still of significant interest.

This is the best overall book on Samuel Palmer that I've come across, and I kick myself for not actually making it to the show that this is a catalogue for, but oh well, sometimes it's nice to not satisfy every desire one has.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive collection of the work of one of the greatest British artists of all time. Astoundingly beautiful stuff.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid, scholarly exploration of the visionary artist Samuel Palmer ... spans his entire career, from aspiring follower of William Blake to accepted Victorian etcher of landscapes ... copiously illustrated with magnificent color plates ...

[Thomas Sheridan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a large collection of art books and this is among the best. I think it is somewhat overpriced - but if you love the English Romantic era you won't be sorry to have purchased this.