Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Mysterious Wisdom is a biography of the painter Samuel Palmer whose world of slumbering shepherds and tumbling blossoms, mystical cornfields and bright sickle moons, has enchanted admirers since the nineteenth century. The lynchpin of the first British art movement, Palmer dreamed of creating a new rural ideal. Leading a band of fellow artists - the brotherhood of Ancients - from London to live in the village of Shoreham in Kent, he pursued his vision. If English tradition had ever encompassed the making of icons they would not have been so different from Palmer's enraptured landscapes. Samuel Palmer, however, was more than a reclusive eccentric. He lived during a century of great social upheaval and his works, at their finest, reflect its hopes and its fears. They capture a world in which the concerns of politics, religion and culture are inscribed onto the contours of our native landscapes. In his day, Palmer was much neglected. He did not attempt the grand dramas of J. M. W. Turner or follow John Constable's profoundly naturalistic path. But he belongs in their Romantic pantheon; as much for the numinous visions that are embodied in his loveliest paintings as for the vagaries of a life story in which so often he failed. Mysterious Wisdom offers a vividly intimate account of a man who has been as much misunderstood as admired; who was as sensual as he was spiritual, as dreamy as determined, as playful as profound. This is a portrait of a great British Romantic. It is a picture of a life shaped by passionate conviction, lit by enthusiasm, irony, and a captivating charm.

Genres: Art, Biography

400 pages, Print on Demand (Paperback)

First published June 6, 2011

Reviews

[Sarah Harkness]

Beautifully written, Rachel made a man i knew nothing about come alive. My ambition is to be even half as good a writer!

[Brian Robbins]

Palmer's paintings - very surprisingly! - were what drew me to read this book. I was looking forward to reading about about their background, composition, and hopefully an insightful assessment of the finished products. SO WHY DIDN'T THE BOOK PROVIDE IT!?

It was this area of the book, which set itself out to be a life AND work, which was it's greatest weakness. In the first place there were far too few plates showing a variety of his work. Secondly, the comments in the text were very sparse, brief and not at all adequate in the information they gave. At times the titles of paintings referred to in the text but not shown in the few plates, were not given; which makes it less easy to go to other sources to see them. Where the book contained plates these were not referenced in the text.

Also, although the author selected information from Palmer's copious and interesting letters, she failed often to provide any quotes at all, let alone one's substantial enough to really gain the interest of the reader. In her selection of information from them, as in the overall text, she focused on his surface life, providing much more detail about his money situation and bowel functions, than his ideas on art and his paintings.

On the plus side the book was written in a very readable style, and gave clear brief information about his associates and contemporaries, but largely it remains an introductory text providing some information, but certainly not one to enthuse the reader with a great desire to know Palmer or his paintings better. This is unfortunate, as both desrve to be better known.

[Neale]

This is a book to shelve alongside Jenny Uglow’s wonderful biography of Thomas Bewick, ‘Nature’s Engraver’ – both books are about artists who led modest and outwardly unexceptional lives, but which illuminate those lives just as the artworks illuminate them, and create the complex world in which they moved, like a Victorian crowd-painting. A. N. Wilson's fulsome praise of this book seems a little excessive, but it is easy to understand the book's appeal, since it channels the quiet London-pastoral-mystical charm of its subject.

‘Mysterious Wisdom’ is conventionally structured, its strategies and diction almost old-fashioned – I was reminded at times of the biographical works of Lord David Cecil, such as 'the Stricken Deer' about Palmer's hero Cowper– but this fits the subject well. There could have been more plates, certainly – but Palmer is a sufficiently obscure artist, I imagine, that few people are likely to read the book who are not familiar with his glowing and visionary works.