Valley of vision

SAMUEL PALMER Ð VISION AND LANDSCAPE
The British Museum
Ends January 22 2006

This year, the British Museum is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of the artist Samuel Palmer.

Palmer grew up in the Bloomsbury area of London, the son of a nonconformist bookseller and preacher. He was very much a child of the Romantic movement in literature and the visual arts: surrounded by books, he was constantly encouraged to read, and to memorise passages from authors such as Milton and Bunyan. From his letters and diaries in adult life, it is clear that Palmer was a committed Christian. However, unlike his father, he was to become a convinced Anglican — possibly influenced by his mother’s family which included several Church of England clergymen. Like later Victorians such as Ruskin and Morris, he was also drawn to the beautiful architecture and music associated with Anglican worship

New understanding

As a talented 17-year-old in 1822, having exhibited some conventional early landscapes, he was sought out by the older artist John Linnell — a committed Baptist, and a very forceful character Ð as Palmer was later to discover. Through Linnell, Palmer met the visionary poet, painter and engraver William Blake. This contact opened up an entirely new understanding of his calling as an artist. Palmer and his fellow enthusiasts would call Blake ‘The Interpreter’, after the character in Pilgrim’s Progress.

Palmer’s best known, and most intensely poetic work belongs to the happiest period of his early maturity, spent in Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in Kent — which he famously called his ‘Valley of Vision’. Recurrent asthma had driven him to seek a country retreat away from the unhealthy air of London. At the same time his widowed father, who had been worshipping at the East Street Particular Baptist Church in Walworth, was recommended to the pastorate of a small congregation at nearby Otford. Artist friends frequently came to stay, enjoying reading, drawing and idyllic moonlight walks together.

Symbolism and Puritans

Palmer saw Shoreham not in terms of the labours and poverty of rural life, but of deep religious symbolism — of man’s relationship to God’s divine creation. He recorded that he began each day by reading Scripture, and ‘praying for the Holy Ghost through the day to inspire my art’, and that he beheld nature ‘as in the Spirit’. In his imagery he drew on a rich combination of sources — not only the descriptive passages of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but also the Arcadia of Virgil’s classical poetry — infused with a visionary imagination inspired by William Blake. Technically, he and his friends were drawn to the paintings and engravings of 16th century Flemish and German artists such as Breughel, Durer and Adam Elsheimer.

Puritan writings were another important source for Palmer — he is known to have read John Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualised — or the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things — written that his congregation in rural Devon might see ‘the world below, as a glass to discover the world above’. In his drawing ‘The Valley Thick with Corn’, the reclining figure reading in the foreground suggests a Puritan divine — or possibly Bunyan’s Pilgrim.

Sadly, by the early 1830s, other pressures gradually combined to expel Palmer from his rural paradise. Blake had died in 1827, and, apart from political unrest in the countryside, and family problems, Palmer had failed to find buyers for his innocent rustic scenes. By 1834 he was complaining of being ‘pinched by a most unpoetical and unpastoral kind of poverty’, and later in the year set off for Wales and the West Country in search of inspiration, and more saleable landscape subjects

Marital tensions

In September 1837 Palmer married John Linnell’s eldest daughter, Hannah. However, Linnell’s dominant attitude was to cause increasing tensions within the marriage — not least because of Palmer’s adherence to the Church of England. (As he recorded, ‘I often mentioned that I am no Puseyite, but a most unworthy member of the Church of Christ’.) Unlike his father-in-law, and despite his diligence as an artist, he was not an astute businessman, and. was slow to gain recognition, so that the family were constantly short of funds. Beset with such difficulties, he must have looked back to his idealistic Shoreham years with both nostalgia and disillusion.

A personal tragedy in 1861 was the death of his favourite son — following which the family moved out of London to Reigate, where Palmer lived largely as a recluse — yet he had always worked best in seclusion, and in these latter years returned to his favourite subjects from Milton and Virgil in a series of etchings and large, wonderfully atmospheric twilight watercolours. At the time of his death these were highly regarded, although seen as an ‘afterglow’ of the Romantic tradition exemplified by Turner and others.

Enjoyment eroded

However, Palmer’s late work of the 1870s has a sadder significance. By this time, the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, who was Palmer’s almost exact contemporary, had begun to erode the whole possibility of enjoying God’s presence in his creation. Although Palmer’s work was to be rediscovered by a new generation of 20th-century painters and printmakers such as Graham Sutherland, later artists have never been able to contemplate the created world in quite the same way again.

A trip to the British Museum

New understanding

Symbolism and Puritans

Marital tensions

Enjoyment eroded

Anne Roberts

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