Samuel Palmer(1805–1881)

Samuel Palmer was born at Surrey Square in Newington on the south London side of the river on 27 January 1805, the eldest son of Samuel Palmer the elder, a bookseller and later a Baptist preacher of small means, and Martha Giles, daughter of a Newington banker. The boy was sickly: he had what his father's later memoir called fits or convulsions through his childhood and was schooled at home by his mother and by an Anglican aunt who read him the King James Bible from the age of three. His mother died of a respiratory infection when he was thirteen and the household closed in. He took the prize for Latin verse at the Merchant Taylors' annual prize-giving aged fourteen, sold his first painting (a view of the Newington riverbank) to a local engraver at sixteen, and was admitted to the Royal Academy summer exhibition for the first time at seventeen with a picture *A Study from Nature* hung in the second room.

He was nineteen when, in October 1824, the painter John Linnell took him to William Blake's small rooms at Fountain Court off the Strand. Blake was sixty-seven, three years from his death, working on the *Illustrations of the Book of Job* and on the unfinished Dante engravings at the bed-board he used as a desk. The meeting changed Palmer. He had grown up with the Anglican-evangelical reading of the Bible and the visual-poetic register of the King James as the foundational material of his imagination; Blake gave him the proof that an English painter could put the visionary register on canvas as a artistic vocation. He went back to Fountain Court repeatedly through the next three years, sat at Blake's elbow on his last days, and was at the side of the deathbed in August 1827. The small circle of young painters who had come into Blake's rooms through the same period (Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Francis Oliver Finch, Frederick Tatham, Henry Walter) gave themselves the name the Ancients, on the working principle that the right register for an English painter was the visionary medieval-and-Renaissance one and not the academic-Italianate exhibition one.

He moved to Shoreham, a village in the Darent valley of west Kent eight miles below Sevenoaks, in the autumn of 1826 at the age of twenty-one. His father moved into a small house in the village with him. The Ancients came down at weekends. The seven years he spent at Shoreham, between 1826 and 1834, produced the body of small visionary landscape paintings and ink-and-wash studies (*In a Shoreham Garden*, *Early Morning*, *The Magic Apple Tree*, *Coming from Evening Church*, *The Bright Cloud*) that the modern English critical tradition treats as the foundational achievement of English visionary art. The pictures, mostly small (eight inches by six, twelve by ten), worked in opaque body-colour with gum and gold leaf on prepared paper, depicted the Shoreham valley not as topographical landscape but as a visionary harvest country in which the moon and the corn shock and the parish church were the iconography of an English Christian rural Eden. The pictures sold badly. The two London exhibitions of the Shoreham work in 1829 and 1832 produced almost no sales and a single tepid review.

He left Shoreham in 1834 when the money ran out and married Hannah Linnell, the daughter of John Linnell who had introduced him to Blake, in 1837. The marriage was the second turn in his career and the cost was the visionary mode. Linnell, by his early forties a successful commercial landscape painter, took the young Palmer in hand on the principle that the Shoreham pictures could not be made to pay and that a painter in the 1840s had to produce the topographical-watercolour landscapes the market demanded. The Italian honeymoon of 1837 to 1839 (Florence, Rome, the Bay of Naples) was the Linnell-prescribed correction; Palmer came back with sketchbooks of Roman ruins and Neapolitan coastlines and produced from them through the 1840s and 1850s a long working life of competent commercial watercolours that the visionary mode of Shoreham was lost behind. The pictures sold. He elected an Associate of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1843 and a full member in 1854. The Shoreham work was effectively forgotten.

His eldest son Thomas More Palmer died of tuberculosis at nineteen in January 1861. The death broke Palmer. He moved to Furze Hill near Redhill in Surrey in 1862 and lived there for the remaining twenty years of his life with Hannah and their surviving son Alfred Herbert, gardening, working on an unfinished translation of Virgil's *Eclogues* (published posthumously), and producing the late etching cycle (*The Lonely Tower*, *Opening the Fold*, *The Bellman*) that recovered, in print form, much of the visionary register the watercolours of the previous twenty years had lost. He died at the Redhill house on 24 May 1881, seventy-six years old. The Palmer reputation collapsed in the late Victorian period and the Shoreham work was unknown outside the families of the Ancients for fifty years; the rediscovery came with Geoffrey Grigson's *Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years* in 1947, the foundational study that gave the Shoreham pictures the canonical place in English art they have held since. The Palmer name in the English-side catalogue is the Norman-Latin medieval surname for the pilgrim who returned from the Holy Land with a palm-leaf as token of pilgrimage; he carries it in English visionary art on the strength of the Shoreham period.