Samuel Palmer(1805–1881)

Samuel Palmer was born at Newington on the south London side of the river on 27 January 1805, the eldest son of a bookseller and later Baptist preacher. He was schooled at home on the King James Bible, took the Merchant Taylors' prize for Latin verse at fourteen, sold his first painting at sixteen, and was hung at the Royal Academy summer exhibition at seventeen.

He was nineteen when, in October 1824, the painter John Linnell took him to William Blake's rooms off the Strand. Blake, sixty-seven and three years from his death, was working on the Illustrations of the Book of Job. The meeting changed Palmer: Blake gave him the proof that an English painter could make the visionary register a vocation. He returned repeatedly over the next three years and was at Blake's side near the end. The young painters who had come into Blake's rooms with him, Edward Calvert, George Richmond and the others, gave themselves the name the Ancients.

He moved at twenty-one to Shoreham, a village in the Darent valley of west Kent, where the Ancients came down at weekends. The seven years he spent there, 1826 to 1834, produced the body of small visionary landscapes and ink-and-wash studies, In a Shoreham Garden, Early Morning, The Magic Apple Tree, Coming from Evening Church, that the modern English critical tradition treats as the foundational achievement of English visionary art: the Shoreham valley rendered not as topography but as a harvest country of moon, corn-shock and parish church, an English Christian rural Eden.

He left Shoreham in 1834, married Hannah Linnell in 1837, and through an Italian honeymoon and the following decades produced the accomplished topographical watercolours the market wanted, exhibiting with the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, of which he became a member in 1854. In his later years he recovered the visionary register in print, in the late etching cycle, The Lonely Tower, Opening the Fold, The Bellman, that ranks among the finest English etching of the century.

He worked in his last twenty years from a house near Redhill in Surrey, gardening and translating Virgil's Eclogues, and died there on 24 May 1881, seventy-six years old. Geoffrey Grigson's Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947) restored the Shoreham pictures to the canonical place in English art they have held ever since. The Palmer name, the medieval surname for the pilgrim returned from the Holy Land with a palm-leaf, carries him in English visionary art on the strength of the Shoreham period.