Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory

In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows with uncanny significance; for Palmer, as for Tolstoy’s Lieven, the bowed forms of the peasants at the harvest are shadows of divinity. Palmer aged like a Romantic poet too. The long-haired mystic became a High Church Tory: like Coleridge, but without the drinking. ‘The Past for Poets, the Present for Pigs,’ was Palmer’s opinion of England after the Reform Act. But did the poetry of Palmer’s seven-year sojourn in the ‘Valley of Vision’ at Shoreham, Kent also decline into prosaic commerce and pastoral nostalgia?

In Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall, William Vaughan, an expert on the painter, reminds us that our two Palmers were only ever one. Palmer was not a rebel hermit in his Shoreham period. He took to the woods in 1826 with a small inheritance, and returned to the city regularly, as Thoreau was to commute from Walden Pond to Concord. He worked with like-minded friends, including John Linnell, Edward Calvert and George Richmond, and secured a benediction from the ageing William Blake. The Palmer gang, like their German contemporaries the Nazarenes, styled themselves for the market: anticipating the self-publicising of the Pre-Raphaelites, the young idealists called themselves the Ancients.

Graham Sutherland called the early Palmer ‘a kind of English van Gogh’. In the valley of Shoreham, Palmer recalled, ‘the beautiful was loved for itself’. The luminosity is eccentric, not desperate. The later Palmer is a kind of English Claude Lorrain. The subject matter is stolid, the passions decorous, the effects controlled. But Palmer’s talent did not die on his 30th birthday. In 1832, having come into more money, he had bought himself a house in Lisson Grove.