Samuel Palmer
by Jill Webster
by Jill Webster
Samuel Palmer was born in the south London parish of Newington in 1805, the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. He showed great artistic talent at an early age, and his watercolours were exhibited, and sold, at the British Institution and the Royal Academy when he was only 15. But the young Samuel found no home in the commercial art world. He wanted to follow what he later called “his soul’s journey” and find expression in his paintings of his poetic visions of a purer, better world.
Samuel’s introduction to Shoreham came through his father, who was invited to become a lay preacher at the Baptist Chapel in Otford in 1824. Shoreham was known as a stronghold of Nonconformist belief, and there were several local Dissenting sects. Sam regularly visited the area accompanying his father, and his sketchbook of 1824 shows many scenes of villages clustered in undulating landscapes, distant spires and sloping meadows, which can only have been in the Darent Valley.
They first rented rooms at Rat Alley (thought to be in Church Street), but by the end of 1828 Sam and his father were comfortably ensconced in Water House overlooking the pack bridge. With them was Sam’s old nurse Mary Ward, who had done so much to kindle his childish imagination by bedtime readings from Milton and the Bible. Here Sam’s love affair with Shoreham truly began.
There were two strong influences on his artistic development, John Linnell and William Blake. Linnell, another Dissenter, had also left the path of popular classical historical painting to follow his own quest to represent the natural world with unflinching truth. Linnell’s strength of purpose acted as a tonic on the young Samuel Palmer. His self-portrait most likely dates from the time, with its intense yet introspective gaze. Sam described Linnell as “a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art”. His 1824 sketchbook, now in the British Museum, shows increasingly sharp perceptions as he reached for his own individual vision.
Linnell introduced Sam to Blake on 9 October 1824. Blake was 67 and in poor health, but in the three years that elapsed before he died, he had a huge influence on Palmer and his group of artist friends, the Ancients. Blake was obsessed with the idea of a lapsed spiritual age, and all his life was searching the past for fundamental truth. He encouraged his young protégé to try and rediscover the Arcadian dreams of an earlier, purer age, a backwards path to an artistic future. He is known to have made one visit to Palmer in Shoreham.
Sam’s belief in the purity of archaic culture was shared by his group of eight friends, the Ancients. Their motto was “Poetry and Sentiment”. Closest to Sam was George Richmond, who later became a successful portrait painter. The group had a powerful sense of purpose and prayerfulness and sought the simple pleasures of a world in which, as Palmer later put it, “the beautiful was loved for itself”. They made frequent visits to Shoreham, rising at dawn to sing praises to God before breakfasting on bread and apples, bathing in the river, then spending the day out of doors roaming the Darent Valley with their sketchbooks and brushes and their pockets stuffed with apples.
Landscape was what they loved, but it was not the same landscape as that seen by the Shoreham villagers with their lives of hard labour in the fields. These were the times of the “Captain Swing Riots”, when agricultural workers rioted, their livelihoods threatened by the new machinery. The Ancients walked through a pastoral Paradise, reciting the poetry they loved and singing at the tops of their voices, often by moonlight. Needless to say, the villagers thought them extraordinary and called them “Extollagers”, eccentric astrologers.
These were the years when Samuel Palmer produced his most inspirational and original paintings. Shoreham was his “Valley of Vision”, providing him with the hills and sloping pastures, the orchards and hop gardens, the trees and the hayricks, which in his hands became transformative and visionary. Linnell became increasingly disenchanted with Sam’s paintings which he saw as unsellable, but Sam, living on an inheritance from his grandfather, could afford to ignore him for the time being. He worked in pen and ink, oils and thickly applied watercolours. He revelled in the profusion of colours provided by Nature, notably in his blossom-filled In A Shoreham Garden, painted in 1829, and his golden The Magic Apple Tree (1830). Coming From Evening Church (1830) combines so many of his tropes and his religious beliefs, with its imagined church building and solemn worshippers, man living in harmony with the hills and the harvest moon.
These tiny Shoreham paintings are now regarded as Samuel Palmer’s finest works of art, but they found no market at the time. Hanging in the Royal Academy near Turner’s and Constable’s great canvases, his little rural landscapes attracted little attention. In the 1830s he became disheartened and short of money and felt he needed new inspiration. He also wished to marry Linnell’s daughter Hannah, and knew he would have to change his Bohemian way of life.
By 1837 he was married and living in London, and his artistic life thereafter was more successful but lacked the originality and vision of the Shoreham works. He kept them hidden in a folder, his “Curiosity Portfolio”, and never showed them to anyone. Perhaps that was fortunate, as after his death his son Alfred made a bonfire of his father’s paintings and sketchbooks. Palmer died in 1881 and is buried in Reigate Churchyard, his grave untended.
Read more in Historical Society Publication No 21, “Samuel Palmer in Shoreham"