Samuel Palmer Revisited edited by Simon Shaw-Miller and Sam Smiles (review)

Samuel Palmer is an unusual Victorian. On his death in 1881 he was politely remembered as a stalwart member of the Old Watercolour Society and, latterly, the maker of ambitious etchings and translator of Virgil. By largely eschewing the era’s dominant medium of oil painting, however, he effectively condemned himself to obscurity. The Victorian Palmer is almost forgotten, even though most of his long life took place in Victoria’s reign. Rather, it is for a series of extraordinary works on paper produced in Shoreham, a tiny village in rural Kent, between 1825 and about 1837 that his reputation has come to depend. Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, rather than his actual contemporaries Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens, are frequently cited as literary parallels.

The vicissitudes of Palmer’s fortunes in the history of taste are laid out by William Vaughan, foremost authority on the artist, in an excellent introductory chapter to the present collection of essays. Most derive from a conference accompanying the bicentenary exhibition of Palmer’s work held at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2005 to 2006, curated by Vaughan and Elizabeth E. Barker, with an excellent catalogue. As Vaughan explains, Palmer’s visionary early work, entirely unknown in his lifetime except to a tiny circle of friends and admirers, emerged to wide acclaim at a retrospective exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926. Notable to viewers today, as then, are Palmer’s calligraphic pen-lines and stylized figures, his exuberantly fecund flowers and trees, and, above all, his distinctive vision of English village life as an inviolate continuation of the pastoral world of Virgil. Hugely influential on a generation of young English modernists in the 1930s, including Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and John Piper, Palmer’s work was lauded by curators and critics throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, falling from favour as pop art and conceptualism replaced the interwar neo-Romantic temper. Sam Smiles explores this history in a telling chapter on “Samuel Palmer and Modern Culture,” bringing the cultural historiography nearer to the present with a reminder that activists vainly attempted to persuade planners to re-route the London orbital motorway, the M25, to avoid Shoreham.

Peeling away the layers of historiographic, critical, and ideological overlay, several of the chapters provide new data on Palmer’s life, locating him more precisely in specific historical contexts than earlier, hagiographic studies ever attempted to do. The best detective work is by Vaughan himself, as part of the research for a full-scale monograph on the artist forthcoming from Yale University Press. Here, Vaughan publishes for the first time morsels from the diary of Benjamin Wrigglesworth Beatson, a wholly unvisionary childhood friend of Palmer much given to noting the quantity of steak and kidney pudding he had consumed. This unlikely source transforms our understanding of Palmer’s early days, his complex class status and family dynamics, beyond the fragments purveyed in earlier biographies. Vaughan deftly evokes the settings of Palmer’s early life, from late Georgian Margate to the East End of London at a moment of profound transformation. Palmer’s work espouses a vision of rural isolation wholly out of keeping with his life, that of a middle-class family buffeted from one crisis to another by the unruly energies of Georgian capitalism.

Greg Smith turns with forensic precision to Palmer’s development as a watercolourist, revealing both the extent of the artist’s knowledge of conventional techniques and his contempt for the “sky sloppers and brush blotters” who espoused them (37). There is an unresolved binary in Palmer’s work—perhaps the very tension that gives it such power—between intense naturalism and visionary invention. Instructed by his domineering father-in-law, the painter John Linnell, to “look at Albert Durer!,” Palmer was capable of staggering effects of verisimilitude (qtd. in Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years [Kegan Paul...