Mysterious Wisdom (60 page)

‘A preference for the present as a matter of taste is a pretty sure sign of mediocrity,' Palmer told his friend Stephens in 1875. He was not concerned with the merely current. That particular view of genius, he declared, was fit only for ‘dogs and cats, which are eminently remark­able for their sympathy with the present'. Rather, he believed along with Samuel Johnson that it is only that which ‘makes the past, the distant or the future predominate over the present' which ‘advances us in the rank of thinking beings'. ‘The best poets and painters appeal to this faculty and instinct within us,'
20
he declared.

Time has proved Palmer to be among that superlative number. This is not simply because his pictures of lost pastoral idylls showed British Modernists a possible way forwards or because, as several reviewers of the British Museum's bicentenary exhibition suggested, his works can still find significance in a contemporary era which, sensing the threat of ecological catastrophe, finds a freshly relevant environmental message in his belief that humanity could live in harmony with nature. It is because Palmer discovered an entirely original way to show us our world anew. This is what lends his most-loved pictures their timeless appeal. We look at our landscapes through the lens of his eye. To see a line of trees silhouetted against the twilight, to watch a harvest moon rising over the fields, to gaze at the evening star shining above a steeple is to remember his images. His mystical visions are entwined with our living experience. His spiritual messages suffuse our surroundings. They deepen and enrich our perceptions, thus advancing us, as Johnson put it, in the rank of thinking beings. An artist cannot hope for any greater accomplishment.

If British tradition had ever encompassed the making of icons, they would not have been so different from Palmer's tiny glowing pastorals. Condensed in the golden patches of his peaceful sepias, in the luminous landscapes of his Shoreham works, in the intricate densities of his tenebrous etchings, is a vision which expands the reaches of the human spirit. ‘The soul,' as he always knew he would one day discover, is ‘larger than the whole material universe.'
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Portrait of Samuel Palmer
by Charles West Cope, 1884.

Bibliography

 

Abbreviations Used in Notes

L
Lister, Raymond (ed.),
The Letters of Samuel Palmer
, Vols 1 and 2 (Oxford, 1974)

L&L
Palmer, A. H.,
The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer
(London, 1892)

1824 Sketchbook
Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824
, edited with an introduction and commentary by Martin Butlin (London, 2005)

AHP
A. H. Palmer's unpublished notes, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Letters to Martin Hardie
Correspondence between A. H. Palmer and Martin Hardie relating to Samuel Palmer, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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Blake
(London, 1999)

———
London
:
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(London, 2000)

Arts Council,
Samuel Palmer and his Circle
:
The Shoreham Period
(London, 1956)

Ayrton, Michael,
British Drawings
(London, 1946)

Baskin, Leonard,
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(Northampton, Mass., 1965)

Bate, Jonathan,
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Huntingdon Library Quarterly
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Blake Records
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Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
, XIX (1985)

Binyon, Laurence,
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(London, 1925)

Blayney Brown, David,
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(London, 1982)

Bulwer Lytton, Edward,
England and the English
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Butlin, Martin (ed.),
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(London, 2005)

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———
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–
49

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———
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, (Edinburgh, 1791)

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———
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———
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———
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–
42

Hill, Christopher,
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–
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———
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———
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———
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(Cambridge, 1984)

———
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(London, 1969)

———
Studies in the Arts
,
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———
The Paintings of Samuel Palmer
(Cambridge, 1985)

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Samuel
Palmer's Italian Honeymoon
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,
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–
35

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(New York, 1985)

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(Cambridge, 1998)

Palmer, A. H., ‘The Story of an Imaginative Painter',
The Portfolio
,
Number 15 (1884), pp. 145
–
51

Palmer, Samuel,
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, with illustrations by the author (London, 1883)

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:
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:
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:
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