P

Palmer’s present reputation rests over-

whelmingly on the works he produced

between 1825 and 1832 at Shoreham, Kent,

some of which are among the finest jewels of

English landscape painting.

He was born and brought up on the still

rural edges of London and Kent. Although

his parents were Baptists, Palmer’s liking for

tradition and ritual led him to join the

Church of England. He acquired very early a

love for poetry, his favourites being Virgil

and Milton, both of whom could endow

familiar country scenes with spiritual

significance. His older friend John Linnell

perceptively steered him away from

contemporary landscape painting, which had

little to offer him, towards the early Italian,

Flemish and German old masters, especially

Du¨rer. In 1824, Linnell introduced him to

William Blake, whose ideas on art, poetry

and religion were to be crucial to Palmer

throughout his life; and it was in the same

year that he first visited Shoreham. From

1825 dates a series of works in sepia, including

The Valley Thick with Corn, which depict

nature in all its fecundity and possess an

almost hallucinatory intensity. Palmer went

to live in Shoreham, which he called the

‘Valley of Vision’, in 1826 and was joined

there by a circle of like-minded friends calling

themselves the ‘Ancients’, who were united

by their admiration for Blake.