Samuel Palmer 1805-1881: Vision and Landscape - Tapa blanda

Palmer began his career as an artist at an early age. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen (one of his sketchbooks from this time is in the British Museum's collection). In 1824, he met William Blake whose influence helped confirm his visionary approach to art. Palmer retreated into rural isolation in the village of Shoreham, Kent, his own 'Valley of Vision'. Here he produced his most distinctive work, and gathered around him a group of artists (including Edward Calvert and George Richmond) known as 'the Ancients'. He married in 1837, and on his two-year honeymoon in Italy, his style turned to intensely coloured watercolours, with an obvious spiritual connection to his subjects. The striking watercolour A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star is one of his finest works from the Shoreham period and was acquired by the British Museum in 1985 after a public appeal. Samuel Palmer was active during the great flowering of British landscape painting in the first half of the nineteenth century. His work influenced many artists of the twentieth century, including Graham Sutherland and Eric Ravilious. audience to rediscover his beautiful, moving and popular works.

William Vaughan is Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, London. After studying at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, London, he became an Assistant Keeper at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1972 he was appointed as lecturer at University College, London, until he took up the professorship at Birkbeck. He is the author of numerous articles and books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, including Romanticism and Art (2nd edition, 1994). In 1998 he was chosen to deliver the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, London, on the subject of British Painting. Professor Vaughan is married with two children.