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Paperback – 145 x 115 mm – 96 pages

39 pages of colour illustration

ISBN 9781843682073

This volume in the Lives of the Artists series brings together for the first time Samuel Palmer’s autobiographical writing with the early life by his son and the pathbreaking essay by F. G. Stephens.

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the most original artists Britain has produced. Still a teenager when he met Linnell and Blake – meetings that ‘plucked him from the pit of modern art’ – he embarked on an intensely personal journey that led to an astonishing outpouring of mystical drawings and later to leadership of England’s first artistic colony, the group who called themselves ‘The Ancients’ and based themselves in the idyllic landscape of Shoreham. Work from the Shoreham years is perhaps unrivalled in English art for the strength of its spiritual feeling. Palmer’s later work was apparently more conventional, but it never entirely lost the extraordinary acuity and naivety of his artistic personality.

Throughout his life Palmer was a great letter writer and jotter down of thoughts. The autobiographical letter reprinted here, together with a selection of his opinions collected by the editor, William Vaughan, give a penetrating insight into his mind. A brief biographical sketch by his son, A. H. Palmer, was the first published record of his life. It was published in 1881, together with the essay by the pre-Raphaelite Stephens, the first major critic to examine his output as a whole and to give due weight to the Shoreham years. Unavailable for 130 years, Stephens’ essay is not only one of the earliest considered reactions to Palmer’s work, but one of the finest criticisms of this great painter ever written.