A
SERIES of three related, sequential EXHIBITIONS
POETRY
MADE VISIBLE:
The complete etchings of Samuel
Palmer
PALMER’S
PEERS
An introduction to the Etching Club and full
list of the Club’s publications.
A selection of etchings by Palmer’s
fellow members of The Etching Club.
A small selection by contributors to English
Etchings, c1881.
PALMER’S
LEGACY
The neo-romantic pastoral tradition in the
20th & 21st centuries.
A
related catalogue is available, please
see Catalogues,
'The Poetic Impulse'
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POETRY
MADE VISIBLE
The
Complete Etchings of
Samuel Palmer
(Newington,
south London 1805 – 1881 Redhill, near
Reigate, Surrey)
The
Poetic Impulse -
an Introduction to Palmer as a Printmaker
Palmer
received what he called his “first
movements of poetic impulse” as a child
of four, watching, with his nurse, the shadows
cast by elm branches steal across his room as
the moon rose, when she fixed the moment for
him for ever by quoting a couplet from the poet
Edward Young’s paraphrase of the Book
of Job
Vain
man, whose vision of a moment made,
Dream of a dream and shadow of a shade.
(In
a letter to Louisa Twining, 1860, in his son,
Alfred Herbert’s, The Life & Letters
of Samuel Palmer p4 & p227)
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The young Samuel Palmer, c1826.
A self portrait drawn at Shoreham.
Black chalk, heightened with white, on buff
paper.
(Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum/Bridgeman
Art Library) |
Born
at the outset of the 19th century Palmer’s
life spanned both the Romantic and Victorian
periods and his work is redolent of the artistic
concerns of those times in both the pre-eminence
of landscape and in literary & narrative
genre. It also transcends its time and still
speaks powerfully to a modern audience.
The
texts Palmer selected to ‘illustrate’ are
open to imaginative interpretation. He did not
create literal transcriptions, but evocations
of the atmosphere and ethos of the original literary
content resulting in deeply poetic landscapes.
Equally, as he sketched before a 'real' landscape his mind made associations between the elements he was seeing and familiar lines of poetry.
The
son of a bookseller, Palmer was widely read.
Delicate in health, his education was mainly
gathered through reading books at home. In particular
he developed a life-long love for the poetry
of Milton, Virgil, Shakespeare, the Bible, which
would provide the inspiration and titles for
many of his greatest images.
As
a child of thirteen Palmer’s parents
decided that as he enjoyed sketching,
he was destined to be an artist. They gave
him engravings to copy and engaged a drawing
master, William Wate.
Though
not at that time a printmaker, from his earliest
years printmaking was an important part of
Palmer's ambience. In the early decades of
the 19th century it was an activity closely
allied to the book trade, the majority of prints
being published in books. George Cooke, the
younger of the brothers who engraved Turner’s Picturesque
Views on the Southern Coast of England (published
1821) lived round the corner from Palmer’s
father’s bookshop and used to visit to
talk about art. Turner prints were a formative
influence, particularly Turners own etched and
mezzotinted landscape series collectively known
as the Liber Studiorum, issued 1807-1819.
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J.M.W.
Turner: ‘Woman
with a Tambourine’.
One of his Liber
Studiorum mezzotints,
1807.
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In
1819, aged only fourteen, on his first visit
to the Royal Academy (at which he too was a very
young exhibitor) Palmer had been bowled over
by the colour in Turner’s painting of the Entrance
of the Meuse... Turner’s Liber
Studiorum was still in his thoughts forty-five
years later when Palmer wrote to his patron
Valpy suggesting a parallel etched series of
the commissioned Milton watercolours to be
published as a book.
He
must have known too the bound collection of
reprints of Two Hundred Etchings by the old masters,
including Rembrandt and especially pertinent
to Palmer, Claude, which was first published
in 1816, with a later edition in 1825.
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Claude: 'Shepherd & Shepherdess conversing', c1651.
A later impression, as issued in 1816 in 200
Etchings.
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Palmer’s “poetic
impulse” was
further nurtured when in 1822 John Linnell (his
future father-in-law) took on the role of his
artistic mentor. Linnell, both a painter and
aspirant engraver, had befriended the elderly
William Blake and suggested him to Dr Thornton
(the Linnell family doctor) as illustrator for
the new edition of Thornton’s schools’ version
of The Pastorals of Virgil, published
in 1821.
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William
Blake: 'Colinet departs in Sorrow'.
Wood engraving, 1821, illustration to the
First
Eclogue for
Dr Thornton's school's
edition of the Pastorals of Virgil. |
The
tiny Blake wood engravings of the First
Eclogue moved the seventeen year old Palmer
profoundly.
They
are visions of little dells, and nooks and
corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest
pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their
light and shade, and looking upon them I found
no word to describe them…There is in
all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates
and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete
and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight
of this world.
(Life & Letters… pp15-16)
When
Linnell first took Palmer to visit Blake in
person, in October 1824, on the table was the
copper he had just been working on, of the
first plate Thus did Job continually for Blake’s
engravings of The Book of Job, another Linnell
commission. “How lovely it looked by lamplight,
strained through the tissue-paper!” (A
Gilchrest “The Life of Blake”,
for which he consulted Palmer)
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William Blake: 'Thus did Job continually'. Proof engraving, 1825, Pl.1 of The
Book of Job. |
Of
all Blake’s Job engravings Thus did
Job continually is the image that correlates
with those of the Ancients in their Shoreham
days, with its ‘inhabited’ pastoral
landscape setting, the ranks of sheep, the
rising or setting sun, the crescent moon and
star.
Palmer
began visiting the Kent village of Shoreham
in 1824, the year he and his friends formed
their brotherhood, calling themselves ‘The
Ancients’,
looking back to the example of medieval religious
art; Palmer was deeply religious, as well as
revering William Blake. Of similar ‘primitive’ sympathies
to the slightly earlier “Nazarenes” (formed
in Vienna in 1809) the Ancients anticipated
the Pre-Raphaelites.
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Palmer: 'The Valley thick with Corn'.
Brown ink and gum arabic, varnished.
A Shoreham 'sepia',
1825.
(Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum/Bridgeman Art Library) |
The
Ashmolean Shoreham sepia drawings date from
visits to Shoreham in 1825 and the following
year Palmer settled in the village, where the
Ancients and even Blake came to visit. It
was Blake who drew Palmer’s attention to
the flicks of white on Claude’s painted
foliage that sparkled like dew, an analogy which
would inform his future approach to etching.
Though
at this period Palmer still showed little interest
himself in practical printmaking, several of
the Ancients did make prints. George Richmond
engraved The Shepherd while staying
with Palmer in 1827; and Palmer sketched him
at work engraving. At the same period Edward
Calvert began his wood engravings, inspired
by the medium as well as the imagery of Blake’s
illustrations for Dr Thornton. That Palmer too
did attempt a few rough blocks at this time is
recorded by A H Palmer in his 1882 Memoir of
his father. (Wood engraving lends itself to domestic
art, being necessarily small scale, determined
by the slow-growing box tree, and not requiring
acid for ‘cuttting’ or
a press for printing, as etching would. Wood
engravings can be printed with the pressure of
a back of a spoon.) The recently re-discovered
Ionides album includes, in addition to impressions
of Blake’s Virgil pastorals and wood engravings
by Calvert and fellow ‘Ancient’ Welby
Sherman, a few crudely cut wood engravings (the
only known impressions) that relate to the ‘blacks’ that
Palmer was painting then at Shoreham and to the
erotic themes of Calvert, and which may well
be by Palmer.
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Palmer: 'The Flock and Star'. Indian ink and wash.
A Shoreham 'black', c1831-32.
(Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum/Bridgeman Art Library) |
Palmer
did retain one small wood block, Harvest under a Crescent Moon,
c1828, designed by him but thought to have been
cut by Welby Sherman, which is only known in
impressions printed in 1920 when A H Palmer sent
the block to Martin Hardie at the Victoria & Albert
Museum, who arranged to have an edition of
50 printed. Palmer employed Sherman to engrave
his painting Evening (a shepherd with
his flock outside a tree-backed cottage with
an opening to a distant landscape lit by a crescent
moon) in mezzotint. Though the plate was lettered
as published by Palmer in 1834, only three
impressions from the plate are known, all today
in London museums. Two had remained with Palmer
till his death and one came from the Linnell
family. There is also a single monotype attributed
to Palmer (now in the British Museum, provenance
by descent through the Richmond family) of Two Men with Oxen ploughing a Field,
of uncertain date.
From
1832, Palmer began to make return trips to
London and bought a house in Lisson Grove,
though he only finally left Shoreham permanently
in 1835. By that date the visionary intensity
of his youth was inevitably diminishing. He
made rather more conventional sketching tours
to picturesque areas favoured by watercolour
landscape painters, in Devon and Wales. And
in 1837, having married Linnell’s seventeen
year old daughter Hannah, spent his two year
honeymoon in Italian travels, on a traditional
Grand Tour. His watercolours made there include
a beautiful study of cypresses in the Tivoli
Gardens outside Rome, a motif which would recur
in the later etchings.
Palmer and Etching
By
the time Palmer would take up etching in 1850,
at the age of 45, the Shoreham influence of
Blake had been transmuted through his experiences
of Italy and the sketching tours in the West
Country and Wales, the demands of providing
for a family, and the loss of his infant daughter,
but the experience of the new medium rekindled
the vision of his Shoreham years. Already prone
to melancholy, in the early 1860’s he
would suffer further tragedy in the death of
his elder son Thomas More, compounded by difficulties
in his relationship with his wife and irredeemable
bad relations with his father-in-law. Etching idyllic landscapes envisioning a golden age must have
been a solace, and the more so as they received
growing critical acclaim as the years passed.
Subject
to “the production of an etching
in compliance with the rules”, Palmer
was proposed for membership of the Etching
Club by his friend Charles West Cope (see
item 18 in Palmer Peers exhibition) at the meeting on 29 January, 1850. Thomas
Creswick (see items 19-23 in Palmer Peers exhibition) and Henry James
Townsend seconded. Palmer must have etched
The Willow by 19 February 1850, when he was
unanimously elected.
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The
Palmer Exhibition
To
view the entire Exhibition, print-by-print,
click this link and
then follow the prints through the Gallery
by using the "next print >" and "< previous
print" navigation
buttons. Alternatively, you can select an individual
print from its thumbnail or title in the list
below.
1 |
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The
Willow
Etching,
1850 |
2 |
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The
Skylark
Etching,
1850 |
3 |
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The
Herdsman's Cottage
Etching, 1850 |
4 |
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Christmas
or Folding
the Last Sheep
Etching, 1850 |
5 |
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The
Vine (or Plumpy
Baccus)
Etching, 1850 |
6 |
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The
Sleeping Shepherd; Early Morning
Etching, 1854-57 |
7 |
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The
Rising Moon or An
English Pastoral
Etching, 1855-57 |
8 |
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The
Weary Ploughman
originally known as The Herdsman or Tardus
Babulcus
Etching, 1858 |
9 |
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The Early Ploughman or The Morning Spread upon the Mountains
Etching, begun 1861 |
10 |
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The
Morning of Life
Etching and Drypoint, 1860/61-72 |
11 |
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The
Bellman
Etching, 1879 |
12 |
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The
Lonely Tower
Etching, 1879 |
13 |
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Opening
the Fold or Early Morning
Etching, 1880 |
14 |
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The
Homeward Star
Etching c1880 |
15 |
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The
Cypress Grove
Etching c1880 |
16 |
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The
Sepulchre
Etching begun c1880 |
17 |
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Moeris
and Galatea
Etching begun c1880 |
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See
also the associated exhibitions:
Palmer's
Peers. The Etching Club
A brief account of The Etching Club,
1883-1885, and a list of its publications, with
an exhibition of a selection of etchings by other
members of the Club, and by contributors to the
publication English Etchings, 1881.
Palmer's
Legacy
A selection of etchings in the British
neo-romantic pastoral tradition in the 20th and
21st centuries, from F L Griggs to Ron McBurnie.
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Membership
of the Etching Club* gave him an access of enthusiasm
for the ‘new’ technique and in his
first year he produced at least another three
plates, presumably intended for the Club’s
then proposed future publication of ‘illustrations
to twenty miscellaneous sonnets’, a theme
which must have appealed to him. In 1849 Joseph
Cundall had published L’Allegro by
John Milton illustrated by the Etching Club.
The preliminary prospectus for L’Allegro
had advertised their following work to be “Il
Penseroso”, an interesting coincidence
with regard to Palmer’s later work, but
this was abandoned at the Club meeting on March
5 1849 for the ‘Sonnets’ and a selection
of sonnets was made by the members present, though
etchings to suit were not started it would seem
until 1850. By the meeting of 27 December 1850
mention is made of four plates by Palmer being
accepted for inclusion in the ‘Sonnets’, Bampfield*;
the Lark*; the Shepherd; and Evening (?)*.
For publication of the ‘Sonnets’ the
Club approached the Art Union of London, but
there proved to be difficulties and that project
too would effectively be shelved. Eventually,
seven years later, it evolved into Etchings
for the Art Union of London by the Etching Club,
published 1857, though with a largely different
selection of etchings, mainly unrelated specifically
to literary texts.
In
all, seven of Palmer’s thirteen finished
plates appeared in Etching Club publications
over the ensuing three decades. The first four
plates were of small format, presumably dictated
by the dimensions of the plates handed out by
the Etching Club. The larger format adopted after
that may also have initially been determined
by the Club.
With
the exception of The Willow (see
item 1), Palmer’s
etchings are all set in the imaginative poetic
potential of twilight, whether the gilding of
sunrise or sunset, or the magical silvering of
moonlight. Again, except for The Willow,
a ‘pure’ naturalistic landscape for
his probationary plate for the Etching Club,
all Palmer’s subsequent etched landscapes
included figures. He felt that landscape was
only significant if it had “sentiment”, “as
it hints or expresses the haunts and doings of
man”. He wrote to his son Herbert in 1866:
The
Georgics … teach the wisdom of all life
and the mysteries of intellectual discipline
under the veil of agriculture, vintages, cattle,
bees, so that the veil itself is glorious…
And
Palmer went on to say that he likewise tried
to
unite poetic remoteness with such homely reality
as the smell of turned-up
earth …
He
had a life-long fascination with Virgil and made
his own English verse translation of the Eclogues.
Herbert gives a delightful account in the Life & Letters of
Virgil as his father’s gardening guide.
Though removed elsewhere as weeds, the wild plants
that Palmer preferred were allowed to grow in
a small patch outside his studio window at Redhill “some
gave us infinite trouble, and pined away, in
spite of artificial irrigation suggested by a
passage in the Georgics”.
Milton
too was part of the fabric of Palmer’s
life. He had inherited from his nurse, who after
the death of his mother when he was thirteen,
had been like a second mother to him, a small
volume of the Minor Poems of Milton.
I
had a little Milton bound with brass corners
that I might carry it always in my waistcoat-pocket...
(Letter to Hamerton, 1872 L&Lp322)
He
revered Milton as an "arch-alchemist," in
that anything he touched became "poetic
gold." “Milton is abstracted and
eternal.” (From a letter
to Linnell, from Shoreham, 1828 - Life & Letters p174)
Three
of Palmer’s thirteen finished etchings
are inspired and titled from Milton; two from
Virgil (plus the four uncompleted plates); four
others variously from Gray’s Elegy,
Bampfield (another 18th century poet), Shakespeare
and The Bible.
In
a letter to P G Hamerton (1872
L&L pp336-7) Palmer opined
Etching
seems to me to stand quite alone among the
complete arts in its compatibility with authorship. … the
great peculiarity of etching seems to be that
its difficulties … an elegant mixture
of the manual, chemical and calculative… its
very mishaps and blunders (usually remediable)
are a constant amusement…, it raises
and keeps alive a speculative curiosity, it
has something of the excitement of gambling,
without its guilt and its ruin. For these and
other reasons I am inclined to think it the
best comptu exponent of the artist-author's
thoughts.
In
the same letter he exclaimed
O
! the joy - colours and brushes pitched out
of the window; plates the Liber Studiorum size
got out of the dear, little etching-cupboard … ;
great needles sharpened three-corner-wise like
bayonets ; opodeldoc rubbed into the fore-head
to wake the brain up ; and a Great Gorge of
old poetry to get up the dreaming …
Once
committed to the technique, Palmer was passionate
about the process of etching. He worked slowly,
elaborating his plates in successive stages of
biting, stopping out and rebiting, sometimes
perhaps through too many states. A H Palmer comments
on him
sitting,
sable in hand, hour after hour behind the tissue
paper, pencilling in varnish silver cloudlets
round a moon; … [and] revelling in the
ferocity of the seething mordant with which
he sometimes loved to excavate an emphatic
passage.
Some
of his plates went through up to fourteen successive
bitings.
He
was equally demanding when it came to printing.
Till he moved to Redhill where he acquired a
press in 1872, his plates were printed by commercial
printers. He would supply a proof with elaborate
instructions and diagrams in the margins for
the printer to follow and is reported to have
caused one tried printer to declare ‘he
would sooner see the devil himself than Palmer
with a plate to prove’. He is known to
have asked the Etching Club printers for a series
of proofs with the plate wiped of excess ink
with a succession of different cloths to study
the different effects – “acting on
the etching as a glazing” and to “add
mystery”. He was particular about the exact
shade of ebony black of the printing ink, without
hints of blue or brown, and preferred a warm
white paper.
However,
he seems not to have ever printed proofs himself,
even when he did own a press, but his letters
to his son who had the task of printing, expressed
his reaction to proofs and gave instructions
in minutiae for their improvement. Alfred Herbert
was taught to print by Frederick Goulding, an
exponent of the then vogue for retroussage wiping.
Palmer in earlier days had always preferred clean
wiping. In his later etchings he sort a bolder
effect that would speak at a distance if they
were hanging, and retroussage lent itself
to this, though he still preferred its use in
moderation.
It
seems to me that the charm of etching is the
glimmering through of the white paper even
in the shadows; so that everything either sparkles,
or suggests sparkle. .. Well, retroussage,
if not kept within narrow bounds, extinguishes
those thousand little luminous eyes which peer
through a finished linear etching
(L & L pp365-6, 1876, to the
engraver Thomas Oldham Barlow)
Palmer
was equally concerned with the mounting and framing
of his proofs. He suggested not too white a mount,
and a sufficiently wide window-opening to allow
the subject to breathe (it was perhaps to ensure
this that he left a plate border around the etched
image in all of his etchings), and recommended
either gilded frames of 1½ inch moulding
or ¾ inch beads of varnished pine with
an inlaid black line.
His ‘credo’ expressed
in a letter of 1862 to Miss Wilkinson, a pupil, “I
believe the two great parts of art to be SENTIMENT
and STRUCTURE” (L&L p236)
though said in relation to drawing figures, would
seem to encapsulate Palmer’s whole approach
to his etchings. Poetry provided the inspiration
for numerous Victorian artists but few approach
Palmer in poetic vision. A H Palmer quotes his
father equating poetry and image making -
The
work of a poet …where more is meant
than meets the ear, would I should think suggest
picture-work where more is meant than meets
the eye. It is a haunted stream by which the
young poet dreams away the summer's evening;
and it is a spirit, or some benign sylvan Genius,
who sends the sweet music that gently awakens.
Bibliography
- R
G ALEXANDER: A Catalogue of the etchings
of Samuel Palmer. (1937)
- British
Museum 2005 exhibition catalogue: Samuel
Palmer. Vision
and Landscape. By William Vaughan, Elizabeth
E Barker, Colin Harrison other contributors.
- Rachel
Campbell-Johnson: Mysterious Wisdom. The
life and work of Samuel Palmer. (Bloomsbury
2011)
- Gordon
COOKE: Graham Sutherland. Early Etchings (Cooke,
1993)
- Gordon
Cooke: Samuel Palmer. His Friends and Followers (Fine
Art Society 2011)
- The
Etching Club Minutes and related Papers, held
at the Victoria & Albert Museum
- Paul
Goldman: Samuel Palmer visionary printmaker.
(British Museum loan exhibition catalogue,
1991)
- Colin
Harrison: Samuel Palmer. (Ashmolean
1997)
- Raymond
LISTER: Samuel Palmer & his Etchings.
(Faber & Faber, 1969)
- A
H Palmer: The Life and Letters of Samuel
Palmer, Painter and Etcher (London 1892)
online at www.archive.org
- William
Weston: the English Vision. Etchings and Engravings
by Edward Calvert, William Blake, Samuel Palmer,
Graham Sutherland, Frederick Griggs and Paul
Drury. Introduction by Graham Sutherland. (1973)
Newly
acquired impressions of etchings by Palmer will
be added into this exhibition even after it has
been archived.
Return to the top
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*See
article on The Etching
Club in the Palmer Peers exhibition.
*Bampfield. See
Palmer exhibition item 4, “Christmas”,
only published posthumously.
*Lark. See
Palmer exhibition item 2, “The
Skylark”, pl.17 in ‘Etchings
for the Art Union of London’.
*Evening. Though
not specifically identified, this may be Palmer
exhibition item 3, “The
Herdsman's Cottage”, not published
till 1872.
See
also the associated exhibitions:
Palmer's
Peers. The Etching Club
A brief account of The Etching Club,
1883-1885, and a list of its publications, with
an exhibition of a selection of etchings by other
members of the Club, and by contributors to the
publication English Etchings, 1881.
Palmer's
Legacy
A selection of etchings in the British
neo-romantic pastoral tradition in the 20th and
21st centuries, from F L Griggs to Ron McBurnie.
Return to the top of this page
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