Samuel Palmer  
(Newington, south London 1805 – 1881 Redhill, near Reigate, Surrey)

The Homeward Star

The Homeward Star
Alexander 14 ii/iv, Lister 14 ii/iv
131 x 188 mm (plate); 100 x 152 mm (image); 212 x 313 mm

Etching, begun by Samuel Palmer and completed by his son Herbert. With three lines of verse in the lower plate border, as issued for the 1884 small paper edition of An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil by Samuel Palmer, with Illustrations by the Author. On cream wove paper. The full sheet as issued, the right edge gilt.   

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Additional Information about the Print

The illustrations to his English translation of Virgil’s Eclogues.

In 1872 Palmer sent his own English verse translation of Virgil’s Eclogues (at which he had worked for years) to Hamerton, who advised on publishing only if Palmer accompanied the text with etchings. Palmer worked on designs for these in drawings and watercolours throughout the last decade of his life.

Only Opening the Fold was finished and independently published (by the Fine Art Society in 1880) before he died. Palmer had begun work on another four uniformly smaller plates. A H Palmer completed these, and with the addition of heliogravure facsimiles of some of the other preliminary drawings, had his father’s illustrated translation published by Seeley & Company in 1883 and 1884. An unlettered folio edition was issued, preliminary to a lettered quarto version on laid paper, both in 1883. In 1884 Seeley published the standard lettered quarto edition printed on wove paper.

The five Eclogue plates would be among those that A H Palmer sent to Griggs in 1924. Griggs would remove the verses. He printed some proofs in Campden in 1924, stamped with the Dover’s House Press mark (a few of Opening the Fold, 20 of The Homeward Star, 8 of The Cypress Grove, fewer of The Sepulchre and Moeris & Galatea). Each plate subsequently had the small triangle of ‘The Trio’ engraved in the lower border, though only Opening the Fold was published -  in the 1926 Trio printing, in an edition of 50.