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Overview
Samuel Palmer (1805-81) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings. He is represented by several works in Te Papa's collection.
By the time Palmer turned to etching in 1850, at the age of 45, the demands of painting saleable pictures had diluted the intensity of religious and poetic insight that had once distinguished his work. Palmer's adoption of etching was thus a self-conscious effort to rekindle the heightened perception of his early years, when he knew Blake and worked in idyllic seclusion with the Ancients at the village of Shoreham in Kent, 'the valley of vision' as he called it. The 13 etchings completed before his death in 1881 stand as a reaffirmation of Palmer's unique imaginative powers, and can be seen as the direct progeny of the great Shoreham drawings of the 1820s and early 1830s.
Palmer was intrigued by the process of etching, remarking to the critic and publisher P.G. Hamerton in 1871: 'If this kind of needlework could be made fairly remunerative, I should be content to do nothing else, so curiously attractive is the teazing, temper-trying, yet fascinating copper'. The following year Palmer told Hamerton: 'the great peculiarity of etching [is] an elegant mixture of the manual, chemical and calculative... it has something of the excitement of gambling, without its guilt and its ruin'.
Palmer elaborated his plates with painstaking care. Extensive use of stopping out and repeat biting helped achieve the dense hatchings and highly wrought surfaces that characterise his prints. 'The charm of etching', he wrote with evident delight in 1876, 'is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows; so that almost everything either sparkles, or suggests sparkle - those thousand little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching'.
Soon after Palmer devised the plan to prepare eight large watercolours depicting subjects from John Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, he began to contemplate the possibility of expanding the project to include prints. On 20 October 1864, Palmer described his inspiration to his friend Leonard Rowe Valpy:
The Etching dream came over me in this way. I am making my working sketches a quarter of the size of the drawings, and was surprised and not displeased to notice the variety - the difference of each from all the rest. I saw within, a set of highly-finished etchings the size of Turner's Liber Studiorum; and as finished as my moonlight with the cypresses; a set making a book - a compact block of work which I would fain [willingly] hope might live when I am with the fallen leaves.
The two large, exquisite etchings that Palmer completed for the project shortly before his death in 1881 - The Bellman and The Lonely Tower (Te Papa 1951-0013-1) - have, indeed, done much to ensure the immortality of his graphic art. Palmer derived the composition of The Bellman from the large watercolour (in Chatsworth) of the same name, which illustrates the lines from Il Penseroso (lines 83-84) referring to the close of day: '...the Belmans drowsie charm/ To bless the dores from nightly harm'.
As the sun sinks behind the hills, a solitary man, bell in hand, makes his way past figures beneath an arbour and cattle beside a hedge towards a village marked by chimney smoke and a church tower. Palmer based the view on memories of Shoreham: 'It is a breaking out of village-fever long after contact - a dream of that genuine village where I mused away some of my best years, designing what nobody would care for, and contracting among good books, a fastidious and unpopular taste'. Palmer seems to have prepared all six (lifetime) states of this print in the spring of 1879. Thirteen bitings, successive burnishings and other revisions transformed the once-smooth copper plate into a rich terrain of deep furrows and shallow incisions. The artist's son, Alfred Herbert Palmer, pulled working proofs on his first press at Furze Hill House, and later printed proofs for sale on his large second press in London. The etching was published by The Fine Art Society, London, in 1879 and the original copper plate was cancelled after printing an edition of 75 impressions in 1926, by F. L. Griggs, Martin Hardie and Sir Frank Short.
Particularly interesting is the transcription on the mat of A.H. Palmer's earlier accompanying text, which reads: 'A good sample for Printing. Without too much glare & glitter on middle distant edges &c for a moon only partly risen - see Sir Frank Short's proof of the "Lonely Tower" Milton for paper handling. Kindly observe that, in spirt of Mr. Haden's assertions, this is an exceptionally good proof; but that the margins were cleaned (as they should and must be) while the plate was cold. So were all the rest which I printed. A.H.P.'
See:
British Museum Collection Online, 'The Bellman', https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1416962&partId=1&images=true
Peter Raissis, 'The Lonely Tower... Samuel Palmer', https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/275.2013/
W. Vaughan, E.E. Barker and C. Harrison, 'Samuel Palmer, Vision and Landscape', (London, BM, 2005), no. 160, pp. 239-40 (entry by E.E. Barker).
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2016