Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer (born Newington, London, January 27 1805 - died Redhill, Surrey, May 24 1881) was an English landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in English Romanticism and produced visionary pastoral paintings.

Marriage, good health, Italy

After returning to London in 1835, Palmer's work became less mystical and more conventional.

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His health had also returned, and he was recently married to Hannah daughter of John Linnell. He had known Hannah since she was a child, and when they married she was nineteen, he thirty-two. He sketched in Devonshire and Wales at around this time. His peaceful vision of rural England had been disillusioned by the violent rural discontent of the early 1830s, his small financial legacy was running out, and so he decided that he needed to produce work which was more in line with public taste if he was to earn an income for himself and his wife. He began to turn more to watercolour, then gaining great popularity in England. To further this aim, in 1837 the couple embarked on a two-year honeymoon to Italy, made possible by money from Hannah's parents. In Italy his palette became brighter, sometimes to the point of garishness, but he made many fine sketches and studies that would later be useful in producing new paintings. Yet on his return to London Palmer sought patrons with only limited success, and for more than two decades was obliged to work as a drawing master until he moved away from London in 1862. To add to his financial worries, he had returned to London to find that his brother had pawned all of his early paintings, and Samuel was obliged to pay a large sum to redeem them. By all accounts Samuel was an excellent teacher, but the work with students inevitably reduced the time he could devote to his own art.

Related Topics:
Devonshire - Wales - Violent rural discontent - 1830s - 1837 - Honeymoon - Italy - Pawned

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