THE eccentric English artist Samuel Palmer may be something of a one-hit wonder. In 1825, at age 20, he made a series of small, dark landscapes of brown ink, sepia and gum arabic on paper, enumerating the natural world with such fervent meticulousness that the images transcend reality and stop just short of freaky.
They were made the year after Palmer, a precocious artist who began exhibiting and selling his work at 14, met the visionary William Blake. He was taken to visit Blake, then in the final destitute years of his life, by John Linnell, an artist who was first Palmer’s mentor (encouraging him to study Drer, for example) and later his father-in-law. Despite his situation, Blake’s faith in the power of the individual imagination was undaunted. The encounter affirmed Palmer’s desire to make his love of nature and literature the center of his art, and also encouraged him to see beauty as dependent on what he liked to call strangeness.
Palmer called these small landscapes his ” blacks,” but they are more generally known as the Oxford sepias, partly because the six in this exhibition are owned by the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. However you identify them, they form the heart of “Samuel Palmer (1805-1881): Vision and Landscape,” a revelatory retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first big Palmer show in nearly 80 years, it is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Met, and has been organized by a team led by William Vaughan, a longtime scholar of Romanticism. That nothing in this show is quite as great as the sepias can be counted as a failing or taken as a vivid lesson in the power of one-hit wonders, and the sometime modesty of greatness. All you need to do is make history turn on a dime once, however quietly.
Palmer’s sepias take us deep into the mysterious harmony of the natural world. Animals and humans are often present note the hyperalert rabbit and half-hidden villagers in the resplendent “Early Morning” and houses and barns crop up in the distance. But the main character is nature, in its wholeness and divineness, measured out in slightly stiff renderings of effulgently leafy bushes, glimmering birches, massive oaks and gnarly rocks, and in occasional moments of breathtaking ambiguity. In “Late Twilight,” a crescent moon overlooks a dark farm while floating on a horizon of glowing white that probably denotes clouds, but also reads as a vast beneficent sea separating heaven and earth.
Palmer is the least known, and most idiosyncratic, of the great Romantic landscape painters who flourished in Britain in the first half of the 19th century. Turner and Constable, for example, hold steady in our field of art historical vision partly because of the scale of their work, the freedom of their paint handling and their sustained, ever-strengthening consistency.
But Palmer avoided all of the above, and has often been characterized as an illustrator. He favored paper over canvas, rarely made work that exceeded the size of an open book and used oil paint infrequently. (You have to get close to his surfaces to realize how profligate and inventive he was with materials. Like Blake, he concocted strange alchemical mixtures. Only 9 of the 100 Palmers in this show use oil paint; only 2 use it without adding tempera, chalk or ink.)
In addition, financial necessity reinforced by Linnell, who became quite domineering after Palmer married his eldest daughter, Hannah, in 1837 dictated a long, quiet, rather academic patch in the middle of Palmer’s career. His capably realistic renderings of waterfalls, golden views of Rome and Technicolor idols inspired by Virgil and Milton made him a typical Victorian painter. (In contrast, Palmer’s early realism can be mesmerizing. Works like “Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park” (1828) and “A Barn With a Mossy Roof” (1828-9) more or less obviate the work of Andrew Wyeth.)
Palmer was embraced by artists who fell outside the accepted boundaries of the epic and linear course of modernism. The Pre-Raphaelites claimed him as a precursor in the 1870′s. In the late-1920′s, the English neo-Romantics, led by Graham Sutherland, discovered the impressive etchings he made late in life and developed a dark illustration print style in homage. There was renewed attention in the late 1940′s: Palmer is frequently cited as a precedent for the English eccentrics like Stanley Spencer and the young Lucian Freud. Another span of neglect began in the 1970′s, when art historians frequently dismissed English landscape paintings for ignoring the evils brought on by the Industrial Revolution and its agrarian side effects for example the mechanization of harvesting.
Palmer was a High Tory appalled by the blight of industrialization. But his cure was to look to what he saw as the good old days and, in his art, return to a time when man and nature were one. He even formed a short-lived artist’s group, the Ancients, dedicated to this task, partly through the study of Gothic art. (Its outstanding members included George Richmond and Edward Calvert, both represented in this exhibition.)
Tension between the ancient and the modern is often palpable in Palmer’s work. With “In a Shoreham Garden” (about 1829), Palmer translates his vision of darkness into vivid color through a large, beautifully spongy tree. It might almost be made of cotton balls and is startlingly ahead of its time, evoking the visionary art of Charles Burchfield, working in the United States a century later. But framed in the distance beyond the tree is a woman in a long red gown and a headdress who could be a Renaissance princess.
The same divide exists in his radiant mixed-media paintings, which even at their best seem slightly archaic. In “The Bright Cloud,” with its towering cumulus formation and golden fields, contented peasants move about with a dignity that hints at the pageantry of Renaissance frescoes. The landscape also suggests a Bruegel in miniature.
Palmer recaptured some of the force of the sepias only toward the end of his life, when financial security enabled the visionary side of his sensibility to reassert itself. He took up etching, and in works like “The Bellman” (1879) and “Opening the Fold” (or “Early Morning”) (1880), he summoned a softer, matte version of the gleaming darkness of the Oxford sepias.
But only the sepias provide an exciting artistic promontory from which you can catch past and future seemingly flowing together. Look back and you see the light-drenched landscapes of Lorrain and the more architectonic neo-Classical terrains of Poussin, although Palmer’s originality may rest on the way he seems to have assimilated the pictorial crafts of Gothic art cloisonn and stained glass. Look forward and Palmer’s sepias seem like the beginning of a line of exaggerated visionary landscape painting that forms the non-Cubist, more representational side of modernism. It includes van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch and the Fauves, as well as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Louis Eilshemius, Marsden Hartley and Burchfield.
The sepias’ insistent textures and radiant demarcations of light and dark have a textlike vividness. Like manuscript illuminations that have absorbed their narratives, they illustrate something profound, even if we don’t know the story. Every mark on the paper seems to convey meaning like the individual letters and words on a printed page and each one cooperates to form a larger message: ecstasy. Today, Palmer would probably qualify as a tree-hugger, but openness to his greatest work might also make the nonhuggers among us see the essential bond between human destiny and nature’s well-being.
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