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.

Michael Jackson, the onetime pop-music king who has endured a lengthy slide toward insolvency, is close to a deal that would keep him from bankruptcy by refinancing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, people briefed on the plan said last night.

As part of the transaction, he will also agree at some point in the future to give up a part of a prized asset a song catalog that includes Beatles' hits to the Sony Corporation, people briefed on the plan said.

Mr. Jackson, who spent years racking up debt to underwrite his lifestyle even as his music career faded, has appeared to teeter on the brink of ruin several times in recent years. Last month, he all but closed his sprawling California ranch called Neverland, a move that came after the California authorities threatened to sue over unpaid wages to ranch employees.

Mr. Jackson used his stake in the song catalog as part of the collateral for about $270 million in loans from Bank of America. The bank sold the loans last year to Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based investment company that buys distressed debt. The entire catalog, of which Mr. Jackson owns 50 percent, has been valued around $1 billion, the people briefed said.

As part of the new agreement, Fortress has agreed to provide a new $300 million loan and reduce the interest payments Mr. Jackson must make.

Under the deal he has been negotiating, Mr. Jackson would agree to provide Sony which is co-owner of the Sony/ATV Music catalog with him with an option to buy half his stake, or about 25 percent of the catalog, at a set price, according to the people briefed on the deal.

Should Sony execute its option on the music catalog, it would ensure that Mr. Jackson was able to pay his debts, these people said.

Executives involved in the deal cautioned last night that some details had yet to completed and that the agreement could still collapse.

Representatives for Sony and Fortress declined to comment last night. A representative for Mr. Jackson did not return a call.

But executives involved in the deal said it came after months of talks that spanned the globe, with meetings from Los Angeles to New York to London to Bahrain, where Mr. Jackson has been living at the hospitality of Sheik Abdullah, the ruler's son.

The deal also comes after years of efforts by an eclectic parade of financial advisers including the California billionaire Ronald W. Burkle and the Florida entrepreneur Alvin Malnik to offer Mr. Jackson guidance for extricating himself from his woes. Mr. Jackson's financial managers had been pressing him to shed a part of his stake in the Sony/ATV venture since before he stood trial last year on charges of child molestation. He was acquitted last summer.

Many people close to Mr. Jackson have maintained that he could raise money to repay his loans or at least stay afloat by touring internationally or working out a series of television and book deals. But the consensus among his advisers was that he would face bankruptcy if he did not refinance.

Sony has a longstanding interest in keeping Mr. Jackson solvent. If Fortress had moved to foreclose on Mr. Jackson, he might have been forced into bankruptcy protection, where his stake in the publishing company could be put up for auction.

In negotiating the deal, Sony seeks to avoid the prospect that another bidder could gain ownership of the stake, which the company has long hoped to control.

Sony has been trying to organize financial partners that could prop up Mr. Jackson's wobbly finances. In the fall, a Sony representative flew to Dubai to meet with Mr. Jackson and an adviser, Gaynell Lenoir, daughter of the late Gerald Lenoir, a lawyer who was a mentor to the lawyer Johnnie Cochran.

Originally, they had tried to hammer out a deal in which Citigroup would acquire the loans, and offer Mr. Jackson a more favorable interest rate, around 6 percent, these executives said. Mr. Jackson had been paying more than 20 percent in monthly interest payments.

Rather than sell the loans to Citigroup, Fortress agreed to match the bank's terms, the executives said.

The various parties had agreed to the deal in principle a few weeks ago, the executives said, but the final pact was held up while the companies involved tried to address questions about potential exposure linked to Mr. Jackson's remaining legal problems.

Prescient Capital, a New Jersey company that said it helped Mr. Jackson secure the original financing from Fortress, has sued him for breach of contract, accusing him of failing to pay millions of dollars in fees for providing financial advice.

As a result, Mr. Jackson has finally been forced to loosen his grip on one of the richest of song catalogs.

He paid $47.5 million in 1985 to acquire the ATV catalog, which had roughly 4,000 songs among them more than 200 tunes written by members of the Beatles. After 10 months of negotiations with ATV's owner, the Australian tycoon Robert Holmes Court, Mr. Jackson bested other suitors including the music executives Charles Koppelman and Martin Bandier, the London-based Virgin Records and the real estate entrepreneur Samuel J. Lefrak.

In 1995, as he confronted early financial woes, Mr. Jackson struck a deal to merge ATV with Sony's publishing arm. The arrangement also provided Mr. Jackson with a stake in new songs acquired by the venture, like "No Such Thing" by John Mayer.

Aside from the Beatles songs, the venture has a vast archive including "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan, "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond and "E-Pro" by Beck

The catalog also includes the works of songwriters including Stevie Nicks, Sarah McLachlan, Destiny's Child, Garth Brooks and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi. The venture is also a big force in country music, having acquired the catalog of Roy Acuff and Fred Rose for $157 million in 2002. An archive of songs from the likes of Hank Williams and Roy Orbison is also included.