A bucolic paradise

Ronald Blythe examines William Blake’s influence on the work of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer was in his early twenties when he wrote in his notebook, ‘The Glories of Heaven might be tried — hymns sung among the hills of Paradise at eventide…’ As a subject for a painting he means. Just before this he discovered his paradisal hills at Shoreham on the Kentish coast. And that very same year, 1824, he had also discovered how to paint them, for John Linnell, his future father-in-law, had taken him to visit William Blake. This meeting was profound. Blake was near death and living with his wife in a grubby London back street. Palmer found him ‘lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg). There, not inactive, though sixty-seven years old, but hard-working on a bed covered with books sat he up like one of the Antique patriarchs, or a dying Michael Angelo. Thus and thus was he making in the leaves of a great book (folio) the sublimest designs for his (not superior) Dante. He said he began them with fear and trembling. I said, “O! I have enough of fear and trembling.” “Then,” said he, “you’ll do.”… After visiting him, the scene recurs to me afterwards in a kind of vision; and in this most false, corrupt and genteely stupid town my spirit sees his dwelling (the chariot of the sun), as it were an island in the midst of the sea — such a place is it for primitive grandeur.’ There would be further calls on Blake when Palmer would kiss the bell-handle before pulling it.

When he and Linnell and William Calvert settled in the Water House in Shoreham as disciples of Blake, the critics would call them ‘primitive expressionists’ but they dubbed themselves the Ancients. They lived with great simplicity in response to villadom which they saw as a materialistic rash spreading from the old towns and villages of southern England.