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.