tour 2 of 18
Samuel Palmer
Palmer and Primitivism
'I was always
imagining and trying to
draw.'
Palmer,
letter to F.G. Stephens,
1871
Samuel Palmer was born
in 1805 into a middle-class family living in Surrey Square, off the
Old Kent Road in south London. His father was a bookseller, and
both parents encouraged his love of literature as well as his
artistic talents.
By 1818,
when he was thirteen, Palmer had decided to become an artist. This
decision may have been influenced by two traumatic events he
suffered around that time. Firstly, he was sent to Merchant
Taylors' school, but was so unhappy that he left after six
months. Two months later, while staying with his grandfather in
Houndsditch, he learned of his mother's death, news which
he later said 'had pierced him like a sharp
sword'.
A year
later, Palmer was already an accomplished painter and exhibited
work in both the British Institution and the Royal Academy. But his
development as a promising but conventional painter took a dramatic
change of direction when he met the artist John Linnell in 1822.
Under the older man's influence, he began to look at the
work of old masters such as Dürer and developed his own highly
original 'primitive' style. Linnell introduced
Palmer to William Blake and this was to the most influential
encounter of his life. He was deeply impressed by Blake's
vivid imagery, as well as by his independence of mind and powers of
imagination.
By the 1820s
Palmer lived with his father in Bloomsbury and frequently visited
the British Museum. There he drew the antique sculptures and
studied the work of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century engravers such
as Dürer, Van Leyden and Bonasone.