Volume 53, Number 8 · May 11, 2006
In Samuel Palmer's Garden
By James Fenton
Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881: Vision and Landscape
Catalog of the exhibition by William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker, and Colin Harrison
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,March 7–May 29, 2006.
Lund Humphries, 256 pp., $80.00;British Museum Press/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 256 pp., $45.00 (paper)
In the last decade of his life, as is well known, William Blake began to receive recognition and respect as an artist, not from the general public but from a group of painters and printmakers who looked to him as a figure of deep spiritual and artistic authority: 'The Interpreter,' they called him; they called themselves 'The Ancients.' The painter John Linnell (1792–1882) was the first of these. He would visit Blake at home, get work for him, keep him company, take him to the theater (Sheridan's Pizarro, a 'New Grand Serious Opera' called Dirce, or the Fatal Urn, and Oedipus in the version by Dryden and Nat Lee), and introduce him to his circle of young artists, some of whom became his disciples. Among them was Samuel Palmer, whose work is currently on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Born in 1805, Palmer was the son of a London bookseller, a Baptist who was easy-going enough to support his earliest artistic endeavors.
Review, 4654 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |