Samuel Palmer

Samuel Palmer is one of the most renowned British painters, best known for his poetic and spiritual  landscapes. At the age of seventeen he was introduced to John Linnell, who taught Palmer and introduced him to William Blake; Palmer became the leading member of the “Ancients,” a circle of  artists who gathered around Blake. In his twenties, Palmer moved from his native London to Shoreham in Kent, where he made “imaginative, almost hallucinatory” works. He made two sketching tours of Wales, around 1836 and 1837. The works he made there mark the beginning of Palmer’s fascination with mountain landscape that later developed on his two-year Grand Tour of Italy with his wife, Hannah Linnell, the daughter of his mentor.