(Ruth 2 vv17-18)
Regular readers of this column will know that I have a special interest in the English painter Samuel Palmer who lived from 1805 to 1891, many of whose paintings included that mysterious element of mysticism or intimations of the divine. Early in his career Palmer moved, with a number of friends who were influenced by William Blake and were named ‘the ancients’, to Shoreham in Kent.
During the time spent at Shoreham, Palmer produced some of his best works and certainly those which enable the sensitive viewer with a cultural background in Christianity to discern something of the numinous. An indication of Palmer’s thoughts at this time can be gleaned from the following extract from a letter which he wrote to the painter John Linnell (who would become Palmer’s father-in-law) at the end of 1828. From this extract it can be seen that Palmer saw the glory of God reflected in nature, and endeavoured through his art to meet the injunction to ‘glorify his Creator’.
Every where curious, articulate, perfect and inimitable of structure, like her own entomology, Nature does yet leave a space for the soul to climb above her steepest summits: as, in her dominion she swells from the herring to the leviathan … so divine Art piles mountains on her hills, and continents upon those mountains.
However, creation sometimes pours into the spiritual eye the radiance of Heaven: the green mountains that glimmer in a summer gloaming from the dusky but bloomy East; the moon, opening her golden eye or walking in brightness among innumerable islands of light, not only thrill the optic nerve, but shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre into the inmost spirits, and seem the interchanging twilight of that peaceful country, where there is no sorrow and no night. After all, I doubt not but there must be the study of this creation, as well as art and vision; tho’ I cannot think it other than the veil of heaven, through which her divine features are dimly smiling; the setting of the table before the feast, the symphony before the tune, the prologue of the drama; a dream of antipast and proscenium of eternity.[i]
Palmer, in this passage gives an insight into his understanding of the Immanent (manifestation of the divine in the material world) and its relationship with the Transcendent (the sense of the divine being beyond the veil of heaven). This letter, perhaps more than many others in his extensive correspondence with John Linnell and the members of the ‘Ancients’, particularly George Richmond, gives an insight into the thought processes underlying the work of Palmer. These thoughts are brought out very strongly in the two Sepia Studies which I have mentioned previously as well as being characteristic of many of Palmer’s works during the period 1824 to 1834 – the moon, the lustre, the green hills in the summer gloaming and the interchanging twilight of that peaceful country. Whilst many of Palmer’s letters contain rather mundane details of daily life in Shoreham in one, written this time in 1834 to his friend George Richmond, there is an interesting statement which rather confirms Palmer’s own relationship to Christ:
I have a slowly but steadily increasing conviction that the religion of Jesus Christ is perfectly divine but it certainly was not only intended to be enthroned in the understanding but enshrined in the heart, for the personal love of Christ is its beginning and end …[ii]
Whilst this was probably Palmer’s thinking since his teenage years, there is a parallel here with William Blake’s emphasis on the imagination being given precedence and not usurped by the need to understand by rational thought and logic – very much the characteristic of the British approach to the Age of Reason. Perhaps Palmer’s thoughts as a young man were confirmed and reinforced by his contact with Blake.
Ruth returned from Gleaning (c.1828) 29.4 x 39.4 Ink, Wash and Gouache over graphite
Palmer’s work became rather more diverse during the Shoreham period, but strangely, in view of his feeling towards painting the human form (‘the great edifice of the divine human form’) there are very few drawings or painting involving primarily the human. A notable exception is Ruth returning from the Gleaning – produced around 1828. This ink, wash and gouache over graphite work is based on the story in the book of Ruth (Ruth, Chapter 2, verses, 17-18). In this story, Ruth (a gentile) worked so assiduously and humbly that she was actually given grain from one of the sheaves as well as the gleanings that were traditionally gathered by the poor – eventually Ruth is accepted into the Jewish community. Ruth eventually marries Boaz, gives birth to a son Obed, the father of David, ancestor of Christ. In the painting Ruth is shown walking back home with half a bushel of grain. In Shoreham, at the time, Palmer would have observed gleaners working in the fields and although they were unlikely to have been as well built as Palmer’s Ruth and carrying as much grain – he may have been trying to say to the poor that if they were humble and conscientious, then God would provide and they would become as fit and healthy as Ruth. He may also have been keen to make a statement with regard to the changes in agriculture at that time, leading to greater efficiency and less gleanings, as well as drawing attention to the controversies regarding the Corn Laws, but it is more likely that Palmer is expressing the idea that the divine is immanent in the excess corn left over from the harvest. William Vaughan makes a comment that ‘The exaggerated forms of this figure emphasising power suggest Palmer’s admiration for Fuseli, Michelangelo and the Italian mannerists.’[iii] This exaggerated strength is also present in Blake’s Joseph of Arimathea (1773) – maybe another example of Blake’s influence.
Throughout this period at Shoreham, Palmer continued to create paintings and drawings which indulged his own almost child-like sense of wonder and awe (cf. Fascinens etc. in The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto) in the panorama of nature which had been provided by the Creator. As Honour notes in respect of an inscription by Calvert ‘Seen in the Kingdom of Heaven by vision through Jesus Christ Our Saviour’, these same words might ‘equally well have been written by Palmer on any of his paintings and drawings of his Shoreham period’.[iv]
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk June 2021
[i] Lister, Raymond (ed) The Letters of Samuel Palmer Volume I, 1814-1859, Oxford Clarendon Press 1974, p. 50 – Letter to John Linnell dated 21st December, 1828.
[ii] Ibid, Page 63 – Letter to George Richmond dated 14th October, 1834.
[iii] Vaughan, William, p. 115c.
[iv] Honour, Hugh. Romanticism London Allen Lane (Penguin Books Ltd.) 1979 p. 86.
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