Dark of the sun

Samuel Palmer painted golden landscapes that seem pickled in honey, but his visionary work met with mockery and only found recognition long after his death, as Maev Kennedy discovers

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PINK blossoms explode on a tree, a hillside dissolves into autumn gold, a shepherd and his sheep lie safe in the crook of a hill and gleaners still toil at the end of a long harvest day, stars already blazing above them. These dazzling pictures now adorn a smart pub in a pretty Kent village, but patrons of the Samuel Palmer in Shoreham might be surprised if its artist namesake shuffled in, a stocky figure in thick, scratched spectacles, a wide-brimmed straw hat and a huge shabby coat with enormous pockets, possibly singing hymns or reciting lines from Milton at the top of his voice.

"The treasury of stored images would last him the rest of his life'

He didn't always look like that. The earliestknown image of Samuel Palmer, the 220th anniversary of whose birth falls this month, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. It is an extraordinary self-portrait of the 19-year-old artist, on brown paper in heavy charcoal with white highlights, giving his babyish face, under its shock of rumpled hair, a slightly bruised appearance: he looks into the future with an expression of sadness and apprehension.

The anguish of that haunting picture is deceptive. Palmer was born on January 27, 1805, in a Georgian house off the Old Kent Road in Newington, London, into slightly shaky middle-class respectability. His father was given to impulsive and usually disastrous decisions, repeatedly moving his family and variously becoming a bookshop owner, a preacher, a country gentleman—supported by his brother—and the founder of a school that collapsed within a year. He did pass on a passionate love of books, which became the greatest solace of his son’s difficult life.