Samuel Palmer Trail Preview

The full route is 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometres), and takes about 2.5 - 3 hours.

There are two small sections of road walking between stop points 10 and 11 (125 metres) and between points 11 and 12 (550 metres), and one other road crossing just after stop point 8. Please take extra care along these narrow sections because they are along narrow country lanes with no pavement.

There are some hard surfaced paths around Shoreham village but most of the walk is on unsurfaced paths that can be muddy in wet weather and can also be uneven under foot. Some of the route follows the Darent Valley Path. There are several climbs and descents (some steep) as the trail passes between the top and bottom of the valley so it is recommended that you have a good level of fitness and pace yourself on the walk.

There are steps at three locations on the trail; (1) five steps (upwards) at stop point 8, (2) four steps (downwards) at stop point 12 and (3) two large steps (downwards) on the way down from Shoreham Cross. There are two sections of road walking between points 10 and 11 and between points 11 and 12 and one road to cross after point 8; please take extra care. There is one stile at Redmans Lane after stop point 10.

The shorter route is 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometres), and takes between 45 mins - 1 hour.

It is possible to do a shorter circular route of the trail around stop points 1 - 6. It is mainly around the village of Shoreham with a small section alongside the River Darent along the Darent Valley Path. There are no steps on the shortcut route but there is one ascent and some uneven terrain near stop point 6. The shortened version may be preferable for those was particular access requirements or those who would prefer a less strenuous or short walk (you can always listen to the audio for stop points 7 - 12 at home afterwards).

From Shoreham station, make your way down to Shoreham village (10 - 15 minute walk). Turn right out of the station and walk down Station Road, passing the golf course on your left. Follow the road around to your right and then you will see the church in the corner opposite the pub. There is no pavement from the station to the village so please take extra care when walking along the road edge.

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"Good day to you. A heartfelt welcome to Shoreham and my “valley of vision”, a valley, one of my friends observed, so hidden it seemed “as if the devil had not yet found it out."

"Many years have passed since I left Shoreham and returned to London, but it was here I spent some of the happiest years of my life and painted what people now say were my most exciting and original works."

“Who better then than I to act as your guide and to tell you all about the time I spent here in my twenties and the paintings this enchanting landscape inspired.”

"It is no coincidence that we are starting here at the church for I was an intensely religious man, my parents and nurse were all Baptists, but from a young age, I felt drawn to the buildings and traditions of the Church of England and this is where I worshipped when I lived in the village between 1826 and 1834. You will see how church spires, in particular, representing as they do the divine connection between earth and heaven, can be found again and again in my paintings."

“I was born in London just off the Old Kent Road so cannot claim to be a countryman but I developed a great love of nature on boyhood walks with my father who was a bookseller by profession. He would take me down to the beautiful meadows and orchards of Dulwich, quoting from poetry and the scriptures as we went."

"Having shown signs of an artistic bent at an early age, a painting tutor was engaged for me. I was taught how to create watercolours according to the naturalistic conventions of the day and by the time I was 14, I had exhibited at both the Royal Academy and the British Institution."

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"Here’s a drawing of me at 14 made by my friend Henry Walter."

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"I made this Study of Old Buildings at Battersea when I was 16 and it is typical of the kind of work I was making at the time but despite this early success, I became dissatisfied with my efforts and began to lose my way, wondering if painting was really for me. It was then, as fortune would have it, I met the painter John Linnell. He took me under his wing, urged me to make close observational drawings from nature and to pay particular attention to trees. I remember describing him then as “my good angel from heaven who rescued me from the pit of modern art”.”

“It was he who introduced me to the woodcuts of Durer and the work of other Northern Renaissance painters such as Van Dyck."

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"With their use of strong line, and well-defined detail they were much more to my taste than the sky sloppers and bush blotters of contemporary watercolour painting, and their work seemed to reflect a spiritual intensity that I felt was so lacking in my own materialistic age.”

“Most importantly in October of 1824, he introduced me to the artist and poet William Blake. I will never forget that first meeting. He fixed his grey eyes upon me and asked, “Do you work with fear and trembling?”

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"If you look at my self-portrait here, I think you will guess what my answer was. “Then, said he, “you’ll do.””

“Mr Blake was a visionary and, since my childhood, I too had experienced visions, moments of intense trance-like connection with nature when it seemed as if "a veil had been lifted and I could see the heavens beyond”. Mr Blake gave me the confidence to leave my conventional landscapes behind and try instead to capture some of these moments of heightened perception.”

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“This was one of the engravings that I saw on my first visit to Fountain Court where Mr Blake lodged. It is an image of Job and his family sitting under a tree, praying. The sheep resting in the foreground, the last rays of the sun going down behind a large church and the rising moon glimmering in the sky, were some of the pastoral motifs that would preoccupy me for the next ten years. But it was a set of tiny woodcuts, illustrations of Virgil's Eclogues for school children, that particularly entranced me."

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“I described them as “visions of little dells, nooks, corners of paradise, models of the exquisitest sense of poetry” and I went about trying to get some of that poetic and shimmering light into my own work.”

"Here is one of the paintings I made soon afterwards."

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“It looks like an engraving, doesn't it? Following the example of Mr Blake, I began to experiment with my materials and I made these images with sepia ink mixed with varying amounts of gum Arabic, after which I applied layers of varnish. I was developing my own style using strong outlines, exploring pattern and design and finding ways to create textural effects. Look how all the darks in this painting are created by a concentration of marks made with a pen rather than with a brush wash.”

“Most people at the time dismissed Mr Blake as a madman but those of us who met together in his two rooms off the Strand, were united in our fervent admiration for him and his work. We called ourselves The Ancients and we were the first artistic brotherhood in the country, at least twenty years before the Pre-Raphaelites got together. "The Ancients”, rather an absurd name for a group of lads mostly in our early twenties or even younger. My cousin John Giles came up with the title because of our habit of harking back to ancient times, the medieval era especially, when, it seemed to us, everything was purer and more spiritual. "The past was for poets the present for pigs”, that is what we believed."

"There were eight of us in all. Francis Oliver Finch, Henry Walter, a friend since childhood, Edward Calvert and of course, George Richmond. We were not all painters. Frederic Tatham was a sculptor, Welby Sherman a printmaker, Cousin John Giles a stockbroker and Fred's brother Arthur was up at Cambridge training to be a clergyman. But as Calvert used to say, we were brothers in Art, brothers in love and brothers for which art and love subsist, the ideal, the kingdom within.”

“London was proving bad for my health as I suffered from asthma so when my grandfather died leaving me with a legacy of £3000, I conceived a plan of leaving London, that great national dust hole, and going to live in Shoreham, a place I had fallen in love with on an earlier visit with my father who as a lay minister, came to preach down here."

“That’s enough reminiscing for the time being. When you are ready, let our walk begin.”

From the church, turn right and walk down Church Street towards the village. Shortly after the pub on the corner, you will find Ivy Cottage on your right.

“Follow me as we make our way down Church Street to where I first lodged with my fellow Ancient, Frederick Tatham, in the spring of 1826."

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"Here is the painting I made, now see if you can spot the cottage for yourselves. Ah you’ve found it. It doesn’t look very different from the drawing does it?"

“My mentor, John Linnell, strongly disapproved of us leaving London for the country saying that we were cutting ourselves off from any possibility of financial success. He was right of course, but that didn’t bother me at the time. I was very idealistic and determined not to sell away "God’s gift of art for money nor for fame." Linnell was forever urging me to paint in a more commercially viable style. He was an extremely strong character with, I’m sad to say, a tendency to domineer."

"So here I am despite my preference for using my imagination, trying to follow his advice. You can see that I’ve made a real effort to faithfully record all the architectural details of the building, paying attention to the different textures of brick and foliage and I’ve even included some real Shoreham inhabitants. You won't find them in any of my other pictures. Here is Farmer Tooth in his stove pipe hat, his old dog snoozing in the sun and there are the two little girls heading off to church in their Sunday bonnets.”

"Now let’s take a look at another painting I made of Ivy Cottage a few years later."

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"I'm not concerned with being realistic here. Bits of nature, I felt were generally much improved by being received into the soul. I wanted to give the scene a pastoral, poetic and timeless quality. The figures come from my imagination rather than life and the colours are richer and more luminous, like those used in medieval paintings.”

“Look hard and you might spot a figure half asleep leaning back against the tree trunk. I took him from a classical statue which I used to draw in the British Museum. I was enchanted by the myth of the shepherd boy Endymion in love with the moon, who chose to be transformed into stone in order to preserve his beauty. You will spot his reclining figure in many of my pictures. Endymion and I, both in love with the moon - but more about that later.”

Continue down Church Street until you reach the bridge over the River Darent. Pause before the bridge at the junction with Darenth Way.

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"Here is a drawing in sepia wash I made of the bridge. The structure has been enlarged since my day but you can still identify remnants of the old medieval pack horse bridge, with its three arches, incorporated in the modern bridge. As you can see, the river was much less enclosed in those days, as well as being deeper and faster-flowing. Encouraged by Fred Tatham, I took up bathing. Like most people in those days, I had never felt it necessary to wash more than once a week but here in Shoreham I began to immerse myself in the river daily, "in order to sweeten my carcass."”

Turn right along Darenth Way (do not cross the bridge), following the Darent Valley Path. Walk towards a large white house (Water House) with a plaque on the left-hand side of the wall.

“When Tatham had to return to London, I left Ivy Cottage and took up residence at a somewhat uncongenial cottage which the other Ancients soon named Rat Abbey, for obvious reasons. I lived austerely on a diet of eggs, milk and apples and never drank anything stronger than cider.”

“In 1828, my circumstances were much improved when my father, accompanied by my younger brother William and my dear old nurse Mary Ward, came down from London to live here at Water House. We lived in just part of the building. The grand façade you see now, was not added until after we left. Even so, it was a great deal more comfortable than my former lodgings.”

“Take a look at this plaque on the wall to the left of the gate. I am not a vain man but I can’t help feeling I was never truly appreciated as an artist in my lifetime so it gives me a little thrill of pleasure to see this erected in my memory. I notice they have generously added three years to my life. Ah what I would have given for those years? For a start I could have completed the etchings for my translation of Vergil’s Eclogues … but I am straying from the point.”

“Where was I? Oh yes, Water House of course and my early days. I can recall some wonderfully convivial evenings here when we Ancients got together. I would sing or play the fiddle while Finch accompanied me on the pianoforte and in the winter, we would sit by the fireside with a great gorge of poetry books to get up the dreaming and a plentiful supply of my favourite gunpowder tea. My father, God bless his soul, was endlessly hospitable. He would think nothing of giving up his bed if one of the Ancients turned up late at night having made the journey from London.”

"I had once been a bit of a dandy but after catching my reflection in a shop window, I was forced to accept that I really didn’t have the stature or the figure to be modish. So I decided to exchange fashion for practicality. Mary, my old nurse, kindly stitched a long voluminous cloak for me. It was a marvellous garment with great roomy pockets which I would fill with all manner of things, sketchbooks, pencils, nuts and apples. Once, when I was walking down a London street, an egg yolk in a bottle buried deep in one of those pockets, exploded in a sulphurous bomb. I can still recall the terrible smell and the shocked faces of all who were passing by. It was intended for mixing with pigment but had been quite forgotten about. It is all so much easier now that paint comes in tubes.”

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“In summer, I was never without a wide brimmed straw hat. It makes an appearance in more than one of my Shoreham pictures and you can see it gracing this sketch of me by Henry Walter.”

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“Here is another portrait of me, a miniature by George Richmond. You see how I have let my hair grow and have the makings of a beard. We all grew beards for a time although it was long before it became the fashion. It’s a tad idealised I agree but you needn’t worry, he was just as capable of poking fun at me."

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"Look at this drawing where I’m portrayed shuffling along with my laces undone, hair all straggly and absent-mindedly clutching an umbrella by the wrong end! I’m a complete disgrace."

Follow the small lane to the left of Water House and pause at the green.

“For all our earnest prayerfulness, you must not think we were incapable of merriment. We loved jokes and puns, humour and nonsense, nor were we averse to a spot of Gothic horror. On one occasion, when Mr Blake came to visit, we stirred ourselves up into a delicious state of fearfulness at a nearby haunted house, and sometimes we would act out tableaux down a steep lane where a murder was reputed to have taken place. Once we were mistaken for grave robbers when we paid a visit to a churchyard at midnight. Imagine it. There we were, quietly meditating among the tombs when we were suddenly accosted by a gang of bayonet–wielding night watchmen. That was genuinely terrifying!”

“I was never happier than when we were all together down here but it wasn’t as often as I would have liked. There was a reason for this, I know. I was blessed with an income while the others needed to be in town to earn a living. All the same it was often lonely here without them and when the weather was good, I felt they were missing out on all the glories of the season. If I could walk the route from London in a day why did they fancy Shoreham a hundred miles off?”

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“Oh the splendours of visible creation that I witnessed here in Shoreham!" In this painting of an apple tree laden with blossom, I’ve exaggerated the scale of the flower heads and applied the paint for the blossom in thick globs of opaque watercolour. Some of them are breaking away from the body of the tree to give a feeling of all that divine energy, pulsing through the tree and manifesting itself in an explosion of exuberance.”

“I wanted to celebrate in my paintings "the excess that I felt was the essential vivifying spirit, the vital spark of the finest art." (You can see why I have been called the English Van Gogh.)”

“But who, you may ask, is the woman in the red dress? She is a purely poetic invention of mine. I wanted to take the picture out of the here and now, hark back to the past, and add a dreamlike quality to the image.”

Follow the path along the River Darent until you come to a small bridge after about 300 metres. Cross this and follow the path uphill, pausing at the junction with a footpath to your right along the river. (A shortcut back to the start of the trail is available here by walking up Mill Lane then turning left onto High Street then left onto Church Street).

“This was the site of a paper mill. It had been here since Tudor times and was, I must admit, a most convenient source of drawing paper. All the same I was deeply fearful of the growing industrialisation affecting the countryside and threatening the old rural ways. I was distrustful of all things modern so you can imagine what I felt about the railways but that, thank goodness, was all still in the future when I was living here.”

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"This picture which you can now see in Tate Britain in London, is a little oil painting so small, you might well walk by without noticing it. I think it reveals better than any of my other work my yearning for a world that I sensed was passing, a world that had maybe never existed apart from in my own imagination. I have portrayed the pastor at the front of his congregation, a blessed community of young and old winding back in time protected within an enclosed landscape and illuminated by the kindly light of a lustrous moon.”

“The tree branches at the top of the painting, connect in a form that resembles the gothic arches in the medieval churches that I so loved and, emboldened by the example of William Blake, I felt free to elongate the figures and the buildings as if they were all stretching up towards the heavens. I wanted to create a dreamlike atmosphere, "unlike the gaudy daylight of this world." All the more so when in the very year I was painting this picture, there was such great unrest here in the Weald. Gangs of unemployed farm labourers were burning hay ricks and smashing the hateful new threshing machines which robbed them of their winter occupation. Here in Shoreham, good Farmer Love’s barn was set fire to. It was all very unsettling.”

Continue along the Darent Valley Path by taking the footpath alongside the river. Follow this for just over 1km (0.6 miles) until you get to a wooden bench at the top of a hill; the next stop point. Take time to enjoy the panoramic views of the landscape along this section. The terrain is uneven here and it can be muddy in winter months so take extra care. The path will start to take you away from the river across three fields.

“Some years before I left London, the streets began to be lit with gas lights and, what with all the smoke from the chimneys, it was difficult to observe the night sky there with any clarity. Here it was very different and I would often stay up all night to "observe the constellations and watch the flushes of early dawn".”

“When my companions were here, it was our habit to go on nocturnal rambles, lustily singing hymns and songs as we went. The villagers found our behaviour most curious and named us The Extollagers. I think it had something to do with our sketching stools looking like astrological instruments!”

“There were plenty of astronomers at the time doing their best to demystify the heavens, but for me the night sky will always be full of the mystery and magnificence of the divine. At least a quarter of my Shoreham paintings depict the moon and in the small copy of Milton’s poems that I was never without, I underlined every reference to it."

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"Look at this picture of a cornfield by moonlight. If you glance back along the valley, you will see a strong resemblance to the scenery in the painting. I was going out every day, observing, drawing, absorbing but in most of my paintings, I was not depicting a particular location. They are, rather, a synthesis of my experience of this landscape filtered through the imagination."

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“These paintings, made in ink, are examples of what I called my Blacks or Little Moonshines. They are much less stiff and graphic than my earlier works in ink that I showed you. I was experimenting with ways of creating light in monochrome and would employ a whole range of tones from the deepest velvet darks, to the bright white of the paper, sometimes even scratching into the paper to reveal the highlights. In this painting I have depicted my favourite altocumulus clouds gathering in an arc around an enormous radiant moon, so large that it dwarves the shepherd, while the burly sheep in the foreground seem to echo the shapes of the clouds above.”

“In my pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses, I was alluding to the pastoral tradition in literature in which rural life is depicted in an idealised manner, a peaceful idyll where man lives in harmony with nature. But I did not want my pictures to be simply idyllic. They are spiritualised pastorals full of awe and solemnity and often charged with a wistful sense of loss and yearning.”

“In this painting of a shadowy glade, sheep slumber in safety and contentment while the two figures, lit by silvery strands of ethereal light, seem poised in contemplation of the eternal.”

Keep following the footpath for about 300 metres until you come to a hop field with hop poles/supports in the foreground and lavender fields behind.

“What a beautiful valley this still is. In my day of course, there were many more farms and it was highly cultivated, full of hop fields and orchards, oast houses and granaries, and wherever you looked, people working on the land.”

"I made many drawings of its wooded slopes and fields. After all, despite myself, I doubt not that there must be this study of creation as well as art and vision."

"Here are two of them."

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"As you can see, the first is carefully done with great attention to detail but looking at the second drawing, I am struck by its boldness and spontaneity, for in my later years my work became much more restrained. Look how the strong diagonal cuts across the foreground, compressing the space rather than leading you into the picture as was customary. You see, we were not troubled with aerial perspective in the valley of vision.”

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“This little 'black' of mine portrays the "lingering dying ray of twilight," a time of day that I found particularly poetic. It bears witness, I feel, to all those previous studies of trees and their leaf shapes that I made under the direction of Mr Linnell. Rather than depicting a mass of generic foliage, I have been attentive to the individual characteristics of each tree. I am experimenting with distorting scale here too. Look at the preternaturally large stooks of corn and the tree in the foreground with its magnified leaf shapes silhouetted like cutouts against the pale sky.”

“When the inspiration took hold of me, I would start off drawing with rapid and vigorous pen work, making any changes as I went. You can see that I’ve added the figures later in the process integrating them within a network of previous lines."

“Aah. How I loved this enclosed landscape, protected by hills, framed by trees and all rounded into curves. “I have beheld as in the spirit,” I wrote in a letter to Richmond, “such nooks, caught such glimpses of the perfumed and enchanted twilight as passed through the intense purifying, separating, transmuting heat of the soul’s infabulous alchemy”. But it wasn’t always like that. "If my aspirations were very high, my depressions were very deep. When I fell into one of my fits of melancholy, this tranquil valley became for me a fen of scorpions, stripes and agonies.” Well that’s enough of these dreary thoughts, time to walk on."

Take care crossing the road and go up the steps. Turn right and follow the path alongside the fields until you reach Lullingstone Country Park. Toilets and refreshments are available here (during opening hours). Follow the footpath around to your left then uphill along the waymarked path to the top of the meadow. Take a break at the top of the hill to enjoy the view.

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"Take a moment to catch your breath after such a long climb and while you do so, have a look at these three paintings which I named the Bright Cloud. At this period in my life, I repeatedly made paintings in which huge clouds dominate the composition. These magnificent rolling volumes of light, seem to me an intimation of the divine, making itself felt in nature."

Continue on the path at the top of the meadow through the woodland (black markers) for just under 1km (0.6 miles). Dip down and cross an open area with grassland to your right and old railings to your left. Continue straight up the hill, looking out for ancient oak trees, many of which are hundreds of years old.

“I loved to draw the trees in Lullingstone Park. There were some here so old and venerable, they must have been growing in the days when pilgrims made their way along the Downs to Canterbury."

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“Mr Blake once said that he could look at a knot of wood until he was frightened by it. I would observe things just as intently and in this drawing of an ancient oak, I could not help myself from getting caught up in describing the surface texture of the great trunk, the moss and rifts and barky furrows, before attending to the grasp and grapple of the roots, the muscular belly and shoulders and the twisted sinews of this, the Lord of the forest."”

This section from stop point 10 to 11 is just over 1km (0.6 miles). Continue along the path and after a short distance, take a sharp left turn along another woodland path so that the agricultural buildings on the field edge are on your right hand side. Follow this path until you come out onto a road (Redmans Lane). Cross over the stile and turn right along the road. Take extra care when walking along the road and walk on the right hand side to give better line of sight of any oncoming traffic.After approximately 125 metres, you will see a driveway on your left. Follow this and it will take you to a narrow path alongside a fence which soon opens up onto a field. Continue straight across the field with the hedge to your right and open field to your left. Shortly after, the path begins to go downhill with stunning views of the Darent Valley.

"Imagine me on these slopes, drawing in the twilight, the sound of a shepherd’s pipe trilling in the distance or the church bells tolling below. I would often work for many hours without a break for when I was inspired for art, I became quite insensible to cold, hunger and bodily fatigue.”

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"This oil painting of gleaners collecting the left-over corn was a favourite subject of mine. A wheat field glows gold as the sun goes down behind the trees, issues from the window of a nearby cottage. But look again, did you notice the great black sow snuffling around in the bushes in the foreground and a straw hat which looks suspiciously like my own abandoned on the path?”

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“My son named this picture the Magic Apple tree and the title has stuck, but there is nothing magical about it in my mind. This was for me an image of the fruitfulness of the earth; fresh green leaves, golden corn, a tree bowed down with ripe red apples, all coming together in praise of a bounteous God.”

This section from stop point 11 to 12 is 1km (0.6 miles). It involves a 550 metre section of road walking with no pavement and road crossings.Turn left onto Cockerhurst Lane and continue downhill. Take extra care when walking along the road. After 350 metres at the T junction with Castle Farm Road, turn right uphill and follow the road which soon becomes Shacklands Road. Continue uphill for a further 100 metres then take the footpath to your left. Continue along this path for about 15 minutes until you get to a gap in the hedge just above the Shoreham Cross (a chalk memorial etched into the hillside).From the Cross, take the diagonal path down the hill to your right, then turn left at the metal gate, through another gate then down the path between the hedgerows. When you emerge on to the High Street, turn right then turn left onto Church Street to return to the church or the station. The trail from Shoreham Cross to the station is 1.5km (0.9 miles).

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"These are two of the topographical drawings I made in 1828 at the request of Mr Linnell. Look at the second image. By walking around you might be able to find the exact spot in the field from which I made the drawing. Can you see the church where we started and the bridge over the river with the Weald stretching out into the distance? The roof of Water House where I lived is peeping out above some trees to the left of the bridge.”

“As time went on, I found my life in Shoreham increasingly difficult to sustain. The other Ancients were getting on with their own lives and careers and could not come and go as they once had. I was lonely and longed for a wife. I was also "pinched by a most unpoetical and unpastoral kind of poverty and the sad realities of life blotted my vision.”

“Every year I submitted works to the Royal Academy. Some years they were accepted for exhibition but I never succeeded in winning any critical acclaim or selling even one picture."

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"Perhaps this painting by Cruikshank of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition might give you an idea of why my little paintings didn’t get noticed.”

“I had purchased some cottages in Shoreham with my legacy but the meagre rent was not enough to live on, so I was forced to look for some other source of income. In 1832 I bought a house in Grove Street in London and began to earn a living by teaching young ladies the rudiments of drawing and painting in watercolour.”

"Although I returned to Shoreham whenever I could, there was now another reason to keep me in London. I had become increasingly fond of Anny, the eldest daughter of John Linnell, who I had known since she was a child and I was overjoyed to find that she returned my affections. We married in 1837 and spent our honeymoon in Italy. My days in the valley of vision were over.”

“And what of those Shoreham paintings? Realising that they were too odd for the popular tastes of the day, I put them away in what I termed my Portfolio of Curiosities. With a wife and children to support and my father in law, Linnell, always on my back, I lost faith in my visionary art and began to make much more conventional paintings, "hoping in this way to struggle up into repute". But I always valued those pictures, viewing them with great nostalgia and from time to time I would give them away as gifts to those I thought might recognise their worth.”

“My only surviving child, Herbert, was sadly limited in his appreciation of my work finding much of it embarrassingly eccentric. He was ashamed at the open way I expressed my feelings in my letters and sketchbooks and thought that I wasn’t “sufficiently reticent”.”

“After I died, he had a huge bonfire. All but one of my Shoreham sketchbooks and goodness knows what else, went up in flames. Poor boy, he thought he was protecting my reputation. I had ensured that Herbert had the rigorously academic art education that I came to feel that I had sorely lacked but in doing so, I had inadvertently contributed to the destruction of my most imaginative and experimental work. He maintained that “no-one would be able to make head or tail of it” and wanted “to save it from a more humiliating fate”.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on him for although I cannot concur with all his opinions, it was he who wrote my first biography and was active in keeping the interest in my work alive. He encouraged Martin Hardie at the Victoria and Albert museum to have some of my etchings reprinted and helped in the planning of an exhibition at the museum in 1926, entitled Drawings Etchings & Woodcuts by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake. It was a huge success. Suddenly everyone was talking about me. Tastes change and it was my Shoreham pictures which were attracting all the attention. They were seen as daringly expressive and unconventional and they resonated with the Modernist ideas of the time.”

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“I became a very important influence on a group of British painters in the first half of the 20th century called the Neo Romantics. Among them were Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Piper and they were followed by a younger generation of artists including John Minton and John Craxton. They were struck by the way I had made my pastoral landscapes a vehicle for a psychological inner state and shared with me a mystical appreciation of nature.”

“I was brought very low by some grievous sorrows in my life, but despite everything, I continued to paint. In my later years, I found great solace in the practice of etching."

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"There in my small study among my inks and gallipots, I worked tirelessly on a series of etchings based on two poems by Milton, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. In them, I feel I retrieved, albeit in a more melancholy strain, some of that dreamy mystic glimmer of my Shoreham works.”

“Even though our artistic practices diverged, a group of us Ancients would continue to meet once a month, and what convivial evenings they were. Richmond, who was there at my deathbed, remained the very closest of friends. He was scornful of our youthful idealism and used to say, “we all wanted thumping when we thought in a dream of sentiment, we were learning art”. But I felt differently and always looked back fondly on my time in Shoreham that genuine village where I mused away some of the best years of my life.”