CHILD PRODIGY SAMUEL PALMER was just fourteen years old when he first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1819. A delicate and withdrawn child, he experienced intense and disturbing visions as a boy, while developing a love of the Bible and poetry that remained a lifelong inspiration for his art. Influenced by William Blake and John Linnell, he became the most visionary and mystical landscape painter of the Romantic era in England...

CHILD PRODIGY SAMUEL PALMER was just fourteen years old when he first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1819. A delicate and withdrawn child, he experienced intense and disturbing visions as a boy, while developing a love of the Bible and poetry that remained a lifelong inspiration for his art. Influenced by William Blake and John Linnell, he became the most visionary and mystical landscape painter of the Romantic era in England.

Previously issued in a special limited edition, this volume reproduces the only sketchbook from Palmer’s visionary years not to have been destroyed by the artist’s son after his death in 1881. Its pages vividly illustrate the crucial period when Palmer, a nineteen-year-old in the grip of religious and artistic fervour, first experienced his revelatory vision of a divinely ordered heaven on Earth located in the landscape and conmmnity of a still deeply rural Kent. No other source provides such an intimate record of Pahner’s artistic and spirituaI struggles.

All of the sketchbook’s 162 surviving pages are presented in their original sequence and at their actual size. Martin Butlin provides authoritative page-by-page commentaries, notes and an introduction to Palmer’s life, while William Vaughan places the sketchbook in the context of the art and aesthetic of its time.

FRONTISPIECE: Samuel Palmer, Self-portraitc. 1824

PREFACE: The William Blake Trust

FOREWORD: William Vaughan, Palmer and the ’Revival of Art’

INTRODUCTION: Martin Butlin

THE SKETCHBOOK PAGES

COMMENTARY ON THE SKETCHBOOK PAGES: Martin Butlin

APPENDICES A and B

ABBREVIATIONS and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS