I think Samuel Palmer is something of a neglected and underrated figure, certainly in critical circles. He has a revelatory visual approach to the countryside that seems like an irrelevance to those who interpret art principally in terms of its social dimensions.
He didn’t even merit an entry in the reference section of the comprehensive Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, a work that prides itself on including 'all the significant figures' of the period.
I read the comment about it being putting art on the web day, so I took the opportunity to give Palmer a much deserved mention.
He’s certainly an interesting figure.
As a young man, Palmer knew poet, engraver, artist and visionary William Blake. Whilst Blake's art centred around the inner world, Palmer was a painter of the outer world, of visible nature. But there was the same combination of individual genius giving a new reverential significance to landscape. It was an age of technological change, some seeing progress, others, like Blake and Palmer, seeing a threat to natural scenery and traditional ways of life. Against the idea of material advance through technology and industry, Palmer was a visionary materialist. He is one of those artists who give us a new way of seeing familiar scenes - trees, sheep, villages, the night sky, fields with ripened crops.
Nostalgic, backward looking. Critics point out that Palmer’s imagery is far from the reality of rural communities in Britain in the 1820s. True. But Palmer was a believer in a higher reality - an eternity, a heaven — beyond the world in which we live. Also not a popular view with critics. But his paintings, showing shepherds and sheep and rural communities protected by enfolding hills, have never lost their revelatory visual appeal for those open minded enough to encounter him in his own terms.
The only thing I would add is that Palmer's period of poetic inspiration was short-lived and that after the mid- 1830s, his paintings became conventional. But he deserves a wider audience for what he did when the inspiration was with him.
Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer by Rachel Campbell-Johnston - review
The triumphs and trials of the visionary Samuel Palmer
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/15/samuel-palmer-rachel-campbell-johnston-review
Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3647944/Samuel-Palmer-Vision-and-Landscape.html