Samuel Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824, New Edition

A facsimile edition of the only surviving sketchbook by this visionary Romantic painter.

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 A delicate and withdrawn child, he experienced intense and disturbing visions as a boy, while developing a love of the Bible and poetry that remained a lifelong inspiration for his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 by Palmer in existence, now at a reduced price. Its pages vividly illustrate the crucial period when Palmer, a nineteen-year-old in the grip of religious fervor, first experienced his revelatory vision of a divinely ordered heaven on Earth located in the landscape of rural Kent. No other source provides such an intimate record of Palmer's artistic and spiritual struggles.

All of the sketchbook's 162 surviving pages are presented in their original sequence and at their actual size. Martin Butlin provides 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. 163 color illustrations.