Samuel Palmer and 'The Ancients'

It is many years since a major exhibition in England was devoted to the work of the whole of Samuel Palmer’s circle, ‘The Ancients’, a group of young men which included, among others, the painters George and Welby Sherman, all of whom were much influenced by William Blake. Most recent exhibitions devoted to Palmer himself have stressed his early work of about 1835–35 – much of it done in the village of Shoreham in Kent – at the expense of his still interesting later work. This has tended to give an unbalanced view of the artist, and the present exhibition endeavours to correct this; it also relates Palmer’s work to other members of the circle, and endeavours to demonstrate that the work of the Ancients is part of a wide European tradition and was created under the influence of artists such as Dürer, Ruisdael, and Nazarenes and especially Claude Lorrain. This fully annotated and illustrated catalogue considers all of these matters and in addition notes the strong literary influences on the work of Palmer, in particular that of the poems of John Milton.