Palmer, Samuel - In a Shoreham Garden - art postcard

Through John Linnell, he met William Blake in 1824. Blake's influence can be seen in the works he produced over the next ten years or so, which are generally reckoned to be his greatest. These works were of landscapes around Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in the west of the county of Kent. He purchased a run-down cottage, nicknamed ""Rat Abbey"", and it was there that he lived from 1826 to 1835, depicting the area as a demi-paradise, mysterious and visionary, and often shown in sepia shades under moon and star light. There Palmer also associated with the group of Blake-influenced artists known as The Ancients (including George Richmond and Edward Calvert). They were among the few who ever saw the Shoreham paintings since, as a result of attacks by critics in 1825, he only ever opened those early portfolios to selected friends.

Palmer's somewhat disreputable father � Samuel Palmer senior � moved to the area, his brother Nathaniel having offered him an allowance that would ""make him a gentlemen"" and so restore the good name of the family. Samuel Palmer senior rented half of the Queen Anne-era 'Waterhouse' which still stands by the River Darent at Shoreham and is now given the slightly grander-sounding name of 'Water House'. Palmer's nurse, Mary Ward, and his other son William joined him there. The Waterhouse was used to accommodate overflow guests from ""Rat Abbey"". In 1828 Samuel Palmer left ""Rat Abbey"" to join his father at Water House. He lived there for the rest of his time in Shoreham. Later in the Shoreham period he fell in love with the fourteen year old Hannah Linnell, whom he would later marry.

After returning to London in 1835, and using a small legacy to purchase a house there in Marylebone, Palmer produced less mystical and more conventional work. Part of his reason in returning to London was to better sell his work and earn money from private teaching. He had better health on his return to London, and he was recently married to Hannah, daughter of John Linnell. He had known Hannah since she was a child, and when they married she was nineteen, he thirty-two. He sketched in Devonshire and Wales at around this time. His peaceful vision of rural England had been disillusioned by the violent rural discontent of the early 1830s, his small financial legacy was running out, and so he decided that he needed to produce work which was more in line with public taste if he was to earn an income for himself and his wife. In this he was also following the advice of his father-in-law. Linnell, who had earlier shown a remarkable understanding of the uniqueness of Blake's genius, was not as generous with his son-in-law, towards whom his attitude was authoritarian and often harsh.

Palmer began to turn more to watercolour, then gaining great popularity in England. To further a commercial career, in 1837 the couple embarked on a two-year honeymoon to Italy, made possible by money from Hannah's parents. In Italy Palmer's palette became brighter, sometimes to the point of garishness, but he made many fine sketches and studies that would later be useful in producing new paintings. Yet, on his return to London, Palmer sought patrons with only limited success. For more than two decades he was obliged to work as a private drawing master, until he moved away from London in 1862. To add to his financial worries, he had returned to London to find that his dissolute brother William had pawned all of his early paintings, and Samuel was obliged to pay a large sum to redeem them. By all accounts Samuel was an excellent teacher, but the work with uninspired students inevitably reduced the time he could devote to his own art.