Back to the Garden: The Pastoral Vision in Britain at the Delaware Art Museum

“And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang in “Woodstock,” the song that tried to capture the spirit of the generation-defining gathering. For artists working in Britain after the Romantic movement, getting back to the garden—getting back to a sense of the natural world as a spiritual realm—became the top priority. The Pastoral Vision: British Prints 1800—Present currently at the Delaware Art Museum traces the way artists tried to picture the pastoral aspect of British Romanticism over the course of two centuries. The results reveal much about both the art of printmaking and the art of depicting the abstract lurking in tangible reality. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Back to the Garden."

[Image: Morning of Life, 1861. Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). Etching, 5 3/8 x 8 1/8 inches. Gift of Dr. Charles Lee Reese, 1940.]

[Many thanks to the Delaware Art Museum for providing me with the image above and press materials for The Pastoral Vision: British Prints 1800—Present, which runs through August 15, 2010.]

Visionary Company

What could it have been like for a young artist to meet William Blake in person? Intimidating, inspiring, invigorating, all of the above, and more. Through the engraver John Linnell, who would one day become his father in law, Samuel Palmer met Blake in 1824 and was never the same. Born January 27, 1805, Palmer became the one true disciple of Blake’s style. Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job stuck in Palmer’s visual memory for the rest of his life, coloring his perception of nature through their depiction of the pastoral landscape. Palmer eventually superimposed those Blakean landscapes onto the vistas surrounding his home in Shoreham, England, such as Garden in Shoreham (above, from 1820-1830). The garden here literally explodes with fertility, with the top of the tree resembling a mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation. Palmer releases the energy of the atom in such scenes, taking mundane scenery and making it represent the vastness of the cosmos. Palmer tuned in to Blake’s message before tuning in on Blake was cool.

Before meeting Blake, Palmer lived with his father in London and frequently visited the British Museum to study the prints of Albrecht Durer and other masters. This study not only helped further Palmer’s draftsmanship, but also showed him the potential of working in monochrome. Palmer’s A Rustic Scene (above, from 1825) is a watercolor done entirely in shades of brown, which adds to the rustic quality of the image. The brown lends the scene and earthiness that vibrant color might not. Late in his career, Palmer worked heavily in engravings, becoming so demanding in his perfectionism that one printer claimed he rather see the devil walk through his door than Palmer with a handful of corrections to be made. It’s amazing to think of the diversity of Palmer’s eye when you place works such as Garden in Shoreham next to A Rustic Scene.

After Blake’s death, Palmer assumed the mantle of the “visionary” artist in England, the cult figure around which younger artists would gather. A group of young artists calling themselves the Ancients that once surrounded Blake now surrounded Palmer. They longed to be initiated into the spiritual clique that produced such works as Palmer’s Harvest Moon, Shoreham (above, from 1830-1831). Because of earlier criticism of his Shoreham paintings, Palmer refused to exhibit them and only allowed this select society to see them. Many of these works went unseen by the public until the twentieth century. Some were actually destroyed by Palmer’s son, who thought them too feminine and feared they would harm his father’s reputation. Today, modern artists see Palmer’s penchant for color and highly charged landscape as amazingly prescient, just as Blake himself seemed born much too early. Thanks to several museum exhibitions in the last few years, Palmer’s reputation as a great artist in his own right has helped bring him and his artwork out of the considerable shadow of Blake.

Visionary Company

When his friend John Linnell introduced Samuel Palmer to William Blake in 1824, Palmer’s life and art were never the same. Born January 27, 1805, Palmer joined the visionary company surrounding the eccentric poet-painter Blake that later became known as The Ancients. Works such as The Magic Apple Tree (above, from 1830) stem from Blake’s influence, abounding with wild color and florid detail. A child prodigy, Palmer began exhibiting at the Royal Academy at fourteen years of age works patterned on the art of J.M.W. Turner. Turner turned Palmer on to the possibilities of the visionary landscape, but Blake opened up a cosmos of possibility for the young artist. Even Palmer himself grew wary of the powerful influence of Blake, showing his mind-blowing works to a select few initiates who shared his love of the master. While living in the Shoreham region of England in a dilapidated old cottage, Palmer painted the surrounding countryside in various stages of light and dark, often beneath romantic moonlight, as in A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star (above, from 1830). This watercolor shows Blake’s influence quite clearly, resembling some of the illustrations Blake created to accompany his poetry. Although Linnell introduced Palmer to Blake, he had doubts about Palmer’s prospects in his following of Blake’s example, especially after Palmer wed Linnell’s daughter. Palmer always struggled to make ends meet through his art and withered beneath the disapproval of his friend turned father-in-law. Teaching jobs helped with Palmer’s finances, but took valuable time away from his own painting.



In later years, Palmer developed as an engraver, gaining some commercial success while illustrating the poems of John Milton, one of Blake’s favorite poetic predecessors. The Lonely Tower (above, from 1869) conveys the dark romantic mood of much late romantic poetry and early Victorian verse. I’ve always thought that it might have made for a good illustration to Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Just as Blake himself languished in obscurity until rescued by the Pre-Raphaelites, Palmer’s reputation laid dormant until the twentieth century, when his wild colors made him seem less like a madman and more like a Fauvist. Like Blake and so many other artists ill-suited to their time, Palmer found his home in the twentieth century. Sadly, Palmer’s son destroyed many of the artist’s early work after his death in 1881, too embarrassed to have anyone see his father’s “failures.” Fortunately, enough of Palmer’s work survived to give us a glimpse of his greatness.

Fallen Nature

Steeped in the images of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland developed a spiritual vision of nature around him, taking those natural forms and twisting and torqueing them with the pulsating life he saw within. Sutherland, born on August 24, 1903, soon distorted those natural scenes so much that he was tagged as the English Surrealist, and even exhibited with Surrealist groups. When the world itself turned surreal in the dark days of World War II, Sutherland’s friend, the art critic Sir Kenneth Clark, found work for him as a war artist for Britain. The City: A Fallen Lift Shaft (above) shows London during “the Blitz,” a nightmare wasteland of shattered walls and twisted metal. Sutherland’s imaginative world had merged with his real one, but with a sad, sad difference.

In 1946, Sutherland received a commission to paint a crucifixion scene for for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton, England. The result (above) created a new paradigm for religious art in England. Sutherland captured the pathos and disjointed psyche of the postwar world in his Crucifixion as aptly as Matthias Grunewald had expressed the agony of his age in his Isenheim Altarpiece. Sutherland’s Crucifixion was later moved to the Tate Museum, where it stood next to the work of Francis Bacon, whose own triptychs expressed the same angst as Sutherland’s work. Bacon clearly felt the influence of Sutherland, and Sutherland befriended and championed Bacon very early on in the younger artist’s career.

Sadly, not everyone was ready for Sutherland’s type of painting. To celebrate the 80th birthday of Winston Churchill, the British government commissioned Sutherland to paint his portrait (above). Churchill hated it. Churchill’s wife hated it even more and actually destroyed it. This portrait of Churchill clearly shows the cross-influence of Bacon’s portraits, injecting a sense of menace and anxiety into what the British government and the Churchills were hoping would be a laudatory portrayal. Instead, Sutherland seems to merge Churchill’s image with his Crucifixion, affixing the stain of the war onto the visage of the wartime leader, irreversibly bonding the two, just as the two had become irreversibly bonded in the popular imagination. Whereas the authorities wanted a glorified vision of the war years, Sutherland’s honesty and clear-eyed view of war’s destruction could only show those years for the horror that they were.