Samuel Palmer and the English Pastoral
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Begins: Tuesday 8 October 2019
Until: Wednesday 9 October 2019
(6 pm) - The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
- Lecturer: Malcolm Andrews
This lecture takes an opening look at the English pastoral tradition in verse and painting, and then concentrates on Palmer’s development of the genre, in the moonlit valleys of Kent’s Shoreham village and then more broadly in his later life in drawings and paintings. He created some of the most beautiful pastoral idylls in English painting and was a passionate lover of England’s landscapes. Writing from Italy he dreamt of the return home: ‘we shall together thread the garden’d labyrinths of Kent, and on the thymy downs, by twilight, listen to the distant shepherd’s pipes or village bells.’
The lecture will be fully illustrated with examples from Palmer’s work.
Lecturer
Malcolm Andrews is Professor (Emeritus) of Victorian and Visual Studies, University of Kent. He was for 30 years the Editor of The Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, and a past President of the Dickens Society of America. His special interests are in Dickens and in landscape art. Widely published articles and books, his most recent (2021) being A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, on the personality of English rural scenery as represented by writers and artists of the nineteenth century, published by Reaktion Books
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