Page 34 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Samuel Palmer: Weald of Kent 1834 + Early Morning 1825
There’s a natural pantheism, a mystical identification with nature, a glimpse of the magic of the English countryside, in Palmer’s vision - the enlarged moon, the moonlit night-scapes, the poetry of the wild- things, the fruitfulness of the earth, the integrity of the old pastoral life - all these summoned by Palmer and painted in the period 1817-1835, after which his work was less mystical. It is this period where Palmer identifies with the national spirit - a feeling of longing and nostalgia for something about to change, perhaps to disappear forever - England threatened by the first whispers of Industrialisation, the first railways, the coal-mines, the early factories. None of this was apparent in the 1820s, but with their finely tuned affinity with the countryside and it’s age-old agricultural and spiritual patterns, Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, John Linnell, and other followers of The Ancients (as they called themselves), followed William Blake, anxiously painting their visions of heaven before the Satanic Mills appeared. Palmer quickly became a favourite of mine at Art School in the 1960s - we loved country-walking and the perpetual surprise of new vistas unfolding before us, and the mystical empathy of Palmer, Calvert and the others chimed more readily with my late 1960s sensibility than did the more rational Constable (although Turner got it completely right).
John Linnell: The Sheep Drive 1863 - the work of The Ancients influenced the Pre Raphaelites well into the later 19th century