Palmer & Me

Samuel Palmer was born in 1805 in Southwark, London.
In his early twenties, to escape London’s foul air, he started visiting Shoreham in Kent with a group of likeminded friends calling themselves, ’The Ancients’. They wished to retreat from the spiritually barren urban world and return to nature believing such a pathway would bring them closer to God.
The paintings and drawings made by him at Shoreham are hallucinatory visionary portrayals of English landscape, suffused with the poetic fervour that comes most easily in adolescence.
He left Shoreham in the mid-1830s. and married the daughter of the established painter John Linnell, who had encouraged Palmer in his early years but now tyrannised him, demolishing what self-confidence he had by urging him to paint in a more commercially viable style.

However, In 1850 at the age of 45 until his death in 1881, Palmer recaptured much of his lost vision in a series of small complex etchings that centred around readings of Virgil and Milton.
In September 2016 Eames Fine Art invited all the artists on their roster to share wine and food at their Studio in Bermondsey to launch a novel idea.
Edward Twohig, one of their artists, had over 35 years, painstakingly assembled a complete collection of the Palmer etchings.
He now wished to offer each one of them to an artist to live with for a month and produce a work in reaction.

PALMER & ME ” follows the processes and myriad forms that the contemporary artists use to create their reaction. The artists discuss their approaches and express their feelings about both Palmer’s work and what he means creatively now.
Using 4k cameras the film draws the viewer into detailed visual explorations of Palmer’s etchings accompanied by spoken quotes from Palmer’s notebooks and letters.