It's here if one wants it, the life (1805-1881) capably narrated. But much of Palmer's adult biography makes for dreary reading. In the Palmer household, money was often tight. Nobody in the family enjoyed good health and two of the three children died, one aged three, the other at nineteen after having been the object of his father's least pleasing habit, paternal micromanagement. John Linnell, Palmer's prosperous artist father-in-law, often leaned on him as well as providing financial assistance. The middle-aged Palmer doesn't seem to have enjoyed much camaraderie other than through the post office, and the letters are sometimes self-pitying. He made a living as a small landowner and private art teacher, and sold the occasional watercolor -many of these being examples of his less interesting work. Reproduced in today's art books they can look garish, although in a Victorian drawing-room lit by candles and a fireplace they may have pleased. Elements of Victorian women's clothing received his censure - specifically extravagant bonnets ("Jezebel tops") and absurd and unhealthful tightly-laced corsets. He lived in places that were increasingly suburbanized thanks to access by railroad from London, contrasting with the Shoreham, Kent, countryside that Palmer and his young artistic friends had explored in the late 1820s. (One of them said the region looked like the devil had not found it out.)
Mysterious Wisdom has received numerous favorable reviews in English papers and was one contributor's "Book of the Year" in the Times Literary Supplement. Constrained by the facts, the author walks us through the gloomy valleys as well as conducting us along the bright peaks. However, the portions of Palmer's legacy that matter most are the early, superlative, Paradisal Shoreham-era pictures and the noble late etchings on themes from Milton and Virgil. In order to focus on the Shoreham period, one might well read Geoffrey Grigson's Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947) before taking up Mysterious Wisdom. Grigson's plates are mostly monochrome. Campbell-Johnston's book has a somewhat scanty eight-page insert of color reproductions. A generous selection of reproductions will be found in Samuel Palmer, 1805-1881: Vision and Landscape by William Vaughan et al.
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