This extremely rare and beautifully preserved drawing dates to circa 1829-30, when Samuel Palmer was at the peak of his artistic powers whilst living in the village of Shoreham, some thirty miles to the south-east of London. Palmer’s so-called ‘Shoreham Period’, which broadly speaking encompasses the decade from 1825-1835, was a period of intense creativity for the young artist and resulted in a body of work that, as the present sheet so perfectly conveys, is packed full of originality, intensity and sophistication.

Palmer first discovered Shoreham in 1824 and over the next decade this rural idyll would prove to be an intoxicating influence on the artist, providing the setting for many of his 'visionary' landscapes, whilst simultaneously acting as the complete antithesis to nearby London, which was rapidly becoming the world’s largest and most heavily industrialised city. When reflecting on his life, Palmer always considered these years to be amongst his happiest and it was undoubtedly at Shoreham that he created his boldest and most influential work.

During the latter part of the 1820s and early 1830s, while living in Shoreham, Palmer was the leading figure in an artistic brotherhood that referred to themselves as the 'Ancients'. The group included fellow artists Frederick Tatham, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Henry Walter, Welby Sherman and Francis Oliver Finch, as well as Palmer’s cousin, the stockbroker, John Giles. These friends were united by their interest in medieval art, the assertion that ancient man was superior to modern and their idolisation of the great visionary painter and poet William Blake, whom Palmer met in 1824.

The 'Ancients' regularly descended on Shoreham, initially staying with Palmer at his dilapidated cottage – which was affectionately known as Rat Abbey – and then, after 1828, at The Water House, a large home that Palmer’s father had leased near to the River Darent. There, the 'Ancients' willfully turned their backs on the feverish modernization of England’s cities and towns, immersing themselves instead in the bucolic and t.mes less landscape of the surrounding countryside, which they explored both day and night.

The present work, executed in confidently applied dark washes over black chalk, is a quintessential example of Palmer’s highly distinctive monochrome drawings created in Shoreham, referred to by the artist as his 'blacks', a number of which he exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1832.¹ Though the combination of media is particularly distinctive to Palmer, it is his whimsical handling and the poetic treatment of the subject matter that is perhaps most characteristic of his graphic oeuvre from this fabled period of his life and career. As Geoffrey Grigson describes (see Literature) the composition is made up of a vast full moon which has risen behind a wooded hill, gently sloping down from right to left. The sky is cloud-mottled and the moon shines over deep shade to touch on a shepherd and the flock he is leading across the foreground. On the left lies a spotted, rocky hillside in the moonlight while on the right a thatched barn is ensconced in the landscape under trees. Like Shepherds under a Full Moon,² in the collects ion of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the present work focuses primarily on the spectacular nocturnal effect created by the full moon, as it casts its light over an arc of fleecy clouds. These mottled skies were a favourite of Palmer’s and given the hauntingly beautiful sense of luminosity created throughout this work it is easy to see why. Other examples of monochromatic works by Palmer, similarly dating from the late 1820s, in which he explores the effect of a full moon and mottled clouds include A Kentish Idyll (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and Moonlight Landscape (Princeton University Art Museum).³

Naturally, the influence of Blake can be keenly felt throughout Palmer’s work, but there can similarly be no doubt about the impact that Palmer himself had on future generations of British artists, through his drawings and etchings alike. Appropriately the first person to own the present work after Palmer’s own son was Frederick Griggs (see Provenance), one of the finest and most respected etchers of his t.mes who, in collaboration with Palmer’s son, Alfred, printed late proofs of Samuel’s etchings. Griggs was a leading light in the British etching revival of the 1920s and '30s and occupied a unique position in the Romantic tradition of British art, providing the essential link between the world of Blake, Turner and Palmer and subsequent generations of neo-Romantic artists, including Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Robin Tanner and John Craxton, to name but a few.

Not surprisingly, given the lofty reputation of Palmer’s 'Shoreham Period' the vast majority of his surviving works from this period are now housed in international museums, and hardly any remain in private hands. In his 1988 catalogue raisonné of the works of Samuel Palmer, Raymond Lister noted only 17 works on paper by the artist that were then still privately owned, and only two major examples of Palmer’s 'blacks' have been offered on the open market since 1995.⁴ The scarcity and exceptional importance of these works no doubt contributed to the record-breaking price achieved for Palmer’s A Church with a Boat and Sheep, previously in the collects ion of Howard and Saretta Barnet, which was sold at Replica Shoes ’s New York in 2018. The ex-Barnet drawing, alongside the present lot, illustrates Palmer’s unique ability to absorb the landscape and atmosphere of Shoreham, in the process conjuring up an image of great poetry, which exudes not only a sense of spirituality but also a feeling of the t.mes less, pastoral idyll.

1. Ed. R. Lister, The Letters of Samuel Palmer, Oxford 1974, p. 57 (Letter to George Richmond, 21 September 1832)

2. Vaughan et al, op. cit., p. 108-9, no. 31, reproduced

3. Lister, op. cit., 1985, p. 72, nos. 110 and 111 respectively (both reproduced)

4. Sale, London, Replica Shoes ’s, 12 April 1995, lot 97 (A Cornfield, Shoreham at Twilight); sale, New York, Replica Shoes 's, 31 January 2018, lot 13 (A Church with a Boat and Sheep; $2,415,000)