Past Events

Revisiting Samuel Palmer

Conference

  • 12 to 13 January 2006
  • 9:00 – 7:00 pm
  • Public Study Room, Paul Mellon Centre

Samuel Palmer has long been celebrated as one of the leading British landscapists of the nineteenth century. His reputation has rested largely on the 'visionary' landscapes of his youth, particularly those created when he was living in the Kent village of Shoreham ca. 1827-35. In recent years, however, it has been recognised increasingly that he also had an important career as a watercolourist and etcher in the Victorian era. This symposium is being held to accompany the major retrospective of Palmer's work mounted by the British Museum in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to celebrate the bicentenary of Palmer's birth.

The first comprehensive exhibition of Palmer's work for nearly eight years, this exhibition and symposium will provide an unique opportunity to reconsider Palmer's career and his subsequent influence. The sessions will consist of a series of papers by Palmer experts and scholars of nineteenth and tweneieth-century art which will both explore Palmer's career in its historical context and consider the nature of his subsequent reputation, notably the role his work played in promoting a particularly British strain of modernism in the twentieth century, and its continued impact in debates about landscape and national identity.