Book review: Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Samuel Palmer was an unlikely radical. He was a portly, wheezy High Tory Anglican with a penchant for roast goose, snuff and green tea. But for a few years in the 1820s and early 1830s, from his fastness in a snug Kentish valley, he painted pictures that are unlike anything else produced at the time and stand among the most daring examples of pastoral in any medium.

Turner may have shown the native landscape in all its drama and Constable reconstructed it through an accretion of detail, but it was Palmer who captured something almost indefinable - its spirit, and its specifically Christian spirit at that. From his home in Shoreham he pulled the steep hills of the Darent valley about him like a duvet and distilled their woods, sheep, gardens and labourers into a pure essence: "The Dream of England".

In true prophet-without- honour fashion, Palmer's Shoreham landscapes were largely unknown at the time. They were the product of a 12-year period at the beginning of a long working life, during almost all of which he remained the most minor of fringe artists.

So special do those prelapsarian images seem to us now, however, that although they are small in scale they overshadow his other work. Art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston's biography is an attempt to give equal weight to the rest of his career.

It is not the easiest of tasks. Kenneth Clark described Palmer as the English Van Gogh, but while the Dutchman had madness, ear-lopping and suicide to enliven his life story, Palmer's litany of failure was waymarked by an earnest religiosity and genteel poverty.

Campbell-Johnston fastidiously recounts the shallow life trajectory that took Palmer from a middle-class London boyhood to forming the Ancients - a band of fellow pastoralists with medieval inclinations - to the meeting with William Blake that inspired him to look at nature with an inner eye and on to the long hardscrabble years that followed his brief visionary burst in Shoreham.

Perhaps it was because these near five decades were a period of such protracted greyness, punctuated by dying children and an increasingly moribund marriage, that Palmer poured so much colour into overheated paintings of sunsets that proved hard to sell. It was only late in life, in his etchings and a series of watercolours to illustrate Milton, that he recaptured something of his former transfigurative intensity and won a degree of critical acceptance.

While Campbell-Johnston gives the man full measure, there is, paradoxically, little analysis of individual pictures. Hers is a descriptive rather than an explanatory book and perhaps that is why the exact nature of the "mysterious wisdom" of her title, which enabled the painter to achieve such a resonant vision of spiritual Nature, remains, in the end, a mystery.