Landscapes by Samuel Palmer, 19th century

Samuel Palmer
The Bright Cloud
1831-32
drawing
British Museum

Samuel Palmer
The Skylark
1850
etching
British Museum

"English painter, draughtsman and etcher Samuel Palmer was a key figure of English Romantic painting who represented, at least in his early work, its pastoral, intuitive and nostalgic aspects at their most intense. He is widely described as a visionary and linked with his friend and mentor William Blake, though he stood at an almost opposite extreme in his commitment to landscape and his innocent aproach to its imagery. He had none of Blake's irony or complexity and was inspired by a passionate love of nature that found its philosophical dimension in unquestioning Neo-Platonism." – Tate Gallery

Samuel Palmer
The Early Plowman
1858-60
etching
British Museum

Samuel Palmer
Opening the fold
1880
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Samuel Palmer
The Willow
1850
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
gift of Louisine Havemeyer

Samuel Palmer
The Weary Ploughman
1858
etching
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Samuel Palmer
Cornfield by Moonlight
c. 1830
drawing
British Museum

Samuel Palmer
Classical River Scene
1870s
drawing
British Museum

Samuel Palmer
End of Day
c. 1837-39
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

First Light

At sunrise this morning the sofa pillows overcame the obscure undifferentiated murk of their corner, entering the tactile world of volume and texture all in a flash as their highest peaks intercepted the first horizontal beams from the east. Simultaneously, the wall behind them achieved a graduated fade on the diagonal (difficult as that maneuver is, and rarely attempted).

Breakfast

Thursday
6:45 a.m.
San Francisco

This was my second morning arriving at Mabel's place in time to help her get ready for a day at preschool, and then journey there with her. Yesterday on our walk to school we saw five or six wild parrots with green bodies and red heads clinging to a bird feeder suspended from an upper-story fire escape. We stood and watched them for ten minutes, making speculations and remarks. Today I brought in breakfast from the cafe across the street. Mabel picked the cinnamon roll and is shown in the process of unwinding it. She let me have the blueberry bran muffin.

Window

There is a wide west-facing window in the kitchen. At the end of every day some form of sunset can be viewed there.

Frosty Morning

Frosty Morning
1813
J.M.W. Turner

This painting hangs in the Tate in London. Here is the brief and interesting narrative the museum displays on the wall next to it –

"This austere winter landscape was one of the most personal of Turner's exhibited pictures. It records a scene he witnessed while travelling in Yorkshire, and is said to include his eldest daughter, Evelina (in blue), and his 'crop-eared bay' horse (pulling the cart).

Turner was particularly fond of this painting, which he preferred not to sell. It was also admired by contemporary and later critics. The Spectator saw in it 'the true tone of nature imitated to perfection'. Years after Turner's death, Claude Monet saw it and declared it had been painted with 'wide-open eyes'."

Skies

Tivoli

J.M.W. Turner spent the last part of 1827 and the first part of 1828 traveling and painting, first through France and then more extensively through Italy. This was his second such trip and the one where he found the most luminous skies. The sketches seen here were all made with thinned-out washes of oil paint. They remained in the artist's studio after his death in 1851 and eventually formed part of the Turner Bequest to the nation.

Brest

Arcueil

Classical Building

Harbour

Italian Bay

Italian Landscape

Lake Nemi

Sunset Landscape

Rocky Bay

Landscape with Aquaduct

Italian Landscape

Wooden Fruit

Mabel has possessed many pieces of wooden fruit in the three-and-a-half years of her life so far. As an infant she had a wooden fruit puzzle with six pieces, each with its own wooden handle (fragments of that  puzzle can be seen in use here when Mabel was about nine months old – though by then one of the six wooden-fruit pieces had already gone missing for good).

At dawn this past Friday while Mabel still slept, I discovered some different pieces of wooden fruit – carved in half-round, with Velcro on the flat sides – resting silently on a corner of the dining table under the faint rainy daylight emerging from the sky. Their parent-toy was not in sight. They occupied the spot where the week's fresh flowers usually flaunt their faces.

Dawn is the best time for extracting compositions from the semi-random disposition of domestic objects. The rule is that nothing can be touched or altered. Everything must be taken as found.

When Mabel woke up, all this seeming stability dissolved. The apartment began to breathe and vibrate under her hand. Below, with nothing but a tiny plastic spade, she commands the inanimate universe and it leaps to rearrange itself.

Sunrise

The camera was stabilized and I left the shutter open for almost two seconds. According to human eyes the room looked much dimmer than the pictures.

Mabel was still sleeping. Dawn was breaking.

Croissants

Mabel and I passed our croissants back and forth at breakfast, making long torn strips out of hers and a treasure cave out of mine.