The young man in the picture looks straight out at the viewer. But he is also at the same time staring into himself. His gaze is so distant that it seems almost drugged. What is he thinking? The spectator can’t help but wonder about the world that lies beyond that broad, high brow.
Samuel Palmer was barely out of his teens when he drew his defining self-portrait. It’s hardly the image you would expect from an upcoming artist at that time. He does not strike the pose of the ambitious young professional; make a bid for new clients by parading palette and brush. He hasn’t bothered to shave or to straighten his collar; no comb has been run through his thick tousled hair. This is not a picture that presents a public persona. It is a portrait that asks you to look into a mind.
How can he conjure the visions that move through his entranced imagination, speak of the feelings that swell like an organ fugue in the heart? These are the problems that Palmer faced all his life as a painter. To try to understand them is to enter the head of the dreamer who stares out from this picture, to know why his image, a longstanding favourite of Ashmolean Museum visitors, is also among the most evocative of its Romantic age.
Palmer’s life leads its followers into a world that has been transformed by a visionary imagination, into the landscapes that lie beyond earthly veils. It is a place in which the magical shines through the material, in which nature and heaven are intertwined, in which God in all his mildness blesses man’s harvests and the darkness of night can be innocent and day. This is not the haunt of any workaday painter. It is the home of the artist as mystic and seer and poet.