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Samuel
Palmer
(Newington,
south London 1805 – 1881 Redhill, near
Reigate, Surrey)
The
Willow
The
Willow
Alexander 1 ii/iii, Lister 1 ii/iii
117 x 80 mm (bevelled plate mark); 90 x 67 mm (etched image); 225 x 151 mm (sheet)
Etching,
1850. Finished state, with the additional line
in the sky. The plate signed and dated (the 5 being
in reverse). First published state, in The
Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer by A H Palmer,
1892. On wove paper, a pale stain in the right
margin, just affecting the blank plate border.
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Additional
Information about the Print
Palmer’s first etching, his probationary plate for membership of the Etching
Club, was based on a watercolour study (twice the size of the etching) of a willow
tree he had painted shortly before - now in Manchester City Art Gallery.
Palmer
made closely observed tree studies throughout
his career. The etching reverses the tree and
Palmer further elaborated the scene into a finished
landscape composition, adding a swan, watering
cattle and a distant landscape with a tower.
It is his only etched landscape without a direct
human presence, though the cattle and the distant
tower are suggestive. The treatment of the willow
itself recalls his admiration for Claude Lorrain’s trees. Some of the lines in the sky
are ruled, a common practice in 19th century reproductive engraving, but the
advice of Thomas Creswick at the Etching Club deterred him from its use again.
On
the submission of The Willow to the
Etching Club on 19 February 1850 Palmer was unanimously
elected a fellow member.
The Willow was
not included in any Etching Club publication
and remained unpublished in Palmer’s lifetime. His son A H Palmer issued it a decade
later, 1892, in his fuller memoir of his father The Life and Letters of Samuel
Palmer.
(It
would also be one of the five plates printed
by ‘The Trio’ -
Short, Hardie & Griggs* in 1926, and
issued in an edition of 75 impressions by the Cotswold
Gallery, after which the plate was cancelled, the
image being scored through with a vertical line.)
*
See Palmer's Legacy, introduction to the Goldsmiths' School Etchers. |
