SAMUEL PALMER
Newington, south London 1805 – 1881 Redhill, near Reigate, Surrey
The Skylark
Alexander 2 vii/viii, Lister 2 vii/viii
120 x 98 mm (bevelled plate); 99 x 74 mm (image); 364 x 268 mm (sheet)
Etching 1850.
The plate signed.
Published state, as plate 17 in Etchings for the Art Union of London
by the Etching Club, 1857, edition of 500; the only issue.
With the plate number and Palmer’s name added in the lower plate border.
On laid india paper on cream wove.
The sheet gilt-edged on three sides.
£3500
Palmer’s enthusiasm for etching having been awakened by his membership
of the Etching Club, and his first etching The Willow, he would produce three
more plates in 1850. In The Skylark, the first of these and though only his second
attempt in the medium, he established his personal etching style,
recapturing the vision of the Shoreham years.
The critic F G Stephens wrote of it later in The Portfolio in 1872
The refined spirit of this little gem of art and poetry baffle words of description.
Ineffable is the way in which the rays of the sun interpose between us
and the ribbed clouds of fugitive night, giving an idea of palpitation in perfect
accord with the outpouring of the voice of the bird, and the awakening landscape.
The subject is based on a Shoreham drawing of c1832, which in 1843 Palmer had
already taken up again for a small oil panel.
It reflects lines from Milton’s L’Allegro
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise.
The development of the etched image was painstaking, the plate going through at
least 6 states before publication, the composition lengthened, a tree introduced,
a branch extended, the sky re-etched etc.
In Life & Letters A H Palmer records his father’s verbatim account of his problems
with the sky
“I remember … spending a whole day in nearly burnishing out … [the] sky
that was overbitten. The perverse acid would bite skies and nothing else ..."
and comments himself
"what I so much admire in it [is] the delicate upward flush of early dawn over
thin vaporous cloud, … the result of the day's elbow-grease directed,
not by knowledge of any etching technicality, but by knowledge of one of the
most beautiful effects in nature”.
It received its title of ‘The Skylark’ only in 1857, for publication; previously Palmer
referred to it as “Dawn” though in 1850 the Etching Club minutes referred to it
simply as The Lark when it was initially chosen for publication.
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