Bread Plate by Samuel Palmer, RWS 1805-81

The Shepherd

Samuel Palmer, RWS 1805-81

1827-28

Engraving, printed in black ink on chine appliqué, the backing sheet with wide margins

4 7⁄8 x 3 9⁄8 inches · 12.4 x 8 cm

One of only five impressions recorded

See commentary below

The Fine Art Society, London, has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web. This generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society.

Commentary by Gordon Cooke

The Shepherd is the only Palmer print from the Shoreham period, engraved after a lost drawing by Welby Sherman (Lister 64). Little is known about the engraver, one of ‘The Ancients’. The shepherd is a symbol which unites Christianity and everyday human experience, and the artists who lived with Palmer in Shoreham all used it in their work.

Michael Phillips writes about this work in the forthcoming catalogue for his exhibition William Blake, Apprentice & Master, to be staged at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2014. He points out that it relates closely to Dürer’s Melancholia I, an impression of which hung close to Blake’s engraving table and remained one of his prized possessions.

Reference

Cooke, Gordon. Samuel Palmer, His Friends, and Followers.Exhibition Catalogue. London: The Fine Art Society, 2012. No. 23.

Dodgson, Campbell. The Print Collector’s Quarterly 18 (1931): 198–200.

Grigson, Geoffrey. Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years. London, 1947. Pp.67, 169 no.59.

Lister, Raymond. Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer. Cambridge, 1988. pp. 251-52, no. P2.

Lister, Raymond. ‘Welby Sherman and Samuel Palmer’s The Shepherd’, The Connoisseur (July 1977): 212–13.

Last modified 25 May 2014