Ink on card
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/samuel-palmer-411" aria-label="More by Samuel Palmer" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Samuel Palmer</a>
Moonlight a Landscape with Sheep
Purchased 1922
adults
agriculture and fishing
animals: mammals
astronomy
herdsman / herdswoman
herdsman / herdswoman, shepherd / shepherdess
landscape
man
moon
moonlight
mysticism
people
religion and belief
sheep
spirituality
wooded
work and occupations
<p>Samuel Palmer was one of the group of men known as ‘The Ancients’, who greatly admired Blake in his later years. Palmer was particularly influenced by Blake’s illustrations to Dr Thornton's Pastorals of Virgil.</p><p>For Palmer, nature offered the ‘gate into the world of vision’. He was particularly fond of twilight scenes, in which the light effects heightened the sense of divine mystery in his visionary landscapes. His simplified drawing style recalls the art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he saw as spiritual and uncorrupted, unlike modern art.</p><p><em>Gallery label, September 2004</em></p>
paper unique ink card
24 March 2003 – 17 November 2003
2003-11-17
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2003-03-24
Blake and Illustration
Collection based display
15 June 2005 – 4 September 2005
2005-09-04
15 June 2005 – 4 September 2005
2005-09-04
2005-06-15
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2005-06-15
A Picture of Britain
Exhibition
21 October 2005 – 28 May 2006
2006-05-28
21 October 2005 – 22 January 2006
2006-01-22
2005-10-21
British Museum (London, UK)
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
2005-10-21
Samuel Palmer, 1805-1881; Vison and Landscape
Loan-out
1 April 2006 – 16 April 2007
2007-04-16
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2006-04-01
Blake in the 1940s
Collection based display
23 September 2016 – 22 January 2017
2017-01-22
23 September 2016 – 22 January 2017
2017-01-22
2016-09-23
Towner (Eastbourne, UK)
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/
2016-09-23
Tom Hammick: Towards Night
Loan-out
12 August 2019 – 17 March 2020
2020-03-17
12 August 2019
2019-08-12
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2019-08-12
Blake Followers
Collection based display
Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep
support: 152 × 184 mm
Purchased 1922
<p>Palmer was fascinated by the atmospheric effects that could be achieved in black and white. In the early 1830s, while living in Shoreham, Kent, he produced a series of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/m/monochrome" title="Glossary definition for 'Monochrome'"><span>monochrome</span></a> works in <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/pen-and-ink" title="Glossary definition for 'Pen and Ink'"><span>pen and ink</span></a>.  This is one of his more poetic works, featuring shepherds tending their sleeping flocks of sheep by moonlight.  When the picture was later <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/e/engraving" title="Glossary definition for 'Engraving'"><span>engraved</span></a>, it was accompanied by these lines from John Milton's <i>Comus</i> (1637):

</p><p>Evening late, by then the chewing flocks<br/>Had ta'en their suppers of the savouring herb<br/>Of knot-grass dew-besprent

</p><p>Palmer's work at Shoreham is intensely personal, but has a mystical, even visionary quality comparable to that of William Blake (1757-1827).  He was part of a circle of artists, followers of Blake and known as <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/t/the-ancients" title="Glossary definition for 'The Ancients'"><span>the 'Ancients</span></a>', including George Richmond (1809-96), Edward Calvert (1799-1883) and Francis Oliver Finch (1802-62).  They shunned the contemporary world and retired into a world of music, nostalgia and dreams. The Ancients would stroll together in the countryside by night, gazing at the stars, and were known among the local villagers as 'Extollagers'. The Darent valley appeared to Palmer a perfect, neo-Platonic world and he called it the 'Valley of Vision'.  In his pictures he attempted to create an image of pastoral contentment, unaffected by the reality of labour. The characteristic rounded hills of Shoreham, visible in the background of the picture, and the crescent moon were later adopted as motifs by artists of the mid-twentieth century.  Often inspired by Milton's poetic evocations, moonlight was a recurring feature in Palmer's work, representing a divine presence in nature.

</p><p>The Shoreham works are characterised by a deliberate archaism or <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/primitivism" title="Glossary definition for 'Primitivism'"><span>primitivism</span></a>. Stylistically they were influenced by the work of such Northern European artists as Breughel, Dürer, Lucas Van Leyden and Giulio Bonasone. They were also partly inspired by Blake's illustrations to Ambrose Philips' imitation of Virgil's <i>First Eclogue</i> (1821). Palmer could have been describing his own work when he wrote of the Blake engravings: 'They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitist pitch of intense poetryThere is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul' (A.H. Palmer, <i>The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer</i>, 1892, pp.15-16). 

</p><p>This work may have been one of a group of what Palmer referred to as 'blacks' which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832.

</p><p><b>Further reading:</b> <br/>Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing and David Rosand, <i>Places of Delight: the Pastoral Landscape</i>, exhibition catalogue, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC 1988, no.100, reproduced p.195.<br/>Raymond Lister, <i>Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer</i>, Cambridge 1988, pp.85-6, no.143, reproduced p.85.<i> <br/></i>James Sellars, <i>Samuel Palmer</i>, London 1974, pp.77-79, reproduced p.79.

</p><p>Frances Fowle<br/>December 2000</p>
Summary
2005-09-15T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div>
    Samuel Palmer was one of the group  of men known as ‘<a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/t/the-ancients" title="Glossary definition for 'The Ancients'"><span>The Ancients</span></a>’, who greatly admired Blake in his later years. Palmer      was particularly influenced by Blake’s illustrations to Dr Thornton's      Pastorals of Virgil.  </div>
<div>
<br/> </div>
<div>
    For Palmer, nature offered the ‘gate into  the world of vision’. He was particularly fond of      twilight scenes, in which the light effects heightened      the sense of divine mystery  in his visionary <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>landscapes</span></a>. His simplified      <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/drawing" title="Glossary definition for 'Drawing'"><span>drawing</span></a> style recalls the art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,      which he saw as spiritual and uncorrupted,      unlike <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/m/modernism" title="Glossary definition for 'Modernism'"><span>modern art</span></a>.   </div>

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2004-09-08T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
adults agriculture and fishing animals: mammals astronomy herdsman / herdswoman herdsman / herdswoman, shepherd / shepherdess landscape man moon moonlight mysticism people religion and belief sheep spirituality wooded work and occupations