The lay of the land

As people moved into towns, they wanted peaceful depictions of rural life on their parlour walls, leading artists to look at farming through sepia-tinted spectacles

- Susan Owens

ONE summer’s day in 1824, the 19-year-old Samuel Palmer put his sketchbook in his pocket and walked to a place that haunted his dreams so much he came to call it his ‘Gate into the World of Vision’. What landscape could live up to his description—the Cumbrian fells, perhaps? Or the rugged scenery of the Peak? No, what entranced Palmer were the fields around the village of Dulwich, which he could reach on foot from London, and when he sat down to draw it was in front of unspectacular farmland. That particular day, the heaps of reaped corn lying in lines up and down the field caught his eye; he drew them twice on the same page, entranced by the patterns they made.

Within two years, he had moved to the small village of Shoreham deep in the heart of Kent, where he sketched ploughmen and shepherds, cornstooks and sheep-shearing, mossy-roofed byres and flowering apple trees. The natural forms he drew and painted are exaggerated, almost hallucinatory: each ear of wheat bulges happily, every farmer’s field looks ready to burst with joy. Coming afresh to the body of work he created during these years, anyone would think that South-East England of the 1820s was an earthly paradise of fecund harvests and contented farm labourers. In reality, it was a place of simmering resentment about terrible working conditions and agricultural mechanisation that was shortly to boil over into the Swing Riots.