An unconventional pastoralist: on Samuel Palmer

The painter Graham Sutherland played a large part in the revival of interest in Samuel Palmer (1805-81) in the 1920s and 1930s and it was he who later referred to Palmer as “a sort of English Van Gogh”. The appellation has been decried as far-fetched, but there is more than a grain of truth in the comparison between the Dutchman who gave up his career in the church and turned to art as an alternative form of preaching, and the Englishman who tried his whole life to balance the claim