The Ancients

'The Gleaning Field' captures the spirit of late summer and with it the glowing essence of Samuel Palmer’s greatest works.

Dating to around 1832-33, it was painted towards the end of the decade in which the London-born Palmer was living in the village of Shoreham in Kent. This was a period of some art historical note, for Palmer, an ambitious young man in his twenties, was at that time the mainstay (and now most celebrated member) of the first British art movement ever to be founded: a fellowship of nine friends who referred to themselves as The Ancients.

Inspired by the visionary William Blake, they aimed for nothing less than “a complete revival of art”. This would be achieved, they believed, not by following contemporary fashions for precise description, but by returning to England’s far older Gothic tradition. By recovering what they saw as the “richness” of an “era of true faith”, the Ancients set out to capture a sense of the mystical which, to their minds, could transfigure the entire natural world.

Divine Grace

To look at the pictures which Palmer painted in his “valley of vision” is to see rural England through newly enraptured eyes. As he wandered the fields of the fertile Kentish valleys, along wooded ridges and down sloping pastures, among orchards and hop gardens, by hayricks and cattle sheds, he beheld a landscape transfigured as if by some miracle of divine grace. It was as if the world had been "passed through the intense purifying … heat of the soul’s infabulous alchemy,” he wrote. “I really did not think there were those splendours in visible creation.”

This is the splendour he sets out to capture in his exhibition canvas The Gleaning Field. Palmer, a master at portraying the shifting moods of light, conjures the moment a summer storm sweeps over a mown field of corn. A lowering sky intensifies the colour. A patch of stubble gleams pale beneath a brief snatch of blue. Golds and browns gather darker where rain-clouds cast their shadows. A white smock flares bright as it catches a sunbeam. The hills recede into a background of vaporous purples and blues. 

Colour was a pure sensual pleasure for Palmer. He used his time in Shoreham to test out new approaches, to experiment with an ever-bolder handling of materials and methods. Peer closer at the great tawny stooks which, at least as much as the gleaning figures, make the subject of this picture. The golden sheaves, swept upwards, by the strokes of a brush, verge upon the abstract. The still life with its sickle that lies in the foreground lends his sketchbook studies an all but impressionistic feel. Realism melts away into an atmospheric sense of mood.

A Vanishing Tradition

This picture, however, is about more than just aesthetics. Palmer was living in an era of rapid social change. An old agrarian way of life was rapidly fading. Britain was moving towards a modern industrial world. Tradition, perhaps, never feels more charming than when it is vanishing. Palmer sets out to argue for his threatened idyll in a canvas which celebrates pastoral values and the sense of patriotism which
he was convinced they enshrined.

He submitted The Gleaning Field to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. It was selected and hung in the Great Room where the majority of visitors would have had a chance to admire. But, put into competition with such pieces as JMW Turner’s first oil painting of Venice, his peaceful rural scene was all but overlooked.

It isn’t now. Palmer may have struggled for recognition in his lifetime, but now he is feted as one of our great home-grown masters and The Gleaning Field, among the very few pictures to survive from his most important period, must surely be considered an extremely precious find.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Lot 71

Lot 71 ‡ SAMUEL PALMER (BRITISH 1805- 1881)
THE GLEANING FIELD
Oil on canvas
42 x 52cm (16½ x 20¼ in.)

Painted circa 1832-33.

Provenance:
John Giles, a first cousin of the artist (1811-1880)
His sale, Christie's, London, 2 February 1881, lot 620, for 135gns
Bought at the above sale by The Fine Art Society
Possibly William Fothergill Robinson Q.C
Possibly Rev. William Fothergill Robinson, Woodspeen, Newbury
Herbert A. Edwards (1888-1978), Newbury and thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K by 2009
With Lowell Libson
Acquired from the above in 2010

Literature:
Raymond Lister, Catalogue raisonné of the works of Samuel Palmer, London, 1988, no.167

Exhibited:
London, Royal Academy, 1833, no.48
London, Fine Art Society, A Collection of Drawings, Paintings and Etchings by the Late Samuel Palmer, 1881, no.2

The reappearance of this exquisitely painted and highly finished large work on board is an exciting addition to the Palmer's oeuvre, dated to circa 1832-33. It was painted towards the end of his celebrated Shoreham period when Palmer's highly personalised artistic voice that had taken shape at Shoreham from the mid-1820s amongst 'The Ancients' was maturing. It is one of only a small handful of known Shoreham period oils to remain in private hands.  

Click here to see the full catalogue description.

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Auction Details

Auction: 
Wednesday 2 July 2025, 2pm BST
Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE, UK
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Monday 23 - Wednesday 25 June

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Sunday 29 June - Tuesday 1 July 

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