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the head of the dreamer who stares out from this picture, to know why his image, a longstanding favourite of Ashmolean Museum visitors, is also among the most evocative of its Romantic age.
    Palmer’s life leads its followers into a world that has been transformed by a visionary imagination, into the landscapes that lie beyond earthly veils. It is a place in which the magical shines through the material, in which nature and heaven are intertwined, in which God in all his mildness blesses man’s harvests and the darkness of night can be innocent and day. This is not the haunt of any workaday painter. It is the home of the artist as mystic and seer and poet.

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    The Palmer Family
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    O! blessed biography which has embalmed a few of the
    graces of so many great and good people
    from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
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    To stand on the Old Kent Road amid the fumes of the traffic crawling in from the suburbs and the thunder of lorries rumbling off to the coast is to feel an awfully long way from the land of Samuel Palmer; from his slumbering shepherds and his tumbling blossoms, his mystical cornfields and bright sickle moons. But take a turn down a side street, beside the betting shop where cigarette butts scatter the pavement and opposite the fuel pumps of a garage forecourt, and within a matter of paces you will find yourself stepping into what could almost be another world. The noise of cars fades to a dull background grumble, the fumes leak away amid rustling plane leaves. You might even spot a songbird flitting into a garden as you slip between the posts that prevent the passage of vehicles and enter the peaceful enclave of south London’s Surrey Square.
    To the right, behind a row of ornamental iron railings, runs a handsome terrace of houses. They are Georgian. Each has an elegant three-bay façade with a smartly symmetrical pattern of sash windows, a panelled door with brass knocker and a pretty fanlight; a few are distinguished by an old-fashioned lamp bracket arching over the steps that lead up from the street. It is one of these – now number 42 – that is marked out with a homemade English Heritage-style plaque. And it is here that the story of Samuel Palmer starts.
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    Life is always a lottery, but the odds were not good at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Almost a quarter of all babies would have been bundled into their graves before they reached their first birthday, a fraction that rose to more than a third among the urban poor. Palmer would one day learn the pain of loss only too well. But for now he was lucky: he was born into a middle-class family whose comfortable financial circumstances could cushion a few of the world’s harsher blows.
    The surname of Palmer is not an uncommon one. It derives from the medieval nickname for pilgrims who, returning from their long, faithful tramps to the Holy Land, brought home with them palm fronds which they displayed as proof. But the branch of the Palmer family to which Samuel belonged boasted gentlemanly origins. Its members bore arms, tracing their ancestry back to the fourteenth-century Henry Chicheley who, as Archbishop of Canterbury, had been immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry V . In the play, he is the favourite who first urges the King to lay claim to France and, in real life, to atone for his role in disastrous French wars, he founded the Oxford college of All Souls.
    Palmer, however, would relate rather more closely to a later Anglican lineage which included the sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker and the eighteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake. The family also claimed kinship with the Whig politician Charles James Fox who, having filled a number of senior government posts including that of Britain’s first foreign secretary, was still in office when Samuel was born, though he died the following year. ‘My Father used to say that his brother . . . made out their relationship to Charles