Samuel PalmerA Hilly Scene c.1826-8

This is one of Palmer's finest works, painted shortly after he settled in Shoreham in Kent. The Darent valley appeared to Palmer a perfect, neo-Platonic world and he called it the 'Valley of Vision'. In this picture he creates an ideal image of pastoral contentment, unaffected by the outside world. The unseasonal combination of flowering horse-chestnut and huge ripe heads of wheat symbolise fertility and the richness of the soil, and Palmer may have been inspired by Edmund Spenser's lines from the Faërie Queene (1596), Book iii, Canto VI, beginning 'There is continuall spring, and harvest there'. The prominent church spire signifies a divine presence within the landscape… (read more)