Evening Church, by Samuel Palmer, is based on the artist's home village of Shoreham in Kent. Palmer was a follower of the visionary poet and artist William Blake. In this scene, he suggests the spiritual purity of life in the country, centred round the village church.

Tate curator Christine Riding:

'Its other-worldliness is somewhat underlined by the fact that it's an evening twilight view with a full moon in the background and the church is in the centre with the spire, which of course dominates the composition as the church indeed would have dominated the village itself. And then around it I mean literally symbolically are the cottages that the villagers live in, although they themselves are actually rather surreally visualised by Palmer so the little cottage on the right hand side is almost like a sort of hedge almost like a piece of topiary people thought that the country village was an organism that had grown naturally and that the people within it were also growing with it so it was a sort of time honoured natural community that was purer than that of the city which was manufactured and constructed.