Samuel Palmer was one of the group of men known as ‘The Ancients’, who greatly admired Blake in his later years. Palmer was particularly influenced by Blake’s illustrations to Dr Thornton's Pastorals of Virgil.

For Palmer, nature offered the ‘gate into the world of vision’. He was particularly fond of twilight scenes, in which the light effects heightened the sense of divine mystery in his visionary landscapes. His simplified drawing style recalls the art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he saw as spiritual and uncorrupted, unlike modern art.