Review by Choice Review
Vaughan's substantial, fully illustrated, color monograph on British Romantic landscape artist Samuel Palmer arrives a decade after the author organized, with Elizabeth Barker, a major Palmer retrospective for the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like the retrospective and its catalogue, Vaughan's most recent contribution presents Palmer's career chronologically and comprehensively. The emphasis here, however, is on situating the artist's visionary, primitivist work firmly in the social, intellectual, and creative fabric of its time rather than interpreting it as the product of a dreamy outsider. Vaughan accomplishes this revisionist task by rereading iconic paintings such as The Magic Apple Tree (c. 1830) with an eye toward Palmer's complex evocation of spiritual intensity. Vaughan positions Palmer's association with "the Ancients," a group of artist friends who embraced the values of the past in the face of a rapidly industrializing society, as a radical rather than reactionary arrangement. Vaughan has created an organizational structure that includes close attention to the geographic contexts of Palmer's oeuvre, whether those are London neighborhoods, such as Bloomsbury, or more far-flung locales, such as Rome, in order to reassess this important body of work that, Vaughan shows, made a significant impact on 20th-century British art. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Kimberly Rhodes, Drew University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
