Coming from Evening Church
This is one of Palmer's best-known works, painted while he was living in Shoreham in Kent. Palmer lived in Shoreham for about seven years. To him it represented a kind of rural paradise, an ideal landscape, touched by a divine presence. He called the Darent Valley the 'Valley of Vision'. Palmer's pictures of this period are intensely personal, and often have a mystical, even visionary quality comparable to the work of William Blake (1757-1827). Palmer was greatly inspired by Blake's illustrations to Ambrose Philips's imitation of Virgil's First Eclogue (1821) and could have been describing his own work when he wrote of the Blake engravings: 'They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitist pitch of intense poetry...There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul' (A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, 1892, pp.15-16).
