Art Throb #16: The Magic Apple Tree (1830) by Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), The Magic Apple Tree (1830)

Drawing (pen, Indian ink and watercolour on paper)

349 x 273 mm

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

It's there particularly in the mornings and evenings – the lower temperatures and changes in the light which, while gilded, is less intense, more nuanced. Leaves are still green, but ivy is deep red. Autumn is edging in on summer.

If ever a painting were appropriate, it's this one. While the title The Magic Apple Tree is a misnomer, chosen by Samuel Palmer's son after his father's death, its magical properties are more metaphorical than literal. With a church at the centre, this is clearly a painting about divine abundance as manifested in a bountiful harvest – the fruit on the tree and the bales in the cornfields. Gleaming gold against an early evening sky, these cornfields are the backdrop to a valley of overlapping hills and slopes, with a pathway down which the eye is led to the church nestling amid overloaded apple trees. Bathed in beatific autumn light and rendered in rich and bold glowing colours, nature gets all the glory, while the church is hidden in shade, simply delineated, a quiet presence at the heart of the painting, with the overarching trunks of more trees framing the pathway and mirroring the shape of the spire. This is a highly romanticised pastoral idyll in which God in the form of the natural world is shown to be generous, nurturing, sheltering and protecting.

Yet there is something mystical about the way in which a familiar scene is rendered extraordinary. Heavily influenced by his friend and mentor William Blake, Palmer has been described as a 'visionary' painter, and his techniques save the painting from complete sentimentality. Although this is one of a series of real-life scenes Palmer painted during the period in which he lived in Shoreham in Kent, here he seems to be an early pioneer of "paint what you feel, not what you see", an approach that pre-empts expressionism by many years. Its suggestive delineation, broad strokes and colour applied in blobs suggest Palmer was starting to abandon realism in favour of an artistic experimentation that was ahead of his time (a similar technique can be seen in his Garden at Shoreham, in which blobs of paint are applied to create an impression of branches overloaded with apple blossom).

So daring and abstract were these images that Palmer kept them hidden away in his 'Curiosity Portfolio' after attacks by critics (that they are also watercolours on paper, a more intimate and less costly form of artistic expression than expensive oils on canvas intended for public display, reinforces that they were never intended to be viewed by the general public). The only people ever to see them in his lifetime were his fellow members of The Ancients, a group of artists brought together by their admiration for William Blake. In 1809 much of Palmer's work was destroyed by his son, who burnt notebooks, sketches and completed works feeling they would not be understood, and wanting to protect his father from humiliation. That Palmer junior chose to name the above painting The Magic Apple Tree, thus making the apple tree the centrepiece and focus of the painting, suggests that it was the painting's execution that disturbed him most. The apple tree is magic because it does not correspond to how one should look either in real life or on paper. At once suggestive and detailed, the tree is curious and inassimilable, as reality is transformed into an imaginative vision too intensely personal to comprehend.

I'm always moved by Samuel Palmer images, especially when I set them within the context of his life. Misunderstood by the conservative art establishment, he was seen as a failure by his parents and forced to produce conventional work to support himself and his family. His more daring work suffered with the need to produce more saleable, less experimental pieces more in keeping with public tastes, while working as a tutor also reduced time for painting. In 1861 his later years were beset with the tragedy of the death of his 19 year-old son, which sent Palmer into deeper reclusiveness so that he died in obscurity. His work remained unrecognised and it was only relatively recently that it started to gain wider recognition for its innocence, purity of vision and genius.