The Goatherd

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)
The Goatherd

Pen and black ink and watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour, gum arabic and scratching out, squared for transfer
20.2 by 28.4 cm., 8 by 11 in.

Provenance:
Francis William Bourdillon (1852-1921);
S.C. Reiss;
With Agnew's, London, 1958, where bought by George Goyder;
George Goyder (1908-1997), his sale, Christie's, 5th June 2006, lot 58;
Private Collection, UK

Literature:
Carlos Peacock, Samuel Palmer - Shoreham and After, 1960, pl.6;
Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.211-1, no.684, ill.

Exhibited:
London, Agnew's, Annual Exhibition of Watercolours, 1959, no.26;
Reigate, Town Hall, Samuel Palmer and John Linnell Exhibition, July to August 1963, no.11;
On Loan to Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1992 to 2004

This relates closely to a sketch in the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled `A Tower City or The Haunted Stream' (see William Vaughan, Elizabeth Barker and Colin Harrison, Samuel Palmer - Vision and Landscape, exhibition catalogue, 2005, p.149, ill). It is on the same sized street, has a similar composition and is also squared in pencil. As the squaring suggests, the V and A watercolour is a study for a larger finished watercolour (op.cit., no.150) in the Rijksmuseum which is an illustration to a part of Milton's `L'Allegro' exhibited at the Old Water-colour Society in 1868.

This watercolour may therefore be a study for an unrealised, or lost, illustration to Milton and is likely to also date from the late 1860s.