Customer Reviews

Samuel Palmer, 1805-1881: Vision And Landscape

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You will find no image within this book presented as enticingly as the front cover. There is way, way too much text, competing for space with the images.

I will never understand why publishers do this: choose a reasonably large format for a book because of the visual basis of the subject and then fill up most of the pages with text, so that the images are reduced and are crowded round with it: it shows a complete lack of understanding of how images work.

This is especially annoying as I'm sure most people who might buy this book would be interested primarily in the images of Samuel Palmer, not the thoughts of various art historians.

There are about a ten or so images which show how the book might have been presented, but only two details which use the full page (and even these are only used to divide the book into sections and so have 'Part One' and 'Part Two' spread across them).

I was hoping for a book which might replace my Raymond Lister book on Palmer, which is smaller but grants a full page to each image, and so allows it to breathe. But this new book has been a bit of a disappointment.

So, still worth getting, but sadly not as good as it might have been.

This is surely the most wide-ranging collection of Palmer's work in an illustrated book, of his scetches, paintings and etchings. Furthermore the accompanying essays by experts are excellent.