As an important figure in British Romanticism, Samuel Palmer produced poetic and visionary pastorals. Born in London as the son of a bookseller, he exhibited small landscape studies as a teen at the Royal Academy of Arts by 1820. His artistic mentor and future father-in-law, John Linnell, introduced him to the artist William Blake in 1824. Palmer became one of Blake’s followers in a group called the Ancients, which expressed a mystical vision of nature. They held meetings in Blake’s apartment in London and Palmer’s home in the Kentish countryside of Shoreham, where they embraced nature in a highly personal manner. Palmer’s Shoreham period, from about 1826 to 1832, often revolved around his search for the spiritual and showcased his belief that the natural world should reveal the divine. In 1834 Palmer became disillusioned with his isolated life in the countryside and abandoned Shoreham for London. His work gradually became less intense and his style more traditional until toward the end of his career, when it regained some intensity.
 
By the late eighteenth century, landscapists such as Richard Wilson and Joseph Mallord William Turner had already mined Wales for its spectacular views, and this search for dramatic natural forms progressed in the early nineteenth century with artists such as John Varley, David Cox, and John Linnell. Palmer went on expeditions to Wales in the summer of 1835 via steamer with Edward Calvert and Henry Walter and again in 1836 with only Calvert to explore castles, mountains, and wilderness.¹ He returned to north Wales in the summer of 1837, shortly before he married and set off in October for Italy. The scholar Raymond Lister has commented on Palmer’s production of “some remarkably good pictures, notably of Welsh waterfalls and mountains.”² On his 1837 Welsh excursion, Palmer focused less on grandeur and more on intimate experiences with the lush terrain. This sheet is one of at least two surviving watercolors, both of rapid waters, from the 1837 tour.³ Palmer previously had been impressed by Welsh waterfalls as he traveled to Dolgellau, as documented in a series of six studies that he made during his first two visits in 1835 and 1836.⁴ Alfred Herbert Palmer described his father’s studies of Welsh waterfalls as “elaborate and true to nature . . . his soul was in this work; he rejoiced in the rugged beauty of wild, impetuous currents, no less than in the still translucent depths; and held that a landscape, however lovely, was never perfect without at least some glint of water.”⁵
 
For this study, Palmer was looking upstream at the Machawy River about a mile below Craig Pwl Du waterfall and near the confluence with the Wye River.⁶ Three hills are noticeable in the distance, with the central one being the Begwyns. The precise manner in which Palmer described his location and dated the drawing on the lower right corner of the vertical sheet suggests that he made it on the spot. Its spontaneity is seen in his quick layout of the composition’s elements in black chalk and layered color washes. Before arriving at the destination of this drawing, Palmer, on June 24, 1837, made an elaborate, expansive study on a gray sheet of paper treated in a similar way with the same materials. He sketched a weir and stretch of Dulas Brook, a tributary on the Wye running through the Cusop Dingle valley, about thirty miles away from the location seen in this drawing (fig. 55.1).⁷ —Dena M. Woodall