Landscape with watermill

This landscape is typical of a type of pastoral scene that Samuel Palmer developed during the middle years of his career in the 1840s and 1850s in a determined effort to break with the intensely personal, visionary style of his youth and paint more commercially acceptable pictures. The conception of the watercolour is indebted to the landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Jacob van Ruisdael. The work also shows Palmer’s liberal use of bodycolour to attain richly variegated surfaces through stippling, dotting and dappling.