Berwick St James Art Appreciation

Palmer’s Virgilian Idyll to Caspar Friedrich’s Mystic Landscape

Thursday 7th December at 7pm, doors open from 6.45pm

Born 1774, some thirty years earlier than Samuel Palmer, Caspar David Friedrich was the leading German Romantic painter of the 19th century. Both painters in different ways were not content just to produce literal images of landscape. For Friedrich, the act of landscape painting was passed through the lens of a strict Protestant upbringing, personal loss, introspection, but above all by ‘The Sublime’ visions of man’s insignificance in the face of the grandeur and enormity of God’s creation.

Samuel Palmer, on the other hand, whilst in Shoreham under the spell of William Blake, invested his somewhat archaic, even child-like parochial images of Nature with an intense spiritual quality and in so doing found that the very essence of it was designed according to God’s pattern. Both Romantic painters produced immediately recognisable works of great beauty and depth of meaning. Please join me this evening as we explore the life and works of these renowned and much admired masters.