1850
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Skylark is a 1850 by Samuel Palmer, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
The painting shows a solitary figure in a rural landscape looking up at a flying bird. This work is interesting because it's one of Samuel Palmer's earliest compositions. He created it after joining the Etching Club in London, which influenced his style. To learn more about the use of contrasting light and dark in this painting, look up the technique: chiaroscuro.
Palmer came to printmaking relatively late in his career in 1850 when he was elected to the Etching Club in London. He created a significant number of landscape etchings, intricate in detail and sonorous in chiaroscuro. In The Skylark, one of Palmer’s earliest compositions, a solitary figure in a rural landscape contemplates the flight of a songbird. Palmer has been compared to the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (also in this exhibition), who produced images infused with a similarly indefinable atmosphere of calm, mystery, and breathless silence.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Samuel Palmer Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in…
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