Page 10 - Art First: Bridget Macdonald: This Green Earth

Given this background it is not surprising that Samuel Palmer seems to be a constant subliminal
presence in her work. His The Bright Cloud (Manchester Art Gallery) was painted about
1833–4, when he had settled at Shoreham in Kent, an area he referred to as his ‘valley of visions’.
It is one of a number of cloud subjects that he executed there, all loaded with religious and
poetic imagery and in this case reflecting lines from Book 11 of Milton’s Paradise Lost:‘ . . .yon
western cloud, that draws/O’er the blue firmament a radiant white,/And slow descends, with
something heavenly fraught . . .’ A comparably intense personal vision of nature is one that
under lies much of Bridget’s work dealing with natural phenomena such as clouds, stars, trees or
moonlight (seeTree and Moon). Palmer was a leading exponent of pastoral landscape in the early
nineteenth century, best known for his visionary paintings and etchings of the English rural idyll,
and the most important follower of William Blake, whom he met in 1824. But whereas Blake
concentrated mainly on figurative subjects, Palmer presented the English countryside as an
ancient, venerable place of fecundity and religious mystery. His reputation stems chiefly from the
visionary paintings of the years he spent at Shoreham from 1826 to 1835, and from the
series of etchings made after 1850. In both he succeeded in giving the rural landscape an inef-
fable timelessness, often by the reassuring glow of a gentle moon, whose beams add a benev olent,
celestial dimension to an Arcadian landscape already charged with abundance and Christian
symbolism. Such fascination with the moon, stars and night was a widespread romantic preoccu-
pation, not only in Britain, where its roots lay in the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby
(1734–97) but also in Europe. Palmer’s devotion to the rustic calendar also finds a ready
response in Bridget’s own fascination with flocks and herds, their essential dignity as part of the
great scheme of Nature and their movement in line with the changing seasons in such works as
Winter Cattle and Ewes. Her approach is markedly romantic in its endowment of each creature
with individual character, echoing the overwhelming life force of the divinely-ordered natural
world celebrated in Palmer’s The Flock and the Star(Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford).

Livestock feature in her work because she feels that animals do not date and thus provide a living
but timeless presence. Often her images are intended obliquely to refer to previous sources.
Thus one early drawing featured a bull which her aunt used to ride as a young girl. This re mind ed
her of the classical myth of the Phoenician princess Europa, for whom Zeus turned him-
self into an irresistible white bull on the seashore before abducting her to Crete. The theme