Samuel Palmer, R.W.S.

Sir William Henry Dyke Ackland his sale, Christie's, London,  22 March 1966 lot 59;
Villiers David his sale, Christie's, London, 19 November 1985, lot 207

Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, no. 590b, p. 190

This intense sketch was dated by Raymond Lister to 1861, for reasons that are unexplained: it would seem more likely to date from circa 1832, shortly after Palmer's residence in Shoreham. A white cloud or bright cloud features in a number of Samuel Palmer's works. As others have pointed out, his two oil and tempera panels, The White Cloud of 1833-34 and The Bright Cloud, of around the same date, are essentially mirror-images of the same composition (see William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker and Colin Harrison, Samuel Palmer 1805-1881, Vision and Landscape, 2005, nos 86, 87, pp.158-59). The paintings are based on the scenery at Shoreham, in Kent, but, bearing in mind Palmer's profound religiosity, it is possible he was interpreting the countryside in Biblical terms. In Revelation XIV, verses 14-16, the last judgement, Christ (or the Son of Man) appears on a white cloud;

'And then I looked, and there was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like the Son of Man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand! Another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to the one who sat on the cloud, 'Use your sickle and reap, for the hour has come, because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.' So the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped'.

Palmer would also often link the white cloud with harvest time. The New Testament had earlier been a fruitful source of imagery for Palmer's and George Richmond's mentor, William Blake.