Page 54 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.
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Fig. 15. SAMUEL PALMER, Rustic Scene.Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fig. 16. SAMUEL PALMER, TheValleyThick with Corn.Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
his sepia Rustic Scene, showing the ploughman beneath The same lyrical, divided mood permeates Palmer’s
the sickle moon of dawn (Fig. 15), inscribed on the famous ValleyThick with Corn, with the harvest moon
mount with lines from Georgics I, urging the men to soaring above and the solitary reader reclining in his
plough at the equinox, divided ‘luci com umbris’: cornfield bower below, like a pastoral British ver-
sion of Wright’s ecstatic reader in the glowing cave
When Libra makes the hours of daytime and sleep equal, (Fig. 16). In 1866, by then in his early sixties, Palmer
And divides the world between light and shadow, told his son Alfred Herbert that the Georgics ‘teach the
Then work your oxen, men.34 wisdom of all life and the mysteries of intellectual discipline
under the veil of agriculture... so that the veil itself is
34. Virgil, Georgics I, trs. AS Kline, 2002; Samuel Palmer, Rustic Scene glorious – the diamond is set in gold.’35 In his numinous
and TheValley Thick with Corn, both 1825, both Ashmolean painting of Virgil’sTomb JosephWright of Derby set the
Museum, Oxford. poet’s memory in gold, lit by the double light of
candle and moon, a unique blend of the Classical and
35. William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer, Vision and Landscape, exhibition Romantic sensibility.
catalogue, British Museum, London, 2005, p. 25.
JENNY UGLOW
t
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