Samuel Palmer ranks among the most important British landscape painters of the Romantic Period. The first of his paintings to enter the collections of Amgueddfa Cymru is a landscape titled The Rising of the Lark.

The Rising of the Lark

by Samuel Palmer.
Acquired 1990; Gift; Sidney Leigh through the National Art Collections Fund

Samuel Palmer (1805–51)

Samuel Palmer was the son of a London bookseller. His early work was profoundly influenced by the visionary poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827), whom Palmer met in 1824.

Palmer settled in the village of Shoreham in Kent. He created a symbolic language, using his pictures to celebrate the rural fruitfulness and pastoral simplicity of the world before the industrial revolution.

Palmer’s later work is more conventional and naturalistic. He travelled to Wales and other parts of Britain in the early 1830s, but no place inspired him as much as Shoreham.

Following his marriage to Hannah, the daughter of the artist John Linnell (1792—1882), his painting became increasingly geared to the requirements of the art market.

Inspired by a poem

The Rising of the Lark is inspired by lines from L’Allegro by the poet John Milton (1608–74), a favourite of the artist:

Through the rising sun and the joyful song of the lark, Palmer suggests a new beginning. The shepherd opening the gate through which the lamb will pass into the broad landscape may symbolise the stirrings of new life.

Palmer based this oil painting on a detailed drawing dating from his later time in Shoreham. His son Alfred Herbert Palmer wrote about the picture in his biography, The Life of Samuel Palmer. He suggests that it was painted soon after his father’s return from Italy in 1839.

The Romantic Period

This painting belongs to the Romantic period. At this time many artists, musicians and writers aimed to recapture a rural lifestyle which they felt was being lost to industrialisation.

The library at Amgueddfa Cymru was established many years before the main museum building in Cardiff was formally opened in 1927.

The library at Amgueddfa Cymru

Miss E. M. Breese, a cataloguer from the adjacent University of Wales, was the first Librarian. Although Miss Breese did not arrive until 1913, the accession books run from 1909.

The beginnings of a collection

The first item to be accessioned was a copy of John Ward's Handbook of objects from the Roman fort of Gelligaer (John Ward, Curator of Cardiff's museum, later became Keeper of Archaeology at Amgueddfa Cymru).

Among the first books purchased in 1909/10 were the Yearbook to learned and scientific societies, Esther Crawford's Cataloguing: suggestions for the small public library and a guide to the House of Commons.

The main Library of the Museum, located in National Museum Cardiff, consists of a central, shelved room with accommodation for staff and readers, along with two wings of heavy 1920s mobile racking that are still in use today.

The only other known example of such racking, suspended from iron girders, is from old library stacks in the British Museum.

The Museum expands

As the Library outgrew its original premises, departmental libraries were created. As well as the libraries at National Museum Cardiff, there is a substantial collection at St Fagans National History Museum.

The library covering industrial history and archaeology is now in the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, and there are small collections at the National Slate Museum in Llanberis and the National Roman Legion Museum in Caerleon. All three libraries are administered from National Museum Cardiff.

Important and significant collections

The Library has attracted some major donations. The most important is the Tomlin library of 17th-century and later books on Mollusca, with several volumes of the finest hand-coloured natural history engravings ever produced.

In 1953 the Willoughby Gardner collection arrived, with a number of early printed books on the natural sciences, including herbals and the Museum's only two incunables (books published before 1501) - two editions of Pliny's writings on natural history from 1481 and 1487.

As well as Museum staff, the Main Library is often used by external students and the Library can be used by the public by appointment.

Special collections

As well as general museological and conservation books, special collections are housed in the Main library at National Museum Cardiff. For example, there is a fine collection of Welsh topographical books - mainly published tours of Wales from the 18th and early 19th century, together with some manuscripts.

On loan to the library is a set of Gwendoline Davies's own copies of the Gregynog Press books in special bindings. The Library has been acquiring examples of other private press books contemporary with the Gregynog Press, as well as modern private presses in Wales, including Gwasg Gregynog, Old Stile Press and Red Hen Press.

The Library continues to actively collect.

Amgueddfa Cymru holds an extensive collection of superbly illustrated topographical books dating from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

11th century cross-slabs near Margam, from Donovan's Excursions (1805)

One such book, Descriptive Excursions through South Wales and Monmouthshire in the Year 1804, and the Four Preceding Summers, was written by the natural history writer Edward Donovan. A prolific author, his books cover various aspects of the animal kingdom including insects, shells and fish. They are characterized by a large number of coloured plates, many of a very high quality.

Donovan also made a large collection of natural history specimens, and it was this collection that was opened to the public in 1807 as the London Museum and Institute of Natural History. Although Donovan was originally a wealthy man, he died virtually penniless, as booksellers seem to have had control of all his writing, which was valued at over £60,000 in the 1830s.

Welsh parrots

In the two-volume Descriptive Excursions through South Wales and Monmouthshire in the Year 1804, and the Four Preceding Summers, which he published in 1805, he describes travels from Bristol to Pembrokeshire. Donovan makes a large number of comments on the natural history and geology encountered on his tours, such as the puffins at Caldey Island, which were known to seamen as 'Welsh parrots'.

Donovan's account covers the topography, local customs, architecture and antiquities of the places he visited. He acquired a Roman table-top from Caerleon depicting Venus, and included an illustration of this now lost piece of sculpture in his account of his tours.

The first volume takes the tour up to the Ewenny area near Bridgend, while the second volume takes the reader from Margam to Tenby. One chapter of over eighty pages describes the state of the remains and antiquities of Caerleon, not only a useful archaeological account in itself, but one that is accompanied by several engravings of finds from the Roman fortress, for example, sculpture, pottery, coins and tiles.

The Margam stone crosses

Antiquities of a later period are described in the second volume, when Donovan visited the Margam area. A feature of this area, besides the remains of the Cistercian abbey of Margam, was a number of inscribed stone crosses generally known as Early Christian monuments. A pair of these lay near the farmhouse of Cwrt-y-Dafydd.

The Cwrt-y-Dafydd crosses were then being used as a footbridge over a stream, depicted in one of the more charming plates used to illustrate the account of the tour, and Donovan describes them, making comparisons with similar monuments that he had seen at Llantwit Major. These cross-slabs now form part of the collection in Margam Abbey Museum, and are known from their inscriptions as the crosses of Ilquici and Ilci, and date to the 11th century.

Donovan went on to visit Margam itself, admitted to the grounds by the gardener who was 'allowed to admit strangers of respectable appearance', and describes and illustrates two further Early Christian monuments in the surrounding area.

These accounts offer a valuable insight of day-to-day life in Wales during the late 18th and early 19th century.