Mysterious Widsom: The Life And Work of Samuel Palmer, By Rachel Campbell-Johnson

With an acuity that characterises this impressive life, Campbell-Johnson describes Samuel Palmer's self-portrait: "It is a portrait that asks you to look into a mind."

Though living to 1880, the artist was a late Romantic influenced by Blake. He portrayed a world "transformed by a visionary imagination".

Like Blake's dismissal of infinite space ("I walked the other evening to the end of the earth and touched the sky with my finger"), Palmer declared from his Shoreham retreat, "The soul is larger than the whole material universe."

This luminous account transports the reader like Palmer's art. CH