PRIVATE VIEW

Samuel Palmer & James McIntosh Patrick Fine Art Society, London W1

Samuel Palmer is an English artist if ever there was - one whose work was deeply and romantically attached to a lost way of life. His speciality was small-scale recreations of a pastoral idyll: a world where shepherds mind flocks and wood smoke curls across the roofs of country cottages. Put like this it all sounds a bit flaccid, but they are intense little pictures, not quite as strange as those of his predecessor William Blake, but distinctive nonetheless. These days he looks like a crucial link to the neo-romantics of the 1940s and never more so than in his etchings which meant so much to the likes of Graham Sutherland and the young Johnny Craxton.

He only ever made 17 etchings - but they are some of the best British prints of the 19th century and one of each goes on view in London this week, appropriately at the Fine Art Society - the gallery which published two of his last prints in 1879. It is equally appropriate that they should be shown now alongside a tribute to James McIntosh Patrick, the popular Scottish artist who died last year. Patrick was one of the great printmakers of the late 1920s, and one of many artists of his time to benefit from the rediscovery of Palmer's prints in the 1920s.

Samuel Palmer & James McIntosh Patrick, Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1 (0171-629 5116) to 21 May

Richard Ingleby