Stop and Look: Ruth Returning from Gleaning by Samuel Palmer
The sugar-loaf hills belong to the dreamlike landscape of Palmer’s evolving feelings for the natural world.
Samuel Palmer was a very private artist. His pictures are usually small, and deal with personal experiences: delight in a calm morning or a brightly-lit cloud. There is usually, too, a sense, implicit or explicit, of the wonder of God’s creation and the perception that that wonder connects vividly with the artist’s own deeply felt response to these things.
Palmer most commonly expressed such ideas through an apparently idealistic depiction of the natural world, and he developed a richly evocative language in which to convey them. Later in his career, under the influence of J. M. W. Turner, he relied on a detailed realism based on the careful transcription of intensely observed facts.
In his youth, as is well known, he was heavily influenced by the visionary William Blake, and his rendering of nature partook of Blake’s mystic idealism. At a particular moment in the late 1820s, he experimented with a more literal presentation of religious ideas, depicting Biblical scenes like this illustration of the Book of Ruth.
Ruth, a Moabite woman, found herself working for a Jewish landlord, Boaz, whose love she won by her steadfast labour and integrity. In Palmer’s depiction of her here, she returns from gleaning loaded down with a huge armful – an ephah – of barley while Boaz’s mother Naomi awaits her return, reading by an evening lamp. In the distance, the steep hills are dotted with grazing sheep and a river runs serenely by. The sugar-loaf hills, typical of Palmer in this early phase of his career, are not much like the rounded slopes of the Shoreham valley, where Palmer was living at the time, but belong to the dreamlike landscape of his evolving feeling for nature in what he certainly felt was a blessed spot.
The ephah – an ancient Hebrew term – was a measure approximately equal to a modern bushel. What Ruth had gathered was the quantity of gleanings from Boaz’s fields, deliberately placed for her to find and harvest: a charmingly ingenious rustic courtship. The couple were to become ancestors of Christ, and Ruth’s story occupies a short book of the Old Testament which concludes with the genealogy down to King David.
Palmer portrays the Biblical heroine as a huge idealized figure, perhaps derived from Mannerist (late sixteenth-century Italian or French) allegorical personifications of Plenty, striding confidently through his very English pastoral landscape. The effect is of simultaneous familiarity and heroic strangeness – an unexpectedly effective way of illustrating the Biblical story.
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