A Farmhouse at Shoreham

From the Getty Museum record

A farmhouse sits nestled amidst lush foliage in this animated study of the countryside in Shoreham, England. Linnell employed brisk and calligraphic penwork to capture the swaying trees and twisted undergrowth that surround the bucolic structure. A curved road invites the viewer into the peaceful scene, which is given depth and dimension through the careful addition of brown wash. John Linnell visited Shoreham, a village in Kent, on several occasions in the late 1820s and early 1830s to stay with his future son-in-law, Samuel Palmer. The two artists often sketched together in the region, creating bodies of small landscape works with stylistic similarities. Indeed, due to its strength of line, the present sheet was long thought to be by Palmer until the 1980s, when authorship was clarified in the Samuel Palmer catalogue raisonné. Close comparisons made in recent years between this work and signed drawings such as Linnell’s The Weald of Kent at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge have reinforced this attribution.