The Skylark (1850): Art, History and Details

The Skylark (1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Samuel Palmer (British, 1805–1881).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Palmer came to printmaking relatively late in his career in 1850 when he was elected to the Etching Club in London. He created a significant number of landscape etchings, intricate in detail and sonorous in chiaroscuro. In The Skylark, one of Palmer’s earliest compositions, a solitary figure in a rural landscape contemplates the flight of a songbird. Palmer has been compared to the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (also in this exhibition), who produced images infused with a similarly indefinable atmosphere of calm, mystery, and breathless silence.

Object facts

• Title: The Skylark
• Date: 1850
• Creator attribution: Samuel Palmer (British, 1805–1881)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1966.181

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis B. Williams, presented in honor of Henry Sayles Francis, Curator of Prints

Further reading listed by the museum

• Richards, Louise S. “Samuel Palmer: Poet of the Etching Needle.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 4 (April 1967): 111–119.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.