The Lonely Tower

Samuel Palmer was a rhapsodic sort who spent his youth in the English countryside absorbed in the writings of Keats, Milton, and Shakespeare, convinced of the mystical perfection of nature. His dreamy vision is evident in these etchings. The Lonely Tower, created to illustrate Milton's poem Il Penseroso, depicts travelers yearning toward a distant tower while an owl passes over the chasm between them. A painstaking printmaker, Palmer worked the plate tirelessly, subjecting it to fourteen separate bitings, or soakings in an acid bath, to etch the lines just so.