Visionary and Dreamer

by David Cecil

Published 21 February 1970

An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic painters

Visionary and Dreamer evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.