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.