Lonely Tower

This is the final watercolor in a series of eight Palmer made to illustrate lines from John Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. As a model for the drawing, he used the tower at Leith Hill in Surrey, which was near where Palmer’s eldest son had died. The impact of his son’s death is evident: the waning moon depicted here would have been visible at the hour his son died. The night sky shows a constellation that could have been observed on the night of his son’s death (2022).