Hannah Palmer (English, 1818-1893) Both Hannah Palmer's father (John Linnell) and husband [Samuel Palmer] were artists, and she characterized the time spent with her husband in Italy as deeply informative and educational. Samuel Palmer himself described her work as "really consistent, beautiful, and I think saleable drawings from nature," and they sketched together on their honeymoon, setting up a studio together when back in London. She exhibited at the British Institution in the 1840s but there is little record of her later work, and it appears that her responsibilities as a wife and mother may have interfered with her artistic aspirations. Despite a description of Hannah Palmer by one nineteenth-century critic as "a conventional, unimaginative, religious woman, dominated by her autocratic father, and more or less ignored by Sam Palmer, her reclusive, eccentric artist husband," she seems to have had some success as an artist, as she exhibited her work at both the prestigious Royal Academy of Art in London and the British Institution. --Rebekah Rickner, from The Golden Age of British Watercolors, 1790-1910
