He purchased a run-down cottage, nicknamed "Rat Abbey", and lived there from 1826 to 1835, depicting the area as a demi-paradise, mysterious and visionary, often shown in sepia shades under moon and star light.

Linnell, who had earlier shown remarkable understanding of the uniqueness of William Blake's genius, was not as generous with his son-in-law, towards whom his attitude was authoritarian and often harsh.

To add to his financial worries, he returned to London to find his dissolute brother William had pawned all his early paintings, and Palmer was obliged to pay a large sum to redeem them.

Interest in his work was rekindled in 1926 by a show curated by Martin Hardie at the Victoria & Albert Museum: Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts made by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake.

[10] The renewed popularity of his Shoreham work influenced a succession of English artists, notably F. L. Griggs, Robin Tanner, Graham Sutherland, Paul Drury, Joseph Webb, Eric Ravilious, John Minton, the glass engraving of Laurence Whistler, Franklin White[citation needed] and Clifford Harper.

(See: Jolyon Drury, 2006) Palmer received a great deal of media attention in the 1970s, following the discovery of a number of fakes of his Shoreham work produced by famous art forger, Tom Keating.

In February 1970, Geraldine Norman, Sale Room Correspondent for The Times, published a glowing report on a rare Shoreham Palmer painting, which 'probably dates from 1831', Shepherds with their Flock under a Full Moon, that was purchased by a major Bond Street gallery for £9400.

[9] A month later, David Gould, an authority on Victorian paintings with a special interest in Palmer,[11] wrote a Letter to the Editor calling it a fake.

[15] Several tips from readers convinced her the master faker she was looking for was Tom Keating, a picture restorer in Dedham, Essex, whom she named in another page one article the following month.

[16] A few days later, Keating wrote a Letter to The Times, confessing to ‘flooding the market’ with fakes –– not for material gain, but rather as a protest against greedy art merchants –– adding that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could believe his ‘crude daubs’ were authentic.

[17] The lead story in the Daily Express the same day read, ‘I FAKED THE LOT!’[18] The following week, Mr. Hugh Leggatt, a well-respected art dealer in Westminster, offered to host an exhibition of Keating’s ‘Palmers’ at his gallery in St James's Street.

Norman went on to publish a total of eleven articles on the scandal, from July 1976 to February 1977, for which she won the British Press Awards News Reporter of the Year.

Keating later claimed to have painted upwards of eighty fake Palmers, most of them moonlit scenes in dark sepia wash, heightened with white.

[26] These same four pictures were illustrated in James Sellars’ 1974 monograph, Samuel Palmer,[27] and their sales resulted in Keating being arrested and put on trial for art fraud at the Old Bailey in 1979.

[30] In the May 1977 BBC1 documentary, A Picture of Tom Keating, the master forger, commenting on Palmer’s captivating self portrait (see at top of this page), called him ‘a child genius, who’s eyes stare at me with a majesty and beauty...

I look back on them now and say I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done, because his name is now more famous than ever.’[31] Times journalist David Carritt replied: ‘How insulting Palmer would have found the new stock...his magic vision diluted by a crop of heartless impostures, conceived in spite and peddled for gain’.

Exhibited first in London from October 2005 to January 2006, then in New York from March to May 2006, Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape, emphasized his early work, but included more naturalistic watercolours, such as Scene from Lee, and A Cascade in Shadow, from his travels in Devon and Wales (1834-1836), as well as Cypresses at the Villa d'Este, and A View of Ancient Rome, from an ill-fated, two-year sojourn to Italy, with his new bride Hannah and his friend, George Richmond, and his wife (1837–38).

[33] The show concluded with works done after his return to England in 1840, such as the watercolour, Christian Descending into the Valley of Humiliation and the etchings, The Weary Ploughman, The Bellman, and The Lonely Tower.