Anglophiles are quick to point out, and rightly so, that without the English visionaries William Blake, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner, Modernism would have taken a very different route. Yet while we find the seeds of Romanticism, Impressionism, Realism, and Art Nouveau in Blake, Constable, and Turner, those men were anomalies. It was mainly on French soil that French artists, cultivating those seeds, ultimately brought Modernism to fruition.

The English visionaries did have their followers, though, among them the Romantic landscape painter Samuel Palmer (1805-81), whose retrospective of some 100 oils, drawings, watercolors, and prints is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Palmer is heir to Turner and to his friend and mentor Blake, to whom he became a devout disciple without replicating his particular blend of eccentricity, mysticism, and seemingly supernatural, if not mad, belief in the occult. Palmer is also heir to Durer and Schongauer, and he prefigures artists as diverse as van Gogh and Beatrix Potter, who, like Palmer, had a peculiar penchant for rabbits.

Palmer, ostensibly self-taught, joined Blake’s circle as a teenager. Painting in the village of Shoreham, south of London, the group of landscape painters, which included John Linnell and Thomas Stothard, became something of a British Barbizon. The Met’s show, which marks the 200th anniversary of the artist’s birth, is organized chronologically. Bookending Palmer, it puts emphasis on both his early Shoreham period, which is the most exciting section of the exhibition, and his late work.

Palmer’s naturalistic “Self-Portrait” (c. 1824-25), an accomplished, doe-eyed, head-on work in black and white chalk, presents us with a glum, self-involved, Romantic artist intent first and foremost on conveying his mood. But Palmer loosens up out in the landscape. His work becomes direct, primitive, and graphic. In many of the ink studies of animals and nature and of the Creation, from an 1824 sketchbook, Palmer’s insistent, heavy line conveys a heartfelt experience of the world.

In the 1825 Oxford series – a group of ink, gum, and sepia landscapes now housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford – Palmer, taken with nature, comes into his own. These beautifully dense, dark, often moonlit, wooded scenes are peaceful, Golden Age works from an eccentric and melancholic temperament: They portray farmers, shepherds, livestock, foraging rabbits, a man playing the flute, and another lolling about with his book amid a “Valley Thick With Corn.” Intensely felt, their closest allies are the drawings of van Gogh. Part fable and part dream, and emitting a balmy, brown light, the Oxford series give us multiple viewpoints and intricately detailed observations from both near and far – the veins on a leaf, the roughness of bark, and the grassy texture of a distant hill – all within the same cramped yet vast landscape.

Color appears in Palmer’s pictures around the same time. It warms the early Shoreham works, setting their fields ablaze with tinges of russet, green, and gold, as in “Rest on the Flight Into Egypt or Holy Family” (c. 1824-28). Elsewhere, bright white and yellow stand in for light, and color activates his rolling trees into an explosion of pear blossoms, as in “In a Shoreham Garden” and “Pear Tree in a Walled Garden” (both c. 1829) and in the beautifully stippled landscape with sheep and apples “The Magic Apple Tree” (c. 1830). But eventually color would prove too seductive for the artist.

By the mid-1830s, Palmer’s lively landscapes begin to settle into a Romantic rut – as if the fires, originally producing a roiling boil, had been turned down to a mere simmer. His touch becomes delicate and illustrative to the point of caressing forms rather than building them, and his idealistic light is applied to his pictures rather than found. From here on out, as if following a pattern, Palmer merely produces visionary landscapes. He loses the fire that had earlier given him a vision of his soul.

Until May 29 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).