Samuel Palmer started working on The Early Ploughman’s when he was living in Kensington in the 1850s, he worked on the plate intermittently for the rest of his life, finally re-biting it in January 1880. In the intervening years it was published in P.G. Hamerton’s Etching and Etchers, in 1868 (in the fourth state) which this versinon is, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873 (a seventh state printed by Frederick Goulding) as ‘The morning spread upon the mountains’.