From 1924 to 1930, Palmer studied with Boardman Robinson, Henry Schnackenberg, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, New York; later, from 1937 to 1942, he was an instructor there. He also studied mural design and fresco painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Fontainebleau, France, in 1927. His had his first one artist show in 1932 at the Midtown Gallery, New York, which would continue to represent him for the rest of his life. It featured landscapes Palmer had painted during the previous two years in his native Iowa. They reflected the influence of the American Regionalists Benton and John S. Curry; later, Palmer's paintings would reveal his exposure to and admiration for the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, notably Van Gogh and Cezanne.
He won a medal at the Paris Salon in *** and received other awards from the Audubon Artists, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy where he was given the Carnegie Prize in 1980. During the 1930s, he created murals for the WPA for which he served as Supervisor for the Mural Department, New York City. One of his WPA murals, The Development of Medicine (1935), is at the Queens (New York) General Hospital; another is Opening of the West (1936), done for the Post Office Building, Washington, D.C.; and others are in post offices in Arlington, Massachusetts (1938), and Monticello, Iowa (1939). Palmer is also respresented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York.
He was a member of the National Socity of Mural Paintiners and the Collaborative Council for the 1939 New York World's Fair. At his death he was Professor Emeritus of the School of Art of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute of which he was a founder.
