11
The beautiful was loved for itself
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
As a boy, Palmer had lived only a short walk away from the tollgate which crossed Kent Street Road (now the Old Kent Road) between the Old Dun Cow and the Green Man, levying the traffic which passed in and out of the city from the south. The smart post-chaises dashing in from the provinces, the lumbering farm wagons piled high with produce, the packhorses floundering under unbalancing burdens, the slow plodding cattle and the flocks of panting sheep: all passed along this crowded route. And, as a child, Samuel must sometimes have stood there gazing, wondering about the world from whence all these things arrived. Young George Richmond certainly did. One of his earliest memories, he recalled, was of watching the great horse carts coming in from the country with harnesses chinking and bright flanges fluttering, while the little gypsy children, too exhausted to walk any further, lay rocking in great nets slung underneath. To him, he remembered, these vehicles had seemed like the harbingers of some charming rural land.
As a young artist Palmer had dreamt of turning rambles and sketching trips into something more lasting. London was a vast, polluted mire of men. The ‘Great Wen’ was how the pamphleteer and champion of rural England William Cobbett had described it in 1820. To a bewildered Thomas Carlyle, arriving in 1824, it was like paying a visit to Bedlam. ‘Of this enormous Babel of a place I can give you no account,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘The flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appalls one’s very sense . . . and with the black vapour brooding over it, absolutely like fluid ink; and coaches and wains and sheep and oxen and wild people rushing on with bellowings and shriekings and thundering din,’ it was, he said, ‘as if the earth . . . were gone distracted’.1 ‘Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be,’2 declared Jane Austen’s valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse. And little wonder: there was not a man or woman who lived there, announced a writer in the Quarterly Review, whose skin, clothes and nostrils were not loaded with a compound of powdered granite, soot, and still more nauseous substances. Even the city’s spiders were said to be so befuddled by pollution that they could not spin their webs straight.
To Palmer, suffering so persistently from respiratory complaints, the idea of rural escape was especially enticing. Increasingly he began to look towards Shoreham for his dreams of ‘that genuine village’ where, as he was later to put it, he ‘mused away’ some of the best years of his life.3
The village of Shoreham lies less than thirty miles to the south-east of London in the county of Kent. Nowadays, crawling out from the capital through an all but unbroken suburbia, it only takes about an hour to get there by car. Alternatively there is a train from Victoria which, crossing the Thames, rattles out past the back yards of Clapham towards Bromley beyond which patches of woodland begin to line the track. Soon, the traveller is moving through opening landscapes, past paddocks of muddy ponies and steepening fields as the railway curves round to enter the Darent Valley, running the length of a line of green pastures that rise up towards hills with wooded horizons. But when Palmer first started visiting the village, the suburbs had only just begun their inexorable creep. There was no train to startle the hares from their nibbling or put up the herons from their patient watch. Even the toll road, that unspooling precursor of ribbon development, did not pass through the village, and Palmer and his fellow Ancients, if leaving on foot from London at dawn, would have arrived in the village by the light of the moon.
It was a difficult journey. The soil, ‘being wholly chalk and very stony’ rendered the road ‘not very pleasant to travel at any time’, recorded Edward Hasted in his 1797 History of Kent. Palmer and his friends must have felt a little like Chaucer’s fellowship as they passed the Tabard Inn in Southwark from which the medieval pilgrims had five hundred years earlier set out and, leaving the city behind them, adjusted their stride to the long journey ahead. They could seldom afford the stagecoach, although there was one which, leaving at twenty past nine in the morning, would drop travellers three hours later at the top of Morant’s Court Hill from which it was a gentle half-hour walk (or cart ride) down into the Darent Valley. At other times they would hitch a lift with a local carrier, riding on one of the fruit carts or hop wagons which plied a regular trade with the capital, or clamber on to the back of some lumbering wain.
On his first visit, Richmond liked to remember, he had been accosted by a gentleman farmer on horseback who, scanning him closely, had politely inquired if he knew any lad of his age in need of employment. Dressed in a nankeen jacket and white trousers, he had looked like a serving boy, the artist supposed. But dressing more in accordance with his social station could lead to other difficulties. One summer evening, weary from walking, he had flagged down a driver and, scrambling up gratefully into the roomy wagon, had soon found himself rocked off to sleep. It was only when the driver roused him at the parting of their ways that he had noticed the stains on his light flannel suit. ‘What were you carting before you took me?’ asked Richmond. ‘Sile,’ was the driver’s laconic response. Clearly, the city-dwelling Ancients encountered a few problems on the path to their pastoral idyll; but once they arrived there they found the village of their dreams.
Shoreham, taking its name from the Saxon words scor for slope and ham for village, shelters in the seam of the fertile Darent Valley which has been pretty much continuously settled since prehistoric times. In ancient days the whole area would have been thickly forested. Woods of oak, beech and chestnut still cover inclines that are too steep to plough. But farmers had started their clearing long before the Ancients arrived there and, as the young Palmer first crested the lip of the valley, it would have been a richly agricultural view that he found himself gazing upon, with crops of wheat and barley turning gold in the sunshine, with orchards laden with apples and fields of twining hops. Sleek cattle would have browsed among lush water meadows and sheep grazed the rough heath lands of the High Weald beyond.
The River Darent loops its sparkling course through the valley, threading its way through ancient demesnes and verdant pastures, down narrow passageways that run between cottages, round pollard willows and under dappling oaks. ‘The still Darent, in whose waters cleane/ Ten thousand fishes play and decke his pleasant streame,’ wrote the Elizabethan Edmund Spenser,4 a product of Palmer’s old school Merchant Taylors’ and a poet whose taste for archaic traditions he would share. Shoals of minnows still flicker, faint as pencil sketches in the pools of the river that, for Palmer, would have offered that lovely glint of water without which no landscape could to him look right.
Flowing over a shallow bed of speckled stones, the Darent was once a much broader, faster river than it is today: in Roman times it was navigable to boats which came upriver from the Thames. And before large-scale extractions diminished it so drastically that, in the 1970s, a weasel was spotted darting across its dry course, its current was strong enough to keep the wheels of several corn mills rumbling as well as powering a paper mill which, not closing until well into the twentieth century, provided a valuable source of employment in the region, especially for the women who shredded the rags. Palmer might have disliked the growing industrialisation of the countryside that such factories represented but he must have found it most useful to have a supply of thick, high-quality paper on hand; nor was he averse to hitching a ride with the rag carts that brought old clothes down to Shoreham from the East End.
A straggling village street flanked by cottages, many of them dating back to medieval times, crosses the river by a three-arched stone bridge which, though now much restored and remodelled, was designed in the thirteenth century to allow donkeys with a bale strapped to each side to pass. Palmer, who sketched it, was as charmed by its antiquity as he was by the picturesque houses which clustered around it: humble low-beamed dwellings with roofs of mossy thatch, their vegetable plots, fruit trees and flower gardens all carefully protected from winds and stray livestock by woven fences of willow. And yet, even in those days, Shoreham was changing. It had flourished in the century before Palmer arrived and, alongside the modest cottages, a handful of rather grander dwellings had grown up and now included Riverside House, an imposing edifice constructed in grand Georgian style by a successful eighteenth-century saddler, and Waterhouse, the spacious residence in which Palmer’s father was to live.
Palmer’s introduction to Shoreham came most probably through his father. One of his cousins, Charles Wake, had been the vicar of the parish from 1775 to 1796. More importantly to the elder Palmer, it was known as a stronghold of Nonconformist belief, although some fifty years earlier when John Wesley had first visited he had provoked a riot, setting an outraged congregation of Anglicans storming and cursing and clanging at the church bells. Dissenting sects had subsequently put down roots in the region and flourished and Palmer’s father was invited to become a lay preacher in the chapel at Otford, about a mile downstream from Shoreham village.
Sam, accompanying his father on trips to attend his new flock, had visited the area with some regularity after 1824. Several of the drawings in his surviving sketchbook – the views of clustered villages amid undulating landscapes, of distant spires and sloping meadows, of cloaked shepherds presiding over quietly grazing flocks – were probably done in the Darent Valley; a large bristle-backed pig, which he sketched as she watched warily over her litter, may well be the ‘huge Kemsing Sow’ that he mentions in an 1824 letter in which he uses Shoreham as his address for the first time.
Palmer was enchanted by the village. His works of 1825, including his glowing sepias, evoke the natural fecundity of its rural views. In the freshness of spring the following year he and his fellow Ancient, Arthur Tatham, travelled down to Shoreham for a more protracted stay. Renting rooms in the ramshackle timber and weatherboard house of a local farmer, Arthur Tooth, (a house which is now known as Ivy Cottage and which, though much done up, still stands on the road that leads up out of Shoreham towards the church) they pooled their meagre resources and by dint of frugal management survived on a sum total of eight shillings a week – an allowance which was later cut to five shillings, two pence.
It was around this time, however, that the fiscal circumstances of the Palmer brothers suddenly improved. In 1825, William Giles died leaving both his grandsons a legacy which, when all the paperwork had eventually been completed, amounted to a far from insignificant £3,000 apiece. William decided on the strength of it that he wanted to become a sculptor. Samuel, no longer bound to London by the need to attract paying clients, was free to pursue his ambitions in remote rural peace. Towards the end of 1826 he bought a dilapidated cottage, small and dark and overrun by rodents. The Ancients nicknamed it Rat Abbey. But the determinedly parsimonious Palmer was unperturbed: ‘I will not infringe a penny of the money God has sent me, beyond the interest, but live and study in patience and hope,’5 he told Richmond. This cottage would remain his home for well over a year.
Meanwhile, Palmer’s father had started muttering about taking a new wife, a prospect which did not please his prosperous brother Nathanial who, already irritated at having to support a sibling who persisted in dabbling so degradingly in trade, did not want to have to deal with any potentially embarrassing and financially cumbersome dalliances on top. He issued an ultimatum: either his brother would live the life of a gentleman of leisure, and live it as a widower to boot, or he would have to forfeit his annual allowance. The path ahead, for the time being at least, was plain. Palmer’s father loved his books but his Baptist convictions were equally firm. He decided to accept his brother’s terms, to relinquish his unremunerative business, leave his dingy London house and retire to Shoreham to pursue a leisured existence, with his own private library and Mary Ward as a housekeeper, and a local congregation to whom he could expound his ideas of salvation, hustling their souls heavenward, as his grandson was later to put it, ‘with much sweating and thumping of cushions’6 to expedite them on their way.
In March 1827, Palmer’s father sold up his stock in a sale which, taking place over the course of three days, brought him £133.6s. Not long afterwards, packing up his books and domestic accoutrements, he carted his entire household to Shoreham. By the end of 1828 he was ensconced at Waterhouse, a pretty Queen Anne building which he rented at the bottom of the village, overlooking the pack bridge. It was not as ostentatious then as it looks now, for a Georgian façade has since been added giving it an air of contrived grandeur; but to the locals it would certainly have seemed a gentleman’s residence with its six spacious rooms and its servants’ attics, its little walled garden sloping down to the river and its expansive aspects of far-off tree-crowned slopes.
Shoreham felt like a secret haven to the Ancients: ‘a valley so hidden’, as Calvert was to put it, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out’.7 Palmer would often paint it protected by a foreground of sheltering hills. It was his sanctum. Away from ‘horrid smoky London with all its begrimed finery and sooty shows’,8 he could search for that simplicity of purpose which he so admired in Blake, a man who managed to live ‘without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few’ so that he could be ‘free, noble, and happy’.9
Palmer had some time since abandoned his dandified pretensions. He had caught sight of his full-length reflection in a London shop window and, after a long pause for self-critical consideration, declared: ‘No more finery for a gentleman as short as you!’10 From then on his dress would be humble, if decidedly eccentric, as a caricature scribbled by Richmond in 1825 makes clear. The painter is depicted from the back, a dishevelled figure with voluminous overcoat, furled umbrella, clumpy boots and broad-brimmed hat. ‘Learn thou the goodness of thy clothes to prize/ By their own use and not another’s eyes,’11 Palmer would chant aphoristically. He came increasingly to detest the affectations of fashion, preferring clothes made with a more rigorously practical regard for comfort, hard wear and, of course, pocket capacity.
In Shoreham he began to adopt the sort of biblical look which the Nazarenes had favoured and, in both a chalk sketch and a miniature done by Richmond in 1829, an idealised ‘Ancient’ emerges who, with his clipped beard and shoulder-brushing locks, serene downcast gaze and long antique robes, looks pronouncedly Christ-like – an association further affirmed by Richmond’s first attempt at a portrait of Jesus. The robed and bearded figure who sits by the well in his 1828 painting of Christ and the Woman of Samaria bears a strong resemblance to Palmer who quite possibly posed.
To the locals, Palmer would have appeared outlandish. Beards were not much worn at that time, except by soldiers, and were considered positively suspect in Establishment circles. Even as late as 1840, when the radical Mr George Frederick Muntz appeared in Parliament with a flourishing growth of facial hair, there were many who felt that he was issuing his own peculiar hirsute insult to English parliamentary institutions. In more bohemian company, however, the beard was coming back and the once pink-cheeked Palmer was proud to be sporting his cutting-edge credentials. ‘The artists have at last an opportunity of wearing the beard unmolested,’ he informed Linnell that summer. ‘I understand from the papers that it is become the height of fashion.’12
Palmer persuaded Mary Ward to stitch him a large and extraordinary cloak. In winter he would furl it warmly around him, pulling up its hood against the inclement weather; but in summer, when the heat in the valley was basting, he would wear a canvas jacket and a huge circular straw hat: a functional if flamboyant adornment which, cropping up in several of his paintings, became for this scion of a family who had made their money in millinery a long-cherished symbol of his Shoreham days. He must have made a peculiar sight, stumping about the hills, stool in one hand, umbrella in the other, pockets stuffed with sketching pads, long auburn locks straggling from under the brim of his great woven-straw cartwheel, while he peered at far distant views through spectacles so ‘scratched and scribbled over’ that their two misty spheres of light looked, he said, like ‘the sun in a fog or a dirty dish in a dark pantry’.13
His fellow Ancients, however, did not follow his dress code. They couldn’t afford to look so shambolic. It was all very well for Palmer, with his financial legacy, to enjoin his companions to trust in the Lord – ‘our blessed Lord teaches us not to be anxious about the morrow’ he told Richmond, ‘spiritual difficulties should be the only serious trouble of a bright intellectual essence: other disturbances are for the most part terrific phantoms which vanish on approach’14 – but the rest of the Ancients were encumbered by what must have felt like a far-from phantasmic need to earn a living. Even Calvert with his private income had to bear in mind his familial duties, not to mention his sense of social propriety. The only person who remained permanently in Shoreham with Palmer was his brother William, who by then was pursuing his own unpromising sculptural career.
Calvert liked to visit whenever he could and, in the autumn of 1825, he brought Blake and his wife along with him by stagecoach. The old visionary was very unwell by then and had spent most of that year confined to his bed, but though still plagued by shivering fits and his perennial stomach complaints, he enjoyed the trip, spending profitable hours tucked up by the fire discussing books with Palmer’s father. It has been suggested that his Jerusalem was inspired by, if not actually written in, the village, that Shoreham’s rainy skylines were his ‘clouded hills’. The rest of the Ancients turned up periodically for visits, staying with Palmer at first in his rodent-infested hovel and later, and far more comfortably, with his father at Waterhouse. Sometimes they would lodge with locals as flurried exchanges of letters discussing rooms and their various merits and rental prices attest.
The ardent young men relished their time in the valley as much as any holiday. In 1827, in the month of May when the orchards and hedgerows were overspilling with blossom, the fields crowded with wild flowers and the pastures springing up lush, Walter, Sherman and Frederick Tatham all came to visit. A short while later, Richmond, having sold his first ever miniature for three guineas, rented a room from a labourer for two shillings a week – he was particularly delighted to discover that John Wesley had held a meeting in that very chamber – and joined his fellows in Kent determined to eke his money out for as long as he could. Richmond was always to remember those weeks. ‘I believe no human being was ever happier than I was in that first independent taste of really beautiful countryside along with my dear friends,’15 he would write.
Linnell had originally tried to dissuade Palmer from retiring to his rural retreat. He would be washed up in a cultural backwater, he had warned. But he also enjoyed periodic trips to the valley. ‘I have been at many places,’ he wrote after a stay in the summer of 1828, but ‘I never was anywhere so much at liberty.’16 He found ‘benefit’ and peacefulness in Shoreham’s ‘Sylvan Bower’17 and he set about making his typically thorough arrangements to bring his entire family, his wife and their (by then five) children – the little Leonardos or little Ancients18 as they were playfully nicknamed – down to enjoy the harvest home.
‘If we wait for a pure community large or small while human nature lasts, we shall wait in vain,’19 declared Palmer. He knew that the ideal society could never exist. And yet for all that the Ancients were rather fragmented, they had a powerful sense of shared purpose and prayerfulness, of friendship and happiness that enriched their lives. They sought out the simple pleasures of a world in which the spiritual was spied through the veil of nature and, as Palmer was later to put it, ‘the beautiful was loved for itself’.20
They rose early at Shoreham, beginning their days – or at least endeavouring to, Palmer admitted – by dwelling on a passage from scripture. They gloried in the loveliness of the dawn, often rising in darkness and slipping out while the mists were still lingering low by the river and the oxen still drowsing unyoked in their stalls, to sit on their camp stools and watch for day’s coming. And then, when the first creeping pinkness had flared and flamed outwards in a conflagration of dawn gold, they would gather up their things and walk home through its wonders together, singing praises to God for his radiant light.
Having breakfasted simply on bread and apples, they would bathe in the river, even in winter when the swift icy currents must have made them splash and yelp. Such vigorous daily ablutions were a new departure for Palmer who had until then been content to wash only once a week. ‘I feel ever grateful to Mr Tatham for teaching me to “sweeten my carcass”,’21 he would later write. For the rest of his life he remained ‘an inveterate body-washer’. The whole human race could be divided spiritually into the converted and unconverted and bodily into ‘the washers and stinkers’,22 he concluded, and when many years later a woman politely inquired of him what, in one word, he considered to be England’s greatest national virtue, he pronounced without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Cleanliness.’ ‘Yes! We may look down from the organ gallery of St Paul’s Knightsbridge in the London season and say “Every one of you has taken a tub this morning!” In what other country could that be said?’23
The Ancients would often spend the entire day out of doors, roaming about in their valley of vision with their sketchbooks and brushes, their pockets packed with apples and bladders of pigment and volumes of poetry, their minds stuffed with visions of ideal delight. To read Palmer’s letters or look at his Shoreham pictures or even take a stroll through the still largely unspoilt valley in which he lived, is to discover a sense of the pleasures he enjoyed: the surging enthusiasms of spring when the orchards are a frothing profusion of blossom and the pale pink of the dog roses drape every hedge, when the woods are alive with the jays’ angry clatter and the young calves bleat shrilly from the little thatched crofts; the sweltering delights of the summer when Palmer would stalk through the cornfields, plodding slowly uphill towards the ridge-top heights where crickets filled the air with their frying-pan sizzle and speckled fritillaries skipped over the chalk. When the sun was too high, he would often sit dreaming on the shady banks of the river watching the flash of the kingfishers under the oaks, the damselflies flickering and the trout lazily rising among the silver twist of the willows and the glinting puzzles of gnats. In autumn, the valley was at its richest. He would watch the stooping harvesters wading through the corn, feasting on blackberries until his fingers were stained purple and crunching at handfuls of hazelnuts. Palmer particularly loved nuts and would stuff his enormous pockets full of them, cracking them loudly between his teeth as he shuffled through the leaves like some acorn-grubbing hog. And in winter, when the pace of life was much slower and the landscape more still, Palmer would often stay in by his fire to work, listening to the rhythm of the flails as they thumped the stone threshing floor, the rush of the river swollen up by rain, the tapping of branches against the panes of the windows and, occasionally, to the thick muffled silence of snow.
Sometimes the Ancients ventured further afield on their sketching trips, pausing in the hop gardens of the hamlet of Underriver, delighting in the architecture of the medieval Ightham Mote, visiting Edenbridge and Anne Boleyn’s childhood home, Hever Castle, or walking to Chiddingstone about three miles beyond, the sort of picturesque village which Palmer would later revisit to find the mills, old forges and cottage doors which could lend character to his work. Occasionally they would follow the Darent upstream in the direction of Westerham from where, climbing up to the village of Brasted Chart, they could gaze out across ‘the softly melting richness’24 of a view which stretched on a clear day as far as the Isle of Wight; or they would make detours to other beauty spots, to the place they referred to as ‘Pig and Whistle Valley’ after the name of the flint cottage that stood at its head, or to the beacon at Rooks Hill overlooking Underriver. Palmer would later paint the view from its summit: a narrow slice of landscape leading towards far-off horizons of hazy blue. When Linnell came to visit, Palmer took him and his children on a tour of all his favourite sites. Linnell was ‘delighted with the scenery’, he reported excitedly to Richmond, ‘and says he has seen higher hills but never finer scenes’25 and the children were thrilled to be trundling along in an open cart.
It was landscape that the Ancients most loved, and particularly when they were wandering through it together, rolling along arm in arm, seeing God in everything from the little ‘garden’d labyrinths’ at the bottom of the valley to the great swelling masses of the ‘thymy downs’.26 These young men were not moving through the same world as the village dwellers, they were not wandering through fields that had to be ploughed, planted and cropped; seeing sheep which would stray if their watcher fell asleep or corn sheaves that would buckle the bones of their spines. Their suns did not rise on a day of hard labour or their dewy twilights bring a damp rheumatic ache. They were moving through the ‘dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise’.27 The landscape of Shoreham had for them been transubstantiated by the poetry that they loved: they would often recite it as they drifted along, letting the rhythms of Virgil or Milton roll out along lanes and rumble down valley slopes. Palmer was always to be particular about the art of recitation. He would study how actors spoke. One did not make oneself heard over long distances by bawling, he would later instruct a young protégée, ‘but by speaking very distinctly and giving . . . words their proper and proportioned emphasis’.28 ‘Do not grunt or snuffle the words through your nose or choak them in your throat or bite them with your teeth,’ he would tell her, ‘but throw them boldly out until they resound again.’29
Palmer was also a fine singer. His powerful tenor ringing out from the hilltops could be heard far down in the valley below. Sometimes, when the thunderclouds gathered in the summer’s sultry heat, huge towers of cumulus massing along the horizons, building and boiling in vast staggering banks, the Ancients would wait out on the ridges until the tempest broke. Then, when the skies were shot through by great bolts of lightning and the rain was dashing down in sheets, they would make their way homewards through the storm together pitting their loud chorus against the rumbling thunderclaps.
The Ancients dined as simply as they breakfasted; probably, as was customary in those days, at about three o’clock. The mainstay of their diet was milk, eggs and bread, supplemented with the occasional piece of meat: perhaps a bit of mutton bought from some local farmer, a plump pheasant or partridge from the woods or on high days and holidays a fat goose. They would buy seasonal fruits and vegetables – radishes and gooseberries are mentioned – from neighbouring cottagers and throughout the autumn there would be an abundance of local apples, served up by Mary Ward in puddings and pies or roasted and stewed for the sake of the bowels with whose functions Palmer and his friends were consistently preoccupied. Sometimes they ate too much and Giles, taking a swim too soon after dinner one day, found himself greatly discomfited by the sensation that a large ‘quartern loaf’30 had got stuck in his digestive tract.
The apples would be pressed by the locals to make cider which, when the harvest had been good, could be bought ‘undiluted and unadulterated’,31 for as little as a shilling a gallon: so cheap, Palmer told Linnell, who planned to take some back to London, that farmers were giving it to workers instead of the normal table beer. Palmer and his fellow Ancients never consumed anything stronger than this local brew, but they appeared to have drunk it in such profuse quantities that even heavily diluted it had an effect – not least if the bacchanalian antics depicted in Calvert’s woodcut The Cyder Feast are anything to go by.
The Ancients particularly loved the ‘perfumed and enchanted twilight’32 of the warm summer evenings and long after the last heavy-uddered cows had swayed home from their pastures, after the weary labourer had returned to his supper and the slow grey heron flapped home to its roost, they would linger, swishing through the cornfields as the hills turned to dark silhouettes and the moon slowly opened her ‘golden eye’. She shed a ‘mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre on the inmost spirits’, Palmer said.33 Sometimes, as darkness drew in, the young men would walk up through the village to a nearby chalk quarry and there, in a natural stone theatre carved out of the slopes, they would deliver a concert at the tops of their voices. They particularly loved Purcell’s music to The Tempest (in those days it was thought to have been written by Matthew Locke), growing wilder and wilder as they sang it louder and louder, their faces glimmering eerily as they danced in the night. Often they set off on long rambles through the herb-scented darkness, their familiar landscapes made mysterious by the sprinkling moonlight. The locals nicknamed them the Extollagers, a mixture of extoller and astrologer, most probably, or as Palmer jokily defined it: one who ‘went by the stars, a strange gentleman whose sketching stool, unseen before in those parts, was mistaken for a celestial instrument’.34
One of their favourite haunts, Finch recalled, was a tangled lane that led away from the village and was flanked by rows of old beeches with great writhing roots. Some years before, this lane had been the scene of a murder and the excitable Ancients thrilled at the very thought. The lane became their theatre, a site for re-enactments of fantastical scenes as the friends staged their own versions of the sort of spooky tableaux vivants that Fuseli’s Gothic paintings had made so fashionable or made the dark corridor ring with their operatic renditions. One night they decided to walk to Bromley churchyard to meditate among the tombs, but were spotted by suspicious locals and reported to the watch who accosted them with raised bayonets accusing them of taking part in the then lucrative practice of tomb-robbing. The encounter came to nothing in the end. Everything was explicable. And the Ancients weren’t deterred from undertaking further moonlit jaunts. Another night, the church clock had already struck ten by the time they decided on a whim to set out on an eight- or nine-mile walk along the ridges to Sevenoaks in search of a copy of the novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho: a ludicrously overwrought tale of supernatural terrors which, when first published some twenty years earlier, had whipped convoluted Gothic fantasies up into a fashion. Jane Austen had ridiculed it in Northanger Abbey in which her impressionable young heroine, riveted by such histrionic stories, starts to imagine her acquaintances to be characters in a lurid drama, but Palmer remained a fan of its author, Ann Radcliffe (‘dear old aunt Radcliffe’). Some sixty years later he still had his ‘ancient fragile’35 copy of her Udolpho and wished that he could get hold of her other volumes in print of a size that his by then ageing eyes could read.
Local rumours would have done little to soothe the febrile imagination. Like most rural communities, the villagers harboured all sorts of superstitions, stories of spirits whose dread secrets had been passed down from generation to generation. They told tales of snakes ‘of the bigness of a man’s leg’, of deadly lizards which ‘basked sleepily on out-of-the-way banks where men never pass’.36 One stout local yeoman professed that, jogging home from market through the valley at twilight, he had seen a flying reptile which by dint of whip and spur he had overtaken and killed, leaving its remains to be seen by all unbelievers the next day, lying on a wall at Otford, wings and tail, complete.
The arrival of Blake – a man who had played host to any number of otherworldly callers – only fanned their enthusiasms and one evening they all set off together to a ‘haunted mansion in a shadowy paddock’ where, as Palmer remembered it, ‘sceptics had seen more than they could account for’.37 Shuffling and whispering and hushing each other, glancing at Blake by the light of the veering lantern and giggling and nudging no doubt, they arrived and waited but any urge to laughter, however nervous, soon came to an abrupt stop when they heard a curious rattling. Drawing together they listened in a scared but expectant silence. It was Calvert, the most practical among them, who moved soft-footed towards the source of the sound while Palmer, more tentatively, followed with lantern raised. They listened again. Tap . . . tap . . . tap, came the sound. They peered more closely. And it was only then that they made their discovery: a snail was inching its way up the mullion, its shell tapping noisily against the glass pane. Not that this mundane revelation would dissuade them from their ardent belief in supernatural forces. Palmer was convinced that he had had a clairvoyant experience one night when, leaving Blake and his fellow Ancients in Shoreham, he set off on an errand to London. Not very long after he had left, Blake, sitting at the table, suddenly put his hand to his forehead and said: ‘Palmer is come . . . he is walking up the road.’
‘Oh, Mr Blake,’ Calvert told him, ‘he is gone to London, we saw him off in the coach.’
‘No. He’s coming through the wicket,’ Blake clearly contradicted. A few seconds later the latch was indeed raised and Palmer stepped into the room. It turned out that the stagecoach had broken down just outside the village and so he had returned.
Palmer would relish such experiences all his life and would happily recount tales of mystic canary birds or haunted toy horses. He was delighted, some fifty years after leaving Shoreham, to find an article in the Spectator by someone who, while ridiculing rustic credulity, thought a terror of ghosts a far more reasonable response to tradition than mere dismissal of what one cannot at once explain. As Palmer himself rather pompously declared, having returned in 1870 to Margate where he had spent ‘among the most interesting evenings of my life’ in a haunted house, his impression was ‘that, making all allowance for imposture and mistake, there was a residuum of evidence which no candid mind could resist’.38
The Ancients, however, only indulged in their eccentric nocturnal jaunts from time to time. In autumn, as the fragrant smoke of the homeward-plodding labourers’ pipes drifted along the lanes, their own thoughts would also turn to the hearth. In the cold of the winter they preferred to remain by the fire. Frequently they would stay up into the small hours, working by candlelight as a little ink sketch of Richmond done by Palmer attests. Huddled up in his warm dressing gown, a long, tasselled night cap pulled over his head, he scratches away diligently at his engraving. It is his Shepherd, a note by Palmer informs us: an elegant but unfinished pastoral composition that had been inspired by the engravings of Blake.
Later, as an elderly hypochondriac nervously alert to potential causes of ill health, Palmer would repent these prolonged late-night stints. ‘Sir Walter Scott got all his day’s work done before breakfast,’ he informed a pupil. ‘I fell early into the opposite habits which I deeply regret.’39 But at the time those long winter evenings, pulled like warm coats around them, felt delightfully homely, especially after Palmer moved from the incommodious Rat Abbey into the far more comfortable Waterhouse. He loved the ‘never-cloying luxury’ of long ‘quiet intellectual evenings to those who are fagged out by the day’.40 Gathered round the fire, the Ancients would listen to the music of the river as it rushed down to the millrace, to Palmer playing his fiddle or picking out tunes on the piano, while Finch sang along choosing the sort of ‘sweet pathetick’41 melodies that his friends most loved.
Long after the last amber glow of the neighbours’ candlelit lattices had faded, the young men would be sitting there, indulging in their agreeable ceremonies of pipe-smoking and snuff-taking, puffing and tamping and pinching and blowing as they sipped at their bowls of ‘dear precious green tea’.42 Palmer and Richmond (whose mother sent him parcels of tea and sugar from London) had a particular passion for this drink and a letter passes between them in which Palmer minutely instructs his friend on how to discriminate Hyson (which should be ‘of a full-sized grain, of a blooming appearance, very dry, and crisp’) from its superior Gunpowder (which ‘should have a beautiful bloom upon it, which will not bear the breath’, be of ‘greenish hue’ and ‘a fragrant pungent taste’).43 But green tea – or terre verte as they called it, after the artist’s pigment – was their particular favourite and even years later a bowl of it would stir nostalgic memories for Palmer of quiet Shoreham evenings and ‘nice long old-fashioned talks’44 by the fire.
These conversations were made up of an ‘entertaining medley’45 of poetry and art, religion and politics, though they could easily descend into acrimonious theological bickerings, not least when Palmer’s father was entertaining Primitive Baptists or Linnell had invested in the latest proselytising tract. Palmer relished a tough quarrel and revelled in long-running intellectual tussles. But more even than talking, the Ancients loved to read. ‘Blessed books – any one of which is worth all the toggery we ever put on our backs,’46 said Palmer. With ‘opodeldoc [a powerfully aromatic liniment, supposedly invented by Paracelsus, made of soap dissolved in alcohol, to which camphor and herbal essences, most notably wormwood, had been added] rubbed into the forehead to wake the brain up’ and ‘a Great Gorge of old poetry to get up the dreaming’,47 he was happy. When the wind howled bitterly round the chimney pots and the rain beat in gusts against panes, he and his fellow Ancients would place the steaming teapot by the fire and, reaching down the tall folios from the bookshelves, tuck themselves peacefully into their tomes. These precious interludes, passed ‘recreating myself with good books’,48 were times which Palmer was always to look back on and treasure. ‘I am really glad I had a dose and glut of reading at Shoreham,’ he would write many years later, for some savour of it always remained, he said, ‘like the relish of wine in an empty cask’.49
Eventually it would be time to retire. Palmer would go up to his bed, with its mattress of local sheep’s wool (‘a feather bed costs 14 guineas and is not my lot’50) with a hop sack coverlet thrown over it if he needed extra warmth, and lie there listening to the calls of the owls as they swept through the trees, the creaking of the floorboards and the bark of the foxes. And maybe, beyond that, so constant that he barely even caught it, the deep background hum of a profound sense of peace. ‘We less enjoy life than listen to the sound of its machinery,’51 Palmer later wrote. He would always look back to his time in Shoreham as a moment of blessed tranquillity; as a time of stillness which for the rest of his life he would seek.
William Blake died within a year of Palmer moving to Shoreham. Richmond gave Palmer the news. ‘He died on Sunday night at 6 o’clock in most glorious manner,’ he told him. ‘He said He was going to that country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.’52 It was Richmond who finally closed Blake’s eyelids and kissed him as he lay in his work room in Fountain Court. John Linnell, with characteristic efficiency, helped to arrange the burial and five days later the Ancients followed Blake’s humble elm coffin to the dissenters’ burial ground in Bunhill Fields in north London where both his parents had already been buried and where their brilliant son was now laid, at a cost of nineteen shillings, in a common grave. Palmer wasn’t there. It was a loss he must have felt keenly, despite his conviction that they would meet again in heaven one day. For the rest of his life he kept among his most treasured mementos a message card designed for Cumberland, the last work Blake had completed, and his pair of big, round, steel-rimmed glasses, their lenses bleared by many years of use. The memory of Blake bound the circle of Ancients even more closely together. They were to become his most impassioned defenders. ‘He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life, who are not in some way or other, “double-minded” and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre,’53 Palmer would say.
It was Linnell, however, who was most immediately affected by his death. He had been much involved in his affairs during his last feeble months and had lent Blake’s widow, Catherine, the money to pay for the ceremony, moving her afterwards into his Cirencester Place studio ostensibly as a housekeeper, but in fact to take care of her. He had lost a friend whom he had profoundly respected and his health began to break down shortly afterwards. One day, queuing at the bank, he found himself too weak to wait any longer and had to return home. Soon, all other restorative measures having failed, he was compulsively inhaling twelve bottles of oxygen a day.
In 1828, finding the constant back-and-forth journey too taxing, he moved his family back from Hampstead to a rented house in Bayswater. But he still kept up a punishing work schedule: rising early in the morning to work at his painting, continuing his teaching (he was by then much in demand as a tutor), educating his children, making bread (he would often leave his sitters for a few moments to knead the dough), brewing beer and, as if all this wasn’t sufficient, hatching a scheme to build a new house. Having consulted with the architect Tatham, undergone all his usual pecuniary calculations and negotiated a complex web of barter arrangements by which he would trade paintings for building work, he embarked on the project. By the autumn of 1829, foundations had been laid in Porchester Terrace and, within the stipulated year, the new home was finished, by which time Linnell, having taken a hand in everything from the drawing up of the first plans to the digging of the cesspool, was installing a bread oven and a cast-iron kitchen range.
Beside all this determined industry, the un-timetabled hours that he passed in Shoreham must have felt even more beguiling and back in London, after a visit, he began dreaming of pastoral Kentish scenes. Palmer, manifestly delighted, did everything he could to encourage his return. A succession of letters passed back and forth between them, discussing potential accommodation, organising help from a farmer’s daughter (down to the specific details of her responsibilities: her father would not like her to wash dishes or be under the cook doing scullery work), negotiating prices, giving the times of the coaches and making arrangements to meet them. Palmer would happily walk up to the toll road at the top of the hill at Shoreham on the off-chance that Linnell might be on a certain coach. He worried about whether his mentor could bear the uncushioned jolting of a cart without springs and on one occasion, when Linnell was feeling particularly weak, the Ancients procured a wheelbarrow in which to push him about.
The Palmers did everything they could to make their guests welcome at Waterhouse. There was always a bowl of apples left out on the table and a kettle of tea left brewing on the hob. When Calvert and his wife came to visit they were given the best room because they were married and, when one of their sons fell dangerously ill, the Palmers looked after him in Shoreham while he convalesced. ‘In all probability it saved his life,’54 the boy’s grandmother thanked them. If there were not enough rooms, Palmer would move out to lodgings above the village bakery and, if walkers from London arrived in the middle of the night, his father would not only get up to greet them but give them his own bed so that they could enjoy a well-earned sleep.
Palmer made as few visits as possible to ‘the great national dusthole’.55 ‘I purpose never again to see London by daylight,’ he declared in 1834. Between 1831 and 1835 he bought four more properties in Shoreham which he let out to locals, planning to live off the meagre rental income until his career gathered pace. He would own these cottages for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his fellow Ancients ran his errands in the capital – visiting framers, looking out books, delivering messages or purchasing materials that ranged from the sheets of thick Bristol board, which he most liked to draw on, to a mussel shell of powdered gold for a miniature that he planned to paint. Palmer, in return, dispatched potatoes to Tatham at two shillings a bushel, sacks of hops to Linnell and to Richmond flagons of cider for his bowels.
Alone in Shoreham, however, Palmer greatly missed his friends – he laments not being present for a cricket match in Linnell’s garden – and constantly chivvied his fellow Ancients to visit: the harvest is coming; the days are glorious; the hopping season has begun, the weather is fine, they must hurry before it breaks. ‘Why do Walter and Mr Calvert fancy Shoreham a hundred miles off?’ he complained in 1828. ‘Let them get on the road by chance and walk a bit and ride a bit and they will soon look down on the valley.’56 The winter months when the roads were not conducive to travelling, when the weather was ‘fogg’d and cloudy’ and the ‘landscape a sickly white or grey’,57 often left him solitary and in the summer, when sudden rains turned the roads into mires, sending torrents rushing down the hillsides and leaving the fruit carts stranded up to their axles in three foot of water, he would feel the inconvenience of his isolation acutely.
The Ancients kept in touch by writing long letters to each other in which they discussed their activities, ideas and discoveries. ‘Punctually devote half an hour every evening to setting down the prominent circumstances of your day; particularly anything pictorial or intellectual,’58 Palmer instructed Richmond as he set off to Italy in 1828. ‘Pray write me a more minute account than the last of what you get up to “from morn to dewy eve”.’59 He fretted about the parlous state of the postal service with its delays and misdirections. ‘I want so much to be talking to you that you see I cannot wait to be coming to town,’ he told Richmond in a letter which ‘dribbled out’ as he walked in the neighbouring Lullingstone Park, as he sat in the peace of a local farmer’s garden or scribbled at a table after supper at home.60 These periodically updated missives took the place of a conversation; a pen, the place of an arm tucked companionably into his own.
Palmer in many ways found writing a more natural form of expression than painting. ‘It is very much easier to give vent to the romantic by speech than to get it all the way down from the brain to the fingers’ ends, and then squeeze it out upon the canvas,’61 he told Calvert in 1837. To consult the archives of the Victoria & Albert or the Fitzwilliam Museums, to read through page upon close-packed page of his sloping sepia-inked scripts, is to gain a vivid sense of his life and character. A barrister who had once met Blake over dinner, described him as having delivered an unmethodical rhapsody on art, poetry and religion throughout the meal. Palmer’s letters have something of the same rambling flow. They encompass anything from the most solemn disquisition on artistic beliefs, to a boyish discussion of bowel movements; from a profound profession of faith, to a fussy itemisation of costs. They have a delightful freshness. The reader is introduced to a character unfurling in all its many aspects, from the heights of its idealism to the depths of its disappointments. A picture is offered of Palmer in his many moods: passionate, punctilious, pious, fun-poking, pompous, provocative, self-pitying, appeasing. One hears him haranguing or assuaging, whining or exulting; finds him madly excited or gloomily melancholy, ridiculously grandiloquent or just downright silly. Sometimes, Palmer pours out his thoughts in a stream of consciousness (‘autobabblery’62 as he describes it), sometimes he flits from idea to idea as when he moves in a trice from discussing the ‘perpetual miracle of life’63 to the price that he should pay a Mr Steggle for a picture frame. Sometimes, he writes with premeditated gravity in a neat legible script with barely a crossing out; sometimes his letters are ornamented with drawings in the margins, packed with afterthoughts and cross-scorings and strings of postscripted points.
Palmer tried to draw the brotherhood more tightly together through his letters, passing on news, offering words of encouragement or conveying frequent remembrances from one to the other. The Ancients would also use drawing in this way. Like the Nazarenes before them, they would sketch each other, studying the lineaments of each other’s faces, becoming familiar with expressions and moods. Such likenesses could affirm a sense of shared purpose. When Richmond exhibited his 1829 miniature of Palmer under the title of Portrait of an Artist, it was an assertion of his faith in the future of his friend’s profession.
More often, however, their sketches were less serious. The Ancients were little more than boys – and were even mistaken for schoolchildren as a tale, which Finch liked to tell, shows. One day, out for ramble, they had stripped to the waist to wash in a village well only to find themselves suddenly surrounded by locals who, thinking them truants, wanted to call the constable. It was only when a man ran a finger across one of their cheeks that, feeling the bristles, he realised: ‘No, these ain’t schoolboys. This is an old file!’64
The young men revelled in boyish teasing, in practical jokes and self-mockery. A caricature of Richmond catches him ‘in the full swing of his glory’, his tail coat flapping as he twirls upon a pair of horizontal bars. And in a little self-portrait, Richmond presents himself as a dunce, smoking a pipe and wearing a fool’s cap. There are pictures of Palmer in big round glasses and ridiculous hat, or singing with his mouth wide-agape as a frog’s, or shambling absent-mindedly, his umbrella clutched upside down. ‘Sambo Palmer’, Richmond inscribed this sketch. The Ancients liked nicknames. They called Blake ‘the Interpreter’, Michelangelo ‘Mike’, Linnell’s children ‘the little Leonardos’, and Richmond’s newborn baby ‘the Chevalier’, short for ‘Chevalier-New-Come’.
Beyond the solemn purpose and the religious piety of the brotherhood, lay the simple enjoyment of a gang of young men who loved laughter and jokes and bawdiness, ridiculous puns (‘I would rather have queer notions than queer motions’65 Palmer declares as he returns yet again to the subject of costiveness) and ludicrous rhyming ditties. ‘I am in one of my fits, again,’ Richmond wrote. Palmer would often be reduced to rolling incapable on the floor: ‘a kind of delightful hysterics’, as he described it, when he would ‘yell and roar’ like a wild beast.66 They all relished teasing except the solemn Calvert who as a result became the butt of their jokes. A high-spirited Palmer once affronted him by singing The British Grenadiers at the top of his voice when he had been told not to. Calvert’s consequent anger lasted for more than thirty-six hours. They were the only three days that they ever hated each other, an affectionate Palmer was later to recall.