16
You are going to tread a holy ground, where
St Peter and St Paul have walked
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
On Saturday 30 September 1837, after a courtship that had lasted for more than four years, Palmer finally married Hannah Linnell. She was nineteen and he was thirty-two when they signed their names in the register. And though Palmer would have liked to have professed his vows in church, in taking the hand of Hannah he was also taking her father ever more nearly into his life and Linnell, who, when he had married twenty years earlier had been prepared to travel as far as Scotland to avoid the priest, had insisted on a civil ceremony. The young couple, under a law which had only two months earlier come into effect, were conjoined in a ceremony solemnised by a registrar. ‘S. P. was married at the Courthouse, Marylebone’, noted Palmer several years later in his commonplace book: and ‘he, a churchman!’1
For their honeymoon, the young couple planned to join the throngs of British travellers who, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, had returned to traipsing the Grand Tour trail. They would visit Italy. For Palmer it would be the fulfilment of a long-held desire. ‘You are going to tread a holy ground, where St Peter and St Paul have walked before you,’2 he had written to Richmond almost a decade earlier when his friend had first visited this land of artistic wonders. He had long dreamt of the luminous vistas of Claudean pastorals, of Donatello’s divinities and Michelangelo’s giants; he had imagined the heavenly music that would be played in churches, the medieval reverence of the peasants who prayed. Now he and Hannah were to join Richmond, his heavily pregnant wife Julia and their four-year-old son Thomas Knyvett (the sole survivor of the four children to whom she had so far given birth) on a voyage for which they all held great expectations, but none higher than Palmer’s. Reputations could be made overseas. ‘I hope to produce much saleable matter – and to make the “pot boil” with fuel “kindled at the muses’ flame”,’3 he declared. Richmond, quick to reciprocate the favour that Palmer had done him upon his own marriage, lent his friend £139 for the journey. A contract was drawn up, setting the interest at 3.5 per cent, though specifically stating that the money should never be demanded back at a time when its borrower would be inconvenienced.
Money, however, was not the couple’s main problem. Hannah’s mother presented a far less easily surmountable obstacle to their plans. A woman who could discover multifarious dangers in even the most ordinary course of London life, regarded the Italian venture as a dice with death in a land of perilous fevers and volcanic catastrophes, ferocious bandits and predatory priests and, perhaps worst of all, indigestible foodstuffs. For a while it had seemed as if Palmer would be travelling alone. It took all the persuasive tact of a conciliating Julia and all the logical pressure of a reasonable Linnell, to coax the neurotic matriarch into changing her mind. To prevent any last-minute backpedalling she was made to put her name to a written declaration of assent. Meanwhile Linnell, although initially he too had had his reservations, commissioned his daughter to paint a series of small-scale copies of the Raphael frescoes in the Vatican, as well as to colour a set of prints he had made after Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. These tasks would provide her, he thought, with a project to occupy her as well as a source of much-needed income for he had given his daughter no dowry and she would be embarking for Italy with barely £10 in her purse.
In the weeks before leaving, Palmer set busily about his preparations: painting materials were gathered, packing attended to with militaristic rigour, a pistol complete with ammunition purchased (it was confiscated by the French authorities even before they got to Paris) and some ‘curious modifications’4 introduced to his bachelor wardrobe. Though these were not specifically described, they would no doubt have involved increased pocket capacity for, several months into his journey, remembering that he had not returned a borrowed book, Palmer wrote and asked his father to do so only to discover the said volume several weeks later bumping around at the bottom of his coat.
Palmer intended to make money by letting out his Grove Street house and, until such time as a tenant could be found, he left his brother to live there and take care of it with the help of his wife. It had seemed a convenient arrangement at the time. The feckless William had at last secured a job and was working as an assistant keeper at the British Museum.
Four days after the wedding, the Linnells and their children – Lizzy, Johnny, Jemmy, Willy, Mary, Sarah, Polly and Sally – gathered in their front garden to wave Palmer and their eldest sister Anny off.
Having enjoyed a smooth crossing by paddle steamer from Dover, the travellers arrived in Calais, the foreign cries of the French sailors echoing all about them as they dragged the boat shorewards, earrings winking in the light. It was here that Palmer paid his first visit to a Roman Catholic church (though, unsurprisingly, he did not tell Linnell); its richly furnished chapels and ‘picturesque poor people . . . kneeling about the doors’,5 delighted his visitor’s eye quite as much as the old-fashioned markets with their gay rustic costumes and profusions of bright fruit. From Calais, the Richmonds and Palmers shared a bumpy diligence to Paris, only getting out twice on the way for a quick stretch of the legs. Despite a few passages of ‘pretty tolerable’ scenery, the villages were mostly ‘desolate and deserted . . . with not a gleam of cottage comfort . . . and instead of ruddy ploughmen, ragged, sallow, blue-coated monsieurs’, the firmly anti-Republican Palmer recorded. The whole country, he observed, looked as if it had been ‘purged, not purified’ by its violent history.6
In the past, Palmer had referred to Paris as ‘that metropolis of Apes’.7 But now, passing a few days there, he spent every hour he could spare from wrangling with French officials over problems with their papers, admiring the antique statuary in the Louvre where, though three-quarters of the paintings he dismissed as ‘of little interest’,8 Veronese’s massive canvas The Wedding at Cana seized his eye. It would be worth travelling to Paris to see this one extraordinary picture alone, he concluded, though it was but the first of many pictures which he would complain could hardly be seen because they were hung in such gloom.
Leaving Paris, the two couples headed south-eastwards for the Swiss frontier; rattling along from five in the morning until six at night with only a brief stop for lunch they made their way upwards into the mountains, through steepening valleys and past plunging waterfalls, by cream-coloured oxen and tumbrels of purple grapes, before winding down into Lausanne and on round its lake. They were delighted by the precipitous drama of the Alpine landscape, which, as Hannah informed her parents with somewhat unwise relish, was scattered with crosses to mark the places where previous travellers had been killed. They crossed into Italy by darkness over the perilous Simplon Pass. From the balcony of a flower-trellised inn above Lake Maggiore, the honeymooners watched their first dawn breaking over Italy. Beyond them stretched the landscapes of the Romantic imagination. They were setting out together into their new life.
While the horses were rested for three days in Milan, the travellers went sightseeing. They were entranced by the cathedral’s poetic gloom: ‘a wonder of holy, Gothic’, declared Palmer: ‘its dim religious light gilds the very recesses of the soul’.9 He admired a few drawings in the city library but was appalled by Leonardo’s Last Supper which, hanging in ‘the most dismal hall I ever saw’, looked like ‘a complete wreck’.10 Then, leaving Milan, they headed south on an ever-more-glorious route which took them via Bologna, where they wandered through moonlit arcades, across Apennine landscapes and on down to Florence. ‘Quaint, antique, stately, and gorgeous, and full of the gems of those divine and divinely inspired arts,’11 this city with its dusky semi-barbarous cathedral, its sumptuous baptistery, its turreted palace and colossal statues seemed to Palmer like some old-fashioned yet richly wrought cabinet, containing in its caskets and curious recesses specimens of all that is sublime. But Rome, that ‘wilderness of wonders’,12 was their ultimate destination. It was mid-November 1837 when the companion couples arrived and started sorting out lodgings for the duration of the winter.
Palmer at first was entranced. ‘What shall I say of Rome?’ he cried. ‘Rome is a thing by itself which, once seen, leaves the memory no more – a city of Art which one . . . can scarce believe one has seen with these ocular jellies – to which London seems a warehouse and Paris a trinket shop.’13 They watched the sun as it sank beyond the dome of St Peter’s, visited the Colosseum by flickering candlelight, witnessed Pope Gregory blessing prostrate multitudes and joined their fellow English tourists for opera trips. For Palmer, the magic of unfamiliarity infused everything at the beginning, although the Richmonds, in their neighbouring lodgings, found the atmosphere rather less charming and three months later moved on.
It was not until May 1838 that the Palmers, disentangling themselves from the happy society of the many artists they had met, got going again, travelling to Naples to escape the rising summer heat. Their carriage, hopping with the fleas that had disembarked from an accompanying greyhound, was protected by a guard with two pistols for there had been several robberies on the marshes which they had to cross. Naples they found ‘filthy and uninteresting’;14 their rooms were pestiferous dens with the foul stink of drains, and for all that Vesuvius bubbled fitfully away – they described dreadful rumblings and drifting ash and a sun that glowed red as if shining through a fog – they did not hang around waiting for the promised eruption, for the volcano, locals told them, could go on grumbling for weeks.
By early June, the Palmers were in Pompeii where they found lodgings in a rustic cottage at the edge of the ancient ruins. ‘You can go into their kitchens and cellars and see their jugs and utensils,’15 Hannah told her parents. She was spooked by the eerie silence that hung over the site and the skeletons of trapped prisoners still fastened by their chains. Palmer was astounded by the quality of the paintings: ‘If these are the works of antique house decorators what must Apelles have been!!’16 he exclaimed.
The sun was baking: by nine o’clock each morning the young couple were forced to stop working because of the heat. They spent August and September sketching in the cooler climates of the mountainous Torre Annunziata, Salerno and Corpo di Cava, before returning to Rome at the end of October in preparation for a second winter, throughout which Hannah worked on her father’s commission.
Arriving back in the capital, they felt like old hands. They were welcomed as friends by their earlier acquaintances and met up with the Richmonds whose baby, born at the beginning of that year, had already cut six teeth. By the time Julia left the immortal city she was pregnant again.
From Rome, the Palmers took a diversion to nearby Tivoli – ‘the most charming place we have seen in Italy’17 declared Hannah with the effusive delight that marked arrival at any new spot – where they settled down for a month or so in rural lodgings. Palmer, taking advantage of the balmy late autumn weather, produced some of his best paintings before retiring to the hearthside to spend hours reading Shakespeare while his wife worked at resuscitating her tattered wardrobe. By New Year 1839 they were again in Rome where they remained before heading northwards for the summer, reaching Subiaco on donkey-back by June. The heat here was intense and, tortured by fleas, they moved a month later to the fresher climate of Civitella until the temperature there also mounted and an outbreak of plague sent them fleeing, travelling by mule under the light of a moon which picked out the speckled green corpses of abandoned plague victims, to Papignia, a picturesque little village in the Umbrian hills. From there they travelled via Terni back to Florence, where, passing the entirety of September and October ‘wholly absorbed in art’, Palmer became ‘so imbued with love for the landscape of Titian and Giorgione’ that he vowed never to ‘paint in my old style again’.18
The letters written by Palmer and Hannah from Italy are irregular. They reached the Linnells haphazardly, sometimes in the wrong order, sometimes two at once; long and (as far as Hannah’s parents were concerned) nerve-wracking interludes often fell between them, provoking terrible anxieties and leading to angry recriminations. Read all together, however, they give a vivacious account of foreign adventures. Palmer, who would pull out his pen as soon as the tea was drawing, had rather less time than his wife for writing; but their missives – his often poured onto the page without revisions or erasures, hers full of apologies for not writing sooner, for having bad handwriting, broken pens or for being too brief – bring their experiences to vivid life. ‘An account of all the novelties which I have seen, if hung from the top of the Monument, would trail upon London Bridge,’19 Palmer said.
He and his new wife observed everything wide-eyed, from the extravagant masquerades of the Rome carnival to a papal procession in which a white satin pontiff was borne aloft like ‘something the English boys carry about on the fifth of November’.20 They remarked on the ‘dear precious shining heavenly faces’ of the ‘poor barefooted pilgrims’21 arriving at churches to pray. They witnessed a monk securing his dinner by offering fish-market traders a coloured print of the Virgin to kiss in exchange for a small gift from each of their stalls: ‘I think in Billingsgate he would find himself as much out of his element as the fish themselves,’22 Palmer observed dryly. They met a curly-headed urchin who had been christened after Christ’s prophetic cousin: ‘I saw John the Baptist this morning eat a very large raw Cucumber for breakfast,’23 Hannah said. And they watched a funeral in which boys dressed as angels carried the bier, their large pasteboard wings knocking against everything, and making, Hannah noted, the most uncelestial noise. They listened to nightingales, saw the oxen of Theocritus and the frescos of the Florentines, ate pomegranates and oranges and sketched cypress trees planted in the days of Ariosto. They crammed their letters full of detailed observations of everything: from the way that bedsheets, shaken out of windows, scattered passers-by with bugs, through how swaddled babies were hung up on hooks to keep them out of the way, to the heat of the door handles which could not even be touched. Nothing was too small to mention – from a screaming match with a curricle driver to the loss of a parasol.
The weather proved a matter of constant discussion. One moment Palmer was shivering in Rome ‘wearing always two shirts and two waistcoats lined with flannel – and sometimes an India rubber cloak’,24 a few months later he was sweltering through the high summer of Pompeii. ‘It is a labour here to lift my hand for a dip of ink,’ he moaned, though at least he was being baked in a ‘pleasantly ventilated oven’.25 In Florence a stifling heatwave reduced him to the consistency ‘of the jelly fish which we find on the sands’.26 Food provided a source of at least as much fuss. They started off, Hannah assured her mother, by eating only the sort of things that they could be sure of: fowls, beefsteak, fish and veal, and, since all was ‘cooked in the French way, covered with sauce and curiosities’,27 they left anything they didn’t recognise. At first Palmer considered Italian cookery ‘most hateful’ – ‘nothing portly, nothing round, majestic or profound in it’28 – but in Rome he mastered a modestly priced bill of fare and, from the 580 dishes on offer, found six he could manage, though macaroni, he warned Richmond, was ‘vile rubbish . . . most constipating . . . and hard of digestion’, its effects only rectified by ‘blessed bowel opening’ oranges, grapes and figs.29 But they soon grew accustomed to foreign eating habits and came to relish raw ham and fresh fruit for breakfast or the ample ‘fat of the land’ fare of mountain dwellers. Every dinner seemed to be ‘better studied than the last’,30 the increasingly portly Palmer declared. In the course of his Italian sojourn he grew so fat that a visiting friend reported back to his family that he stood ‘like a fixed easel’. ‘Well you are likely to come home a man of substance in some sense,’31 the sardonic Linnell remarked.
The Palmers described all their encounters with the natives, from the cries of ‘Piccola Inglese’, pursuing Hannah down the streets, to the body odour of the locals which Palmer found more problematic than their beliefs – though it was not just the human population that could be troublesome. The local fauna proved equally threatening, from the pack of fierce dogs which Palmer charged with his iron-tipped walking stick, through the wolves that supposedly prowled the wild mountain tracks (and which Palmer, hearing strange rustlings, one day bravely confronted, only to find that ‘lo! up came a goat!’32), to the snakes and the scorpions that lurked under beds. And though, in the long run, none of these creatures caused them any difficulties (a scorpion was even popped into a box as a present for Hannah’s little brother), the mosquitoes turned out to be a constant torment. Palmer and Hannah spent many a sleepless night rubbing themselves alternately with soap and vinegar, pacing their rooms and scratching, before eventually one day deciding to travel ten miles by donkey (Anny falling off on the way when the girth suddenly broke) specifically to buy nets. Even these didn’t entirely solve the problem since the nights were so hot that even a layer of gauze could become unbearable. The fleas – F sharps, they called them, F for their initial letter and because their bites were so sharp (whereas the bed bugs were known as B flats, B for their initial and because the insects were flat) – proved to be a particular trial. Palmer suffered ‘perpetual minute venesection’, he said. ‘I suppose daily body washes are peculiarly tempting to vermin,’33 he groaned, unwilling to give up the personal hygiene that ever since Shoreham had remained a point of pride.
Despite such tribulations, however, the Palmers soon began to feel at ease in Italy. In Rome, they met up round a trestle table every evening for dinner and animated discussion with a colony of English artists. They discovered a Protestant church, and they quickly learnt to make friends with fellow travellers, a cast of characters that included a Mr Macdonald, a Scotsman who angrily stormed out of the room when one day a rude comment about the bagpipes was passed (Palmer was not the offender but tried to make peace, he assured Linnell) and the artist Edward Lear whom they met in Civitella and who played the flute for an impromptu ball. A year into her trip, Hannah was not remotely worried to find herself travelling in the company of complete strangers. ‘I made myself at home with them in minutes,’ she wrote, ‘though at first they gave me the usual fashionable glare which I am now so used to that it does not in the least discompose me.’34
Soon the Palmers were taking siestas and speaking passable Italian. Hannah befriended the locals with particular ease and an Italian lady in Papignia was so grieved at the prospect of their eventual parting that, amid profuse tears, they exchanged locks of hair. In her second winter in Rome, Hannah started Italian lessons with a man whose brother was a captain in the Swiss Guard. The Palmers became seasoned travellers. They found out how to face down the wily veturino drivers, to bargain with shop keepers and boil up coffee in a tin in their room. They learnt to carry their own soap because there was never any on the washstand, to sleep between blankets when the sheets were damp, to hire a boy to fend off the people who would crowd them while they were sketching and, when communicating with locals, to exchange decorous English manners for boldly flashing eyes and a loudly raised voice. Unfortunately, it was only many years after leaving that Palmer learnt that burning camphor could keep mosquitoes away.
As soon as she arrived in a new lodging, Hannah would pull out her knitting and make herself at home. ‘Travelling is nothing when one is used to it,’ she airily informed her sister. ‘A clean coarse mattress in a little hot room without a single decoration’35 came to feel like a blessing. The Italians, she enthused, were ‘truly delightful people’; she praised their warm-hearted affection, the way they would jump up and hug. ‘We are such a cold set of people,’ she remarked.36 She was particularly charmed by the way that the villagers would kiss her hand in the street and say ‘Buon-giorno Eccelenza’.37 They were ‘wonderful people in spite of their fleas’,38 Palmer declared. ‘I have learned more of mankind since I left England than I did all my life before . . . [I] fancy I know how to get through the world pretty well.’39
Though the Linnells had had qualms before the wedding of their daughter, Hannah’s honeymoon letters were designed to reassure them. ‘The propriety of our marriage is a thing I never doubt for a moment,’ she told her mother a few months after leaving. ‘If Mr Palmer had come abroad without me you would have lost me altogether as I am quite sure I should not have lived.’ ‘I am fatter and better than I have ever been in my life.’ ‘Mr Palmer is kinder to me than even I could have expected.’40 ‘We live in increasing mutual delight in each other’s society’. ‘We have not had one quarrel yet, and I do not think there is any fear with so kind a creature.’41 Palmer, in his turn, was equally enthusiastic. ‘Anny is exactly the wife I wanted,’ he told Linnell. ‘My anticipations of happiness’ in her society ‘have been most fully realised and every day I think brings an increase of affection without exception or alloy.’42 He especially liked her high-spirited moods. ‘I had no notion she had so much sparkle and buoyancy,’ he declared one evening when, fearing that she might have been unsettled by the bustle of the Roman carnival, he had approached her ‘thinking to comfort her very tenderly’ only to find to his amazement that she had leapt up and, bursting into laughter, had started to dance and sing. ‘I thought myself a tolerably merry animal,’ wrote Palmer, ‘but I am quite a Simon Pure compared with Anny who is all dance and frisk and frolic.’43
The young couple’s missives offer glimpses of close mutual happiness: of Anny giggling as she mischievously erases a bit of a letter that Palmer is writing, or laughing open-mouthed as her husband, kneeling on the carpet before her, attempts to stuff three large onions into a duck. When Julia Richmond brings news that Anny has permission to draw a privately owned Titian portrait, Palmer is so pleased that he falls upon the floor and, kicking like a lady in hysterics, seizes a tambourine before leaping up to perform a Bacchic dance. Linnell would no doubt have considered the response a trifle undignified, though the Richmonds would more probably have understood, for it was in a letter to them that Hannah told of how she had had to tick her husband off for his ‘most beastly’ trick of trying to cram as many grapes as possible into his mouth at once ‘till the juice ran out of each side, like the lions of the Roman fountains!’44
Palmer and Hannah – often mistaken by shopkeepers for brother and sister – were much at ease with each other and it is perhaps surprising that, in the course of their honeymoon, she never became pregnant. Perhaps the couple deliberately avoided conception because they feared that it would interfere with their future work. Having travelled with the expectant Julia, they would have been only too aware of the awkwardness; Hannah had often been snappy with the Richmonds’ four-year-old son and perhaps did not want to shoulder the burdens of motherhood quite yet.
The creation of paintings – not progeny – lay at the heart of the Palmers’ plans. Sam intended to return to England with a portfolio of drawings to sell as well as sheaves of preparatory sketches for more significant commissions; Hannah too had ambitions which he took as seriously as his own. He believed her capable of great things. ‘I should like to fight up into fame and get her a Greek and Latin master from Oxford – Novello for music lessons – I see her quite a Lady Calcott,’ he wrote, referring to the wife of a naval officer who, when her husband was at sea, became a writer of children’s and travel books: ‘tho’ I hope she will be more – namely a fine and original artist’.45
Hannah often found drawing frustrating and sometimes, losing her temper, she would hurl down her papers and stamp on them in pique. If it were not for Palmer, she told her parents, she would have given up for good. But he was a patient master and soon she was producing what she believed might be saleable sketches while he coaxed her on, always ready to hail each new effort as her finest so far. In Rome she would set off for the Sistine Chapel with her basket of painting materials and stay there from nine until four in the afternoon, working on her copies of the Michelangelo frescos for her father’s commission, while her husband would find some other spot to sketch. They would take it in turns to grind colours for each other’s boxes, sometimes share a hired model or draw side by side in a scenic landscape. A comic pen sketch by a fellow artist, Penry Williams, captures them at work: the bespectacled Palmer and his bonneted wife perch on a rock like a pair of puffins while half a dozen other artists roost all around. Anny was particularly taken by the picturesque local costumes and, taking a brigand’s wife as her first sitter, made the first of a series of records of the exotic Italian dress. She planned to turn these drawings into a book. She also dreamt of selling a set of five etchings done after her husband’s pieces to a London publisher. Palmer could thereby become ‘as much known in a week, as he would become by a year’s private circulation of the etchings’,46 she wrote.
They were both optimistic. It was in Italy, after all, that artists from the idealising Richard Wilson to the atmospheric J. M. W. Turner had made their names. But talent alone, they discovered, was not quite enough. Where Richmond had arrived in the capital armed with a bundle of introductory letters, Palmer had brought no recommendations and without them, he soon realised, Rome’s social circles remained resolutely sealed. He grew increasingly self-conscious about his lack of social graces. While Anny, he told her parents, ‘will do very well for society . . . “I – the dogs bark at me as I halt by them”,’47 he wrote (quoting from Shakespeare’s Richard III). His eccentric dress sense can hardly have helped, not least as his journey progressed and he hatched idiosyncratic plans to avoid the darning of stockings which involved cutting patches from one bit of footwear and tacking them on to the other’s sole. Where Hannah was presentable – she even invested in a new evening dress for Roman parties at which artists’ wives, she noted, dressed more like queens – her husband, however passable he tried to make himself, always looked in comparison with any regular dandy much like a coal barge beside a royal yacht.
Richmond did his utmost to help, introducing the couple to Joseph Severn, a pivotal figure in Roman society, and securing for Palmer a commission from John Baring to paint a panorama of Rome. But even the Richmonds’ young son could spot Palmer’s social failings. ‘Tommy sends his love . . . and says that you must not eat the backs of the sticks that we have for dinner,’ wrote Julia: ‘meaning that you began to eat the asparagus at the wrong end.’48 Palmer became increasingly troubled. ‘All who know us by sight, know us as nobody, and as creatures whom nobody knows,’ he lamented.49 How galling it must have been for him to meet a young artist who (in his opinion) could not draw and, even more unforgivably, had been heard dismissing Michelangelo’s Last Judgement as ‘a mass of rubbish’50 get two fifty-guinea commissions from the Russian ambassador and an introduction to the Duke of Sutherland. ‘There seems to be a great chasm between me and gentility,’ he mourned: ‘that gentility which I despise, but of which I should like to suck the sweetness.’51
Linnell was not worried. ‘I think it of far more consequence that you bring home plenty of fine studies rather than fine connections,’52 he reassured his son-in-law. But success remained elusive. Though Baring was interested in a pendant piece for his Roman panorama and Palmer spent weeks grappling with possible compositions, the banker employed another artist in the end. Nor did Hannah’s commission from her father go well. The colouring in of his Sistine engravings may have been anticipated as a pleasant enough pastime, but it turned out to be a strenuous, time-consuming, neck-cricking feat.
As Palmer’s time in Italy progressed his relationship with Linnell grew increasingly strained. Hannah’s parents missed their daughter. They worried about her health, especially when the country was struck by an outbreak of cholera, and although at first the young couple sent back constant reassurances – bowels are reported on, diets assiduously monitored and an account of sudden hair loss by Anny meticulously proffered along with the benefits of Veritable Moelle de Boeuf oil, the application of which brings back her curly auburn mop – no profusion of reassurances could ever be quite enough. Palmer entreated his mother-in-law with ever-growing exasperation to dismiss her excessive anxiety. She must get over her ‘dread of boats and drownings and moving accidents by flood or field’, he admonished; he felt provoked to intemperance by what he described as an ‘unjustifiable and distrustful anxiety’ which ‘embitters and falsifies’.53 ‘Your daughter is well and unhurt,’ he insisted towards the end of his trip ‘and has spent nearly two years acquiring intellectual and moral power, and experience which will . . . lead her safely through the mazes of life.’54
Linnell, though more sanguine than his spouse, was not much easier to deal with. His very first letter to his daughter reproached her for not writing sooner and suggested a strict routine whereby missives – which he would pay for – would be dispatched once a month. When this did not happen as planned he grew more insistent and blamed his son-in-law. ‘Why did not that Bartholomew Pig write?’ he demanded. ‘Was he so tired going halfway up the hill that he has not yet got over it?’55 he asked, alluding to the portly Palmer’s failure to climb a steep slope to the hill-top statue of Santo Carlo Borromeo.
The balance of an already unequal relationship had finally tipped. Palmer’s letters were increasingly stuffed with professions of gratitude, persistently proffered compliments and ingratiating requests for advice – should he draw entire scenes or only details; should he concentrate on foregrounds or backgrounds; should he draw figures on the spot or in the studio? – while his father-in-law ever more firmly took the upper hand. By the time the young couple had been away a year, Linnell was instructing them as to when they should don their warm stockings and flannel drawers. Where once he had had faith in Palmer’s artistic future – admiring his lack of compromise much as he had admired Blake’s, describing his own practice, in comparison, as an inferior ‘pettifogging’56 path in which success had been sacrificed for the sake of a family – over the course of the honeymoon he progressively lost confidence in the son-in-law for whom he had once fostered such hopes.
Religion, predictably, became a point of contention. Though Hannah went to some lengths to explain how much Roman Catholicism disgusted her – not least a ceremony in which two lambs were blessed and their skins used to make monks’ cowls – Linnell’s festering suspicions that Palmer harboured Romish tendencies eventually found expression. There was no disguising his tone of voice when Palmer anticipated the pleasure of paying family visits when they got back home. ‘It is all very nice what you say about home at Grove Street and your visits to Bayswater with only the wooden bridge to get over etc. – but it appears to me there is another Bridge which you have assisted in building and keeping in repair for some years and which is rather a barricade than a means of communication. I mean that Asses Bridge of Superstition built with nothing but the rubbish of human tradition – obscene, false and fraudulent.’57
Money turned into another source of friction. Palmer’s financial affairs were not running smoothly. Grove Street remained untenanted, in large part because the next-door house had been rented by a pair of prostitutes who advertised their services by throwing up the sashes and shouting out of the window. Palmer’s father had by then left, moving to Aylesbury to become the pastor of a congregation of only nine people, and leaving Palmer’s home to the improvident William to take care of. But William, having adopted a foundling from the workhouse, was using the Grove Street front parlour as a bedroom, which was hardly conducive to paying lodgers.
Palmer badly needed the money that the letting of Grove Street would bring. He politely but firmly pressed his brother for rent, but though William had plans to follow his father into the country and set up a school, for the time being he could not pay. He even hatched a shady plan to sell Palmer’s Shoreham cottages – a scheme to which Linnell, efficiently, put paid. Meanwhile a strange and never-quite-explained affair occurred whereby charges were brought against William for the barbarous treatment of his adopted daughter. The child was removed. The rumours were eventually proved unsubstantiated but by the time that William was asked to take the child back, his wife was expecting a baby of her own.
Without any rental income, any sales of his work in Rome exhibitions or any private commissions coming in, Palmer found himself falling into dire financial straits. ‘Pray tell me what you mean Samuel, by the gloomy picture you draw of your funds, tell me how much money you have spent?’58 Linnell asked him in June 1838. The news which Palmer sent back was not good; though Linnell laughed off his wife’s worries that their daughter was starving – Palmer would eat the geese from the Capitol before he starved, Linnell joked – matters grew more pressing. Palmer, for all his penny-pinching, bargaining and making-do, was barely able to manage and, reduced to delineating his expenditure in humiliating detail, he handed over all financial responsibility to his father-in-law who, in return for providing regular funds, took the fiscal control that he would keep for the rest of his life.
Linnell’s commission was also becoming a source of friction. A project that had initially been greeted as a ‘joyful business’59 was beset with problems, not least among them Hannah’s frail constitution. At first, walking across the city every morning to set herself up in the Sistine on a folding camp stool, she had enjoyed the feeling of being a professional artist, but after a while the long hours spent amid chill damp stone, craning up into the lofty gloom, scanning the ceiling with the help of small mirrors or squinting against the glare of the light, had started to take a toll on her eyesight and health. A job which – after Palmer’s long and timidly circumloquacious negotiations – would bring in only six shillings and nine pence per drawing was not worth so much effort. And yet Linnell was implacable. It had to be done, he insisted, and in the end Palmer (helped by Albin Martin, a pupil of Linnell’s who had been dispatched to join them as much as a parental spy as travelling companion) had to waste precious time that should have been devoted to his own portfolio, revising and correcting every one of his wife’s works. By the time the Palmers finally left Rome after a second winter, he had spent more than a third of his stay completing what, in the long run, amounted to little more than a colouring book.
For much of his time in Italy, Palmer had found himself working feverishly against the clock. The honeymoon would have been far more fulfilling had he had the leisure to venture off the beaten track, to discover landscapes other than the tourist’s hackneyed spots. But there was no question of prolonging a sojourn which had already lasted so much longer than the year that had originally been planned. The Linnells were outraged when the idea was even mooted. And so, as the summer of 1839 progressed, the Palmers’ thoughts turned more and more to home. Hannah grew effusively excited at the prospect of seeing her family and though the thought of London’s ‘filthy smoke and black chimney pots’60 sickened Palmer, he was at the same time eager to begin proper work. ‘When I left England my mind was like a house full of furniture and utensils some good and some bad. I think the bad are now thrown out of the window and the good put into tolerable order so that I know pretty well what I want,’61 he wrote a few months before returning. ‘I long to leave study making,’ he added a while later. ‘I have had a glut of roaming.’62
By August 1839 the Palmers were on their long homeward trek. They would have taken a boat from Marseilles, but they dared not trust their precious cargo of pictures to a long sea voyage and so, by the end of October, they were trundling steadily northwards at the rate of thirty or forty miles a day. Hannah could not resist telling her mother one more bloodcurdling story, recounting in detail the crossing of rapids on the flooded River Po. Palmer was more concerned to make completely sure that his brother would not be in the house when he finally got back, but added a little pencil note to the end of a letter from Hannah. It is scribbled from the very top of Mount Cenis: ‘We have crossed the Alp and left Italy!! “Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwelleth. Hail railroads! hail!’63
News of Hannah’s return had sent her siblings capering like savages around the frosty London garden. They were thrilled when the Palmers at long last arrived back; when they saw the sister who had left them two years earlier now turned into a well-travelled woman who could speak Italian and had learnt to fire a pistol in an olive grove. But for Palmer the homecoming was tinged with sadness. He would never forget the contrast between the brilliant skies and the marble buildings of Italy and the filthy Thames warehouses that greeted him on his return. He was often to dream of one day returning. But he never did. Only sometimes, when the sunburnt Italian organ-grinders stopped outside his London house, Palmer would speak to them in their native language and, where most people considered them to be public menaces, he would pay them a shilling to go on playing for a while.