17
Real life began
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
‘Real life began’, noted Palmer many years later, as he looked back at that moment in the autumn of 1839 when he and his wife had returned from their two-year honeymoon. They had been eager to embark on the next phase of their life, but Hannah’s parents had had other plans. They wanted their daughter to live with them at their home. She ‘must be ours again for a time’,1 Linnell insisted in a letter. He went into a sulk when his son-in-law took a rare stand. ‘I do not like the word “must”,’ Palmer replied; Hannah’s ‘filial affection and veneration’ would always remain with her father, but ‘her obedience is transferred to me’.2 In the end, Hannah spent only a few days in Bayswater while her husband busied himself with other tasks: retrieving his portfolios from the snares of customs officials, addressing various financial muddles and making the Grove Street house feel more habitable.
Lisson Grove had first started developing in about 1720 when, with the sudden expansion of London, the village of Lisson Green had provided labour and service to the capital. But the construction of New Road (later called Marylebone Road) in 1756 had made it much more accessible. Its leafy byways had attracted several well-to-do residents including the historical painter Benjamin Haydon and the sculptor Charles Felix Rossi who carved the classical caryatids that can still be found ranked along the front of the nearby St Pancras Church. But Palmer was a latecomer and although the locality was still just about presentable, it had already entered a period of decline. The itinerant Irish labourers who had first arrived there in the 1830s to build the canal which cuts through dank alleyways and tunnels under roads, had made it their home and, as their shoddy dwellings multiplied, it would soon be little better than a slum.
The street in which Palmer lived no longer remains but a few surviving Georgian houses – two-bay red-brick buildings – still give an idea of what it must have been like. It was modest, and though the Palmers in the long-term hoped to find somewhere less cramped, for the time being they were happy. Their house, with its ten little rooms and its field out at the back, felt palatial, Hannah said, when compared to Italian lodgings and so, with the outside repainted, with old furniture and kitchen utensils borrowed from Palmer’s father and a brand new mattress purchased for their bed, the couple set about constructing a shared domestic life. Neither of them was particularly suited to the task. Palmer had always had Mary Ward to rely on and had not fared well when, after her death, he had been forced to live under the hired administration of a Mrs Hurst who had left his damp clothes draped along the passageways and heaps of dirty saucepans piled up in the sink. With Hannah as his wife, domestic arrangements were hardly set to improve. She knew little about housekeeping. She certainly couldn’t cook. A maid called Peacock was employed: a slovenly dogsbody whose methods were slipshod. The Palmers were, for the time being, unconcerned. They were set on a loftier artistic course. Their work would be their haven. ‘Whatever I do,’ Palmer wrote, ‘I wish our painting room to be the cleanest in the house – that however I be kicked about in the world I may be able to retreat thither with Anny as to a little pleasant mountain in the desert – and there try once and for all to do something which may rescue me from neglect and contempt.’3
Palmer had set off to Italy full of optimism for his professional future. He had put in long hours on his honeymoon trip, watching for his subjects like a tiger watching for its prey: seizing upon landscapes and monuments and old master paintings, figures and foregrounds and poetic effects. Buildings and costumes, cascades and mountains, distances and outlines, tonal juxtapositions and atmospheric skies had all been assiduously added to his artistic stock. Little could distract him from his task: not even the swarm of wasps which, attracted by the honey with which he kept his colours moist, had besieged him in Subiaco, crawling about his face and spectacles and ‘eating little clean, round holes into the oil paint’. ‘But never having, on any consideration, left off a sketch from external annoyances,’ he later told a friend, ‘I persevered to the end; only moving my arm and hand very gently, as I knew they were insects full (as the novelists say) “of just pride and proper spirit”; and by respecting their heroic instincts, I came off unstung.’4 Sometimes his fingers had grown stiff and painful from clenching his pencil; sometimes, hauling his heavy sketching apparatus uphill, he had rubbed his hip bones raw. For a while he had complained that he had hardly been able to squeeze his brushes, though this, it had turned out, had been caused not by hard work but by an attack of gout.
Palmer had tried to learn whatever Italy and its old masters could teach him: he had noted how tenderly Michelangelo depicted the strongest muscles or the way in which Titian would deepen his celestial blues so that subjects could glow more brightly when set against them. His Baring commission, a View of Modern Rome, had been of a size and complexity he had never before ventured but it had had a striking clarity, learnt at least in part from the Veronese which, painted in the ‘highest key of light’ and with the ‘purest brilliancy of colour’,5 he had seen and admired in the Louvre. Later, struggling to compose a classical counterpart to his modern panorama, he had faced such frustrations that after a while he had turned quite yellow and grown so thin that he could pull out his waistcoat three inches from his stomach; but determined to do it or die, he had done it in the end.
‘I now see my way and think I am no longer a mere maker of sketches, but an artist,’6 Palmer had written a year into his trip. He had felt a sense of ‘enlargement’7 he said – and not just as a result of too many good dinners. He had discovered the dangers of yellows, found out how far to venture ‘a good deep green’ or which passage of a picture needed particular attention and which might be skimmed over with a rapid touch of the pen. Though only one known work survives from this particular period (a coloured study of the hermitage at Vocatella), it demonstrates how much he had learnt since discovering back in the studio that his plein air Welsh sketches were unworkable, for this delicate architectural piece is a finished drawing of the sort that he had long aimed for, ‘with effect, foreground and figures quite settled’.8 It was this type of drawing, he believed, that would be most useful to him on his return. The ‘good deep greens’9 also played a part, most notably in his studies of an ancient cypress avenue in the gardens of the Villa d’Este. As Palmer had wandered the grounds of this extravagant villa with their nymphs and their fountains, their grottoes and lakes, he had bitterly regretted not having known of them earlier. ‘I have seen nothing like or second to it,’10 he had said. In his sketches he had endowed the cypresses, towering sentinels of bygone Baroque splendours, with a grandeur quite lacking in more conventional treatments; not least that done by Linnell’s acquaintance William Collins who, having met the Palmers in Rome (and passed on troublemaking gossip to the Linnells) had probably recommended the villa as a picturesque site.
Palmer had regretted the long hours wasted on helping his wife with her father’s commission. ‘I try only to choose in each place what seem to be the very essence and what I think it probable we may never see again in our travels,’11 he had written as he had all but dashed along, desperately concerned to make the most of each moment. Towards the end of his trip he had been convinced that he had found a new way forward. His habits had undergone ‘a complete renovation’,12 he said. And though he would still long in his heart to make one last ‘humble effort after deep sentiment and deep tone’,13 he had vowed to ‘make a steady effort to turn all to account’.14 And so, at the beginning of 1840, banishing poetic dreams to a single private hour every morning, he began dedicating the rest of his working day to whatever drudgery was required to adapt old visionary tastes to the demands of the new Victorian era which had dawned with the 1838 coronation during his time away.
The Palmers had returned home with over-stuffed portfolios. ‘They are twins,’ Palmer had joked; ‘Mrs Palmer’s drawings and my own. Dear little creatures! They will I hope, support us instead of our having to keep them.’15 Now he and Hannah, putting up a smart little brass nameplate on their door, mounted a selection of the best of these pictures before setting about grinding palettes of fresh pigments and embarking on new work.
Palmer decided to establish his reputation with a series of large, elaborately detailed, brightly coloured watercolours, which he hoped would lead on to oil commissions. Thoughtfully composed and competently executed, they are appealing enough, but they lack the atmosphere of his Shoreham pieces. Palmer was trying too hard to emulate the sort of ‘light and pleasing construction’ which he thought people would ‘like to have on their walls’.16 Trying too hard to please had always been one of his problems. The small yet poetic works that he had dreamt of producing in Italy, seeing how grand Titian and Domenichino could make the tiniest landscapes, never materialised. Instead his images became increasingly conventional, garishly tinted and lacking in life, as can clearly be seen in an 1845 watercolour of the Villa d’Este cypresses. The replica loses the spirit of the vivid sketch. The public was unimpressed. Nobody came to call at the Lisson Grove house. Nobody was interested in the paintings of the bright-eyed young couple who sat forgotten in their pokey studio, the pictures from their wedding trip stacked unwanted against the walls.
One of Palmer’s watercolours was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 but after that pretty much everything he sent in was rejected. The fashion for Italian views had passed: ‘Italy has been painted out and out and we are weary of its splendid scenes and contemptible people,’17 the Athenaeum had declared in 1833. Artists such as David Wilkie, John Frederick Lewis and David Roberts were tempting the public with more exotic scenes. The wonders of the Orient – its biblical landscapes and archaeological monuments, its Islamic domes and its vast sandy deserts, its camels and date palms and peacocks and gazelles – were now preferred. These were the marvels for which Venice had seemed only a preparation – and Palmer had not even got as far as that.
At first, the couple earned something from the sale of Linnell’s engravings after their Sistine Chapel images: work by Hannah’s father always fetched a good price. But Hannah’s plans to make a series of ten etchings after her husband’s views of Rome came to nothing and though she occasionally sold one of her copies from old master paintings, her drawings from Raphael, hung in pride of place in the Linnell family drawing room, were not so appreciated by more dispassionate observers. Sir Augustus Calcott declared them a ‘very inferior and exaggerated version’18 of their fine originals – though he probably would not have been so dismissive if he had known how much youthful energy they had cost.
Palmer’s hopes fluttered briefly when his work caught the eye of Ruskin whose Modern Painters, first published in 1843, had made him the most famous cultural theorist of his day. He had probably been pointed in Palmer’s direction by Richmond who had painted his portrait in 1842. Ruskin, who criticised the old masters for inventing their landscapes rather than studying from life, appreciated the sensitivity of Palmer’s perceptions and he was probably referring to his sketches of the Villa d’Este cypresses when in an 1846 edition of Modern Painters he described him as ‘deserving of the very highest place among the faithful followers of nature’, praising in particular the fullness of his studies of ‘foreign foliage’. ‘His feeling is as pure and grand as his fidelity is exemplary,’19 Ruskin wrote. But this moment of appreciation never flourished into widespread acclaim for, in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was founded, a gathering of fervent young painters and poets who set out to reform art by rejecting the academic formulas of such practitioners as Sir Joshua Reynolds (whom they called Sir Sloshua) who, as they saw it, simply parodied Renaissance models. The Pre-Raphaelites advocated a return to the sort of direct observation that Palmer too admired. Their heartfelt appreciation for the early Italian and Flemish masters was not far from that which the Ancients had expressed. But the brightly coloured canvases of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais or William Holman Hunt, in which every minute detail – every petal of a meadow flower or hair of an animal, every wrinkle on the skin or embroidered stitch on a costume – is attentively picked out, far more nearly accorded with Ruskin’s liking of scrupulous observation than Palmer’s conceptions of poetic landscape. Palmer did not feature in Ruskin’s disquisitions again.
Nothing concrete came of Palmer’s time in Italy except when in March 1846, well over six years after he had returned, Charles Dickens, needing illustrations for his forthcoming travelogue Pictures from Italy, approached him, a planned liaison with another artist having failed. For a while the excitable Palmer must have thought that his prospects were improving. He was offered the commission. He was to receive twenty guineas – a sum agreed upon only after a flustered consultation with Linnell – to do four wood engravings similar to those used as vignette illustrations for a comparable volume: Samuel Rogers’s by-then enormously popular blank verse poem Italy which had been illustrated by Turner and Stothard. And though an initial hitch at the publishers sent his spirits into a tailspin – ‘I am weak as a rat and a spectacle to the little boys in the street as I totter along’20 – the transaction eventually was carried through. Dickens was detached but affable. ‘I beg to assure you that I would on no account dream of allowing the book to go to Press, without the insertion of your name in the title page. I placed it there, myself, two days ago,’ he told Palmer who was worried that he would be sidelined. ‘I have not seen the designs, but I have no doubt whatever (remembering your sketches) that they are very good.’21
Dickens might have been confident, but Palmer was not. Unaccustomed to working to a deadline, he soon found himself in difficulties. He couldn’t make it clear to the block-cutters exactly what he wanted. His proofs were an impenetrable mess of scribbled suggestions and appeals. An awful lot of trouble was taken for the sake of four small illustrations – they show the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, the Colosseum in Rome, Pompeii’s street of tombs and a vineyard scene in which the plants clamber up tree trunks like twining hop stems – and when the travelogue was republished some fifteen years later another artist was commissioned to add further images. Palmer’s collaboration with Dickens came to nothing. It was one of the great non-encounters of the nineteenth century.
Outside his work, however, Palmer found times of contentment, especially in those moments spent with old friends. With relations patched up with the Linnells, there was much shuttling back and forth between the two households, many pleasant evenings passed around the fire and, in the summer of 1840, Palmer and Hannah took off for Shoreham with all the Linnell children in tow. Taking rooms in a rambling old mansion, they reacquainted themselves with the pleasures of village life, enjoying long walks and feasting on mulberries, stuffing themselves with poultry and filberts and figs. ‘John nearly turn’d over a rock which would have done credit to Ajax. Willy’s mouth is elongated into a perpetual smile – and Lizzy is getting as fat as a butcher’s wife,’22 Palmer wrote to Linnell who, striking a characteristically thrifty bargain with the driver of a two-horse fly (whom they forced to take a detour to avoid paying the toll), soon travelled down to join them with his wife. On the return journey Linnell tried to make similarly economical arrangements, negotiating with the owner of a furniture wagon that was returning empty to London, but his wife, perhaps thinking of the gossip that such a mode of transport might arouse amid neighbours, put her foot down and firmly refused.
Palmer was delighted to be back amid his circle of fellow Ancients. Richmond by this time was living in Beaufort Street, an artistically fashionable area of the Thames embankment at Chelsea. He was never to mention or make application for the honeymoon loan and seemed surprised when, in 1844 and with Linnell’s help, Palmer finally paid him back – though without the interest that had been mentioned in the initial agreement. ‘He asked me if I had sold all my drawings,’23 Palmer said. But financial disparities could not alter the warmth of the relationship between the two old friends and when Palmer sent him a note one day inviting him to come over and join him and Giles for a dinner of goose but asking him to excuse ‘the roughness of things’,24 Richmond promptly replied: ‘I will excuse all things but your asking me to excuse anything. Do you remember who lent me £40 to get married, who gave me and mine a hearty welcome and a house at Shoreham, when such a welcome and a house were most needed, and think you my dear Palmer that the kind friend who has done all this and much more is the one to ask me to excuse “the roughness of things”.’25 Over the next few years, Richmond and Palmer could be found sharing feelings on pretty much anything from the development of their painting through thoughts on new publications or passages from scripture to the progress of children. They would keep each other constantly up to date, inquiring attentively after health, congratulating each other on any successes, sympathising with losses, and consulting on everything from the purchase of a pianoforte to the colour of wallpaper.
Palmer’s relationship with Richmond’s wife, Julia, was particularly tender – she inviting him and Hannah to holiday with her in the country or to celebrate a wedding anniversary or share in their happiness at a daughter’s betrothal. Palmer, in return, wrote attentive letters, recommending books, indulging in the sort of detailed medical discussions which would have delighted a caring mother or recounting his latest joke: ‘Why is an oyster the most anomalous of animals? – Because he has a beard without a chin, and is obliged to be taken out of his bed to be tucked in.’26 There was something almost feminine about Palmer’s gentle character and Julia was the first of several women with whom he was to go on to foster warm relationships.
Palmer and his cousin Giles returned enthusiastically to their ‘theological bickerings’27 and annual Christmas reunions. Calvert, too, despite a slight frostiness caused by the fact that he had never once bothered to write to Palmer in Italy (and when confronted with this had claimed that the letter had been lost), was back in the fold. When Palmer later made a trip to the Devon haunts of Calvert’s youth he was reminded of his friend every turn of the way. ‘How great and important an addition to the happiness of my little life [has] been your united friendship,’ he wrote to Calvert and his wife.28 The core of the little circle of Ancients had been re-established and, though in circumstances very different from old Shoreham days – they had wives and children, ‘dear young friends shooting up and spreading now like poplars and cedars’29 – a fundamental affection remained, a source of deep happiness to the still struggling Palmer as well as more practical help whenever Richmond passed a client along.
The greatest joy of the Palmers at this period was the arrival of their first child – Thomas More Walter George – who, born in 1842 on the same date as Palmer (27 January), was named after that English Reformation martyr and ‘model of Christian laymen’30 whose image his father had once hung on his Shoreham study wall. Thomas More had been a staunch Roman Catholic but Palmer had admired him nonetheless, believing that he and his fellow saint, the blessed John Fisher, whose portrait he had also nailed up, would ‘frown vice and levity’31 out of his home. George Richmond, whose name was also encompassed in the infant’s moniker, was his godfather.
Palmer, as a young man in Shoreham, had talked of the carrier’s wife dropping her baby like ‘a kitten into the basket’, but there could be nothing so casual about Hannah’s pregnancy, especially not with the neurotic Mrs Linnell about. Retiring to Thatcham in Berkshire in the summer before she gave birth, Hannah had nursed her swelling stomach in healthy rural surroundings. The peace had been as beneficial to her husband as to his still unborn son and Palmer, perhaps finding a new confidence in his coming fatherhood, had painted what at the time were considered among his better works, two of the watercolours being selected for exhibition and another, presented to Linnell in lieu of an earlier £5 loan, becoming the only one of his pictures which his father-in-law would ever deem worthy of keeping – though it may have been desired more as a memento of the period that had given him his first grandson than of the talent of the man who had painted it.
Thomas More, a tiny lace-swaddled creature, would become the repository of a hundred ardent hopes. And yet, for all the happiness that he brought, he added to his parents’ already significant financial concerns. ‘It is more difficult at present to get than to save,’32 Palmer had noted in his first year back from Italy and, hoping to tide things over until trade picked up, he had sedulously set about making personal savings, giving up snuff and sugar in his tea, rationing butter and soap and limiting himself – and the ‘great reads’ of which he had spoken so longingly in Italy – to two candles a night. But still, the money would not stretch. The Palmers were pushed into making embarrassing economies when, after Palmer’s father had taken back the furniture which he had lent them, they were forced to trawl through the then famously shoddy Wardour Street stores. Hannah wrote to her father afterwards asking him not to mention this little spree to one of their cousins who knew the Richmonds. ‘To Mr Richmond it is not well to confess yourself obliged to be economical,’ she explained.33
Meanwhile, Richmond consulted Palmer about whether or not he should move his practice to grander London premises. His friend offered his customarily frank advice. ‘A large house in the central part of the West End would leave you not a moment to yourself,’ he discouraged; ‘it would become the resort of a host of acquaintance – and you – however unwittingly – would go the round of fashionable visiting and late hours.’34 Palmer did not crave the society artist’s life – which was just as well for it was not within his reach. His domestic circumstances only worsened when his father decided that he wanted to move back in with them. The Palmers, in Italy, had envisioned this happening and had considered it a bonus in so far as it would have meant that they could share the cost of a servant. What they had not foreseen was that, by the time the old man eventually decided to come, he would have been stripped of his annual stipend. The long-suffering Nathanial had at last had enough and Palmer’s father had been reduced to selling his piano and books to pay his bills. For a while, Palmer tried to persuade his parent to lodge with a sister in Margate, but accused by this sister of neglecting his filial duties, he had been forced to capitulate. His father moved into Grove Street which meant that the couple not only had to start paying for extra domestic help but give up their long-planned painting studio to provide him with a room.
Palmer, as usual, turned to Linnell asking him for help in securing his father a situation first in the newly founded London Library and afterwards in the British Museum where, he felt sure, there would be posts to suit. His reprobate brother William might at this point have helped. He had worked there himself. But he was not around, having indeed, as Palmer had requested, cleared out by the time that the honeymooners had returned – though not before pawning all the paintings that Palmer had entrusted to his care. Palmer had got back to Grove Street to find that all of the works which he had asked to be so carefully stored were in hock, owing, a pathetic letter from his brother informed him, to ‘illness and other unlooked for exigencies’ that had placed him in ‘circumstances of perplexity and distress’.35 It may have been at this time that William also purloined one of Blake’s notebooks from his brother. He was to sell it to Rossetti in 1847 for the sum of half a guinea telling the buyer that it had been a gift from Blake although, given his devious inclinations, it seems more likely that he had stolen it from Palmer. And though William had promised ardently to redeem his brother’s pawned works (he had hoped to do so before Palmer’s return, he said) it had been left to Palmer to pay the nine pounds one shilling and eight pence while William, who by then had been contemplating an emigration to New Zealand, had kept his profile low.
Just when Palmer’s family situation was beginning to look impossible, he received a letter from his father informing him that he had wed. The bride was a Mrs Mary Cutter, a forty-eight-year-old silk weaver who owned her own business and was, according to one report, good-looking, refined and intelligent to boot. She had a clergyman brother who, as a prolific author, would have shared the literary interests of old Palmer and, even more importantly, she had her own home: a large top floor which she shared with a great, bulky loom. ‘The access to it is uninviting and the whole is mean, but she is a prize,’36 records a scribbled memorandum found among Palmer’s papers. The stubborn and unpredictable old man might, once again, have abased the family reputation by associating with trade, but the news came as a relief to his son. ‘I can only declare that I ever have desired and do most heartily desire your welfare and happiness,’37 he wrote in a dumbfounded letter, having just been appraised of this development.
Watercolour pigment has been used as a medium for sketching for hundreds of years but it was only during the last decades of the eighteenth century that artists started to explore its possibilities more fully. They discovered that by using washes of colour rather than line alone, by creating texture and depth through scraping and sponging and rubbing with breadcrumbs, they could turn a tinted drawing into the sort of complex work considered worthy of appreciation in its own right. It would be a long time, however, before such pictures gained proper recognition. As far as the Royal Academy was concerned, oil was the only medium to work in and when some luminous little watercolour landscape slipped into the summer show, it would more often than not be occluded by a flashy oil drama or hung to least advantage in some dingy anteroom.
In 1804 the Society of Painters in Watercolours had been founded to give watercolourists a higher professional standing and, in 1805, it had staged its first public show. By 1807, it had become known as the Old Watercolour Society after a rival organisation – the Associated Artists in Watercolour – had been set up. Both did much to establish a new respect for the medium and even though Turner, its most accomplished exponent, could not join for he, as an Academician, was precluded from becoming a member of other institutions, the balance of opinion was beginning to swing.
Palmer, as an ambitious young man, had dreamt of success as a painter in oils. In the early 1840s he began work on a glowing panel The Rising of the Skylark which, based on a sepia sketch of a much earlier date (and followed some time afterwards by an etching bearing the same title) was painted ‘con amore in the superlative degree’.38 He infused the oil-painted image with his undiminished sense of nature’s poetry. It is not hard to believe, as Palmer himself later did, that with a little help at this critical moment he might have been put on the path to being recognised. But neither this little panel nor his (now lost) Job’s Sacrifice, also done at this time, met with any encouragement. It must have been galling – especially when his father-in-law was attracting high praise for his own biblical works.
Discouraged, Palmer turned more and more often to watercolour and, in 1843, his career as an artist in this medium was finally determined when he was made an associate of the Old Watercolour Society. Once he had envisaged such a membership as a mere fall-back position, but by the time that he was finally elected, he was overjoyed. He wrote to the secretary of his ‘deep sense of honour’.39 At last, he had received some professional recognition. He would be joining the society of such admired forebears as David Cox and Peter DeWint, as well as that of his fellow Ancient, Finch.
The joy – and relief – of his election was further enhanced by a sale of a watercolour for £30 to the Art Union, an organisation which, founded in 1837 to foster an interest in the fine arts, required members to pay a guinea a year as a subscription fee in return for which they would receive an engraving. The funds which the Art Union accrued were spent on the purchase of art considered of merit. Palmer relished this mark of appreciation as much as the cash. But Linnell, revealing the cruel streak in his character that would glint ever more fiercely as time went on, dispatched a taunting message to his son-in-law. ‘S.P.U.R.I.C. to B P.S.P.W.C . . . U but and ME it is all fiddle DD; I.O.U. no N.V.’ This is to be interpreted: ‘SP you are I see to be President of the Society of Painters in Watercolour. But between you and me it is all fiddle-de-dee. I owe you no envy.’40
Unfortunately, Linnell was before long proved right. Palmer’s election caused no more than a passing ripple in the proceedings of the society. The work of the members was too disparate. The intricate little birds’ nests of William Henry Hunt, the prettified peasants of Miles Birket Foster, the exotic foreign landscapes of John Frederick Lewis, were all too different one from the other to launch any concerted assault on critical tastes. A reviewer in the Spectator suspended his verdict the first time he saw Palmer’s work in the society’s annual exhibition. The fiery sunsets were so crude, he said, that it would be better to wait until the following year to pass judgement. Palmer sold only three of his quota of eight paintings, and those to a neighbour of Linnell’s. The next year when the critic returned he decided that though Palmer was ambitious and had an eye for colour, the sky with its radiant sunsets was the only good part of the picture. The artist, he concluded, was too unskilled to achieve the poetic effects at which he aimed. And although in succeeding years the works which Palmer exhibited were described as ‘dazzling’ or ‘too clever and original-looking to be overlooked’, overlooked is exactly what they were in the end. Palmer’s initial burst of optimism slowly fizzled out, leaving only the dull ashes of a dogged determination that would carry him onwards through the decade that he would then have to wait before being elected a full member, rather than a mere associate, of the Society.
The prices fetched by watercolours seldom reflected the hours that went into their making. Palmer needed to supplement his income. In 1843 he returned to teaching. Linnell encouraged him. It was better than pot-boiling, he said: churning out ‘cheap pennyworths of Art’41 that would only degrade his talent. Richmond, employing Palmer to instruct his own daughters, was quick to recommend him and Linnell, likewise, introduced him to moneyed patrons. Palmer’s election to the Old Watercolour Society would also have helped: indeed, the very day that he was informed of it, Lady Stephen (the wife of a successful banker and prolific author who had helped Linnell to sort out the deceased Blake’s affairs and later sat to him for a portrait) inquired whether he was a member before asking him to come round and give lessons twice a week. It was the start of an acquaintanceship involving repeated and pressing invitations to come and stay with the family in Dorset – invitations which Hannah persistently, and at the risk of real rudeness, refused. She was reluctant to leave her precious baby in some far-off nursery while she sat trapped politely in the drawing room.
For most of Palmer’s pupils, painting was merely part of a repertoire of desirable accomplishments. They had no real feeling for their subjects, he said, and in nine cases out of ten simply wanted some fine touched-up drawings for public show. ‘A good bold quack with plenty of tact, a comely presence, and well-cut Hoby boots, would beat any real artist out of the field as a teacher,’42 he declared, telling the story of how Turner, when he had tried his hand at instruction, had been discharged for incompetence. And yet Palmer was popular. He was a patient, attentive and – when he came across a student who was prepared to ‘take pains’, to produce proper studies instead of ‘a parcel of half-studied fragments’43 – a passionate teacher who believed that, if his pupils did not master the basic grammar of drawing, they would ‘come out as like each other mentally, as a batch of rolls out of the oven’.44
He would prepare a drawing while his young protégées looked on, explaining his methods and encouraging them to take notes so that in their next lesson they could imitate his model. Sometimes they would draw from portrait busts or plaster models and, in spring, when the weeds in his ill-kempt Grove Street garden shot up lush and green, he would fling open his windows and teach drawing from nature. Over time he fostered some lasting acquaintanceships with his pupils, most notably with a Miss Louisa Twining, a member of the tea-growing family, and with a neighbour, Miss Wilkinson, who lent him her copy of The Times every day. His relationship with these women was to continue for years and he was also to grow very close to Laura and Julia, the two Richmond girls.
Palmer was an assiduous taskmaster. ‘All who draw from Nature must be exact,’ he said. ‘I would rather see young people play at marbles [than pursue an inexact education] – for there they do manage to be exact as they can – and so far it is a true educational exercise.’ To turn the pages of a small, bound sketchbook in the Ashmolean, is to sit quietly in on one of Palmer’s lessons. Here is page after page of annotated sketches, of neatly pencilled notes on light and shade, outline and form. Here are lists of recommended colours and recipes for combining them to make tints; suggestions as to how to layer these tints on paper and advice on capturing distances, sunsets and the ‘EXPRESSION’ of nature. Palmer’s correspondence with Louisa Twining constitutes among the most detailed and lively expositions of an artist’s technique. ‘Take hot-pressed thickest imperial [paper],’ he tells her. ‘Put bistre into a swan pinion . . . and outline firmly . . . Keep on refreshing your ink outline as you go on . . . When you use heightening lights, on a tree already painted for instance, do the lights first, delicately and sharply with white; when dry add the colour . . . No scrubbing and fumbling with colour dried hard,’ he admonishes. ‘Until a vituperative dictionary is published, I can’t tell where to find any epithet vile enough to hit this kind of work.’45 He would treat each pupil as an individual. ‘You are the only lady to whom I should recommend dashing, but I advise you to dash at these,’ he instructs Miss Twining. ‘Turn your swan pen into an anchor and then be bold . . . sometimes painting with your brush, then with your fingers. With his finger, they say, Titian put his last finish; it is a wonderful instrument.’46 Palmer himself would certainly use his own: as he fought to capture waves smashing against Cornish rocks, his prints appeared amid the boiling spray.
In her memoirs, Miss Twining recalled his lessons with the greatest pleasure, remembering how his ‘original and striking conversation’ would be mixed with ‘the profoundest rules and directions concerning art’.47 She went on to become a prominent philanthropist and campaigning reformer who published books and pamphlets, several of which she would send to Palmer. The conversations he enjoyed both with her and with Miss Wilkinson ventured far beyond painting to encompass anything from the methods of poorhouse schooling through artistic discoveries (‘Beware of the notion that shadows cannot be cast upon water . . . I lately saw the shadow of a pier cast upon the sea, and its colour thereby totally altered by losing the warm sunlight’48) to the prevention of sunstroke. They continued to exchange letters and pay occasional visits late into his life. His relationship with young Julia Richmond was even more established. As he watched her grow up and get married and have children of her own, an open and affectionate correspondence continued which ranged from music and poetry to personal anecdotes, from fun-poking disquisitions on the frivolities of women to fussing imprecations not to sit in wet shoes.
Over the years, Palmer’s teaching practice expanded and he may even for a while have teamed up with a figure-drawing instructor, Miss Meakin, who seems to have lodged for a time with the Palmers or, at least, given their home as her accommodation address. All his former pupils – except for members of a certain Campbell family whom, after they left off coming to him, he avoided with exaggerated tact for fear that they might think he was touting for business – returned to him again and again. His system of payments was eccentrically complicated, his charges varying from one guinea for two-and-a-half hours to ten shillings and sixpence an hour if less time was required, unless the teaching took place in his home when he asked for only seven shillings. He worried about what he should charge such wealthy clients as the Duke of Buccleugh, who expected him to travel to their country estates, and, with habitual indecision, he had to consult Linnell.
For many years, teaching would provide Palmer with his main source of income. Though he sometimes longed to abandon it – ‘if I could but stand the loss of the first disentanglement . . . I think it would be a hundred times overpaid’49 he declared – he could not make that first break for, however meagre the end-of-season sums may have been, they were all that lay between him and the humiliating handouts of his father-in-law.
Teaching duties kept Palmer in London long into the summer, when the capital sweltered in a miasma of filth. ‘What use I could have made in the country of these three weeks of fine weather!’50 he cried in an 1847 letter to his wife. As he threw up his window sashes, gazing out hopelessly at a patch of withering grass, he must have longed to be tramping the wild landscapes of England. He would take a brief sketching tour almost every year, sometimes in the height of the summer and sometimes in early autumn. He always went south, far preferring ‘dear old spongey Devon’,51 that ‘loveliest of lands’52 to the dramatic austerities of the windswept north. He preferred ‘the ancient granges and manor houses which are to me the gems of England . . . the grand large cottages (for grand they are) . . . buttressed with stone and ribbed with heart of oak’ to a good many Loch Lomonds with their ‘lumpish mountains and leaden lakes’.53 Palmer visited Wales in October 1843, Guildford the following year and Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire the year after that. August 1846 was passed in Margate; in the summers of 1848 and 1849 he travelled again to the West Country and, throughout the late 1850s, he would repeatedly return.
Palmer was thorough in his explorations. He scrambled about with a guidebook always to hand for fear that without it he might miss a fine sight – he recommended John Murray’s because ‘it is written by an artist and has a real savour of Devonshire Perception’.54 All the best things, he believed, lay hidden in chinks and combes; to find them, he said, it was essential to walk, to get as close as possible to the edges of cliffs and brows of hills. Those who lease out the carriages, he warned, tended to get set down on the wrong side of the chasm, to be left ‘gaping at the opposite cliff – while the real spectacle is what they are standing upon’ and usually strewn, he added, with ‘Pic Nic bottles and broken plates’.55
His sketching trips were a vital source of refreshment. ‘I can begin my subjects . . . in London,’ he told Hannah, ‘but when Italian weather sets in I should like to get out of town directly, if it were only for a week . . . The weather from which I get my subjects and my suggestions for the remainder of the year is that dazzling weather when all the air seems trembling with little motes. A week of that is, to me, worth three months of ordinary fine weather. It is then I see real sunsets and twilights.’56
Where other artists travelled in luxury with well-stocked portmanteaus and elaborate painting boxes, Palmer took only what he could carry by hand. He liked to tell his pupils the story of Turner who, to the list of implements he needed, would add ‘myself’, wisely knowing, Palmer said, ‘that it was better to forget some of his colours than not take the whole man to the work’.57 Donning his plainest clothes, a broad-brimmed hat to protect him from rain or sun and heavy hobnailed boots for the steep mountain tracks, he would slip a tin box of spare pigments, an old campstool and his lunch or dinner into a wicker hand basket. A capacious sketching portfolio (big enough to carry a good supply of paper, together with two large but very light wooden palettes) would be slung round his shoulders by a large strap. Everything else went into one of the accumulation of pockets in which were stowed away the ‘all-important snuff-box’, knives, chalks, charcoal, coloured crayons, sketchbooks, water bottle, poetry book, diminishing mirror and a pair of ‘large, round, neutral-tint spectacles made for near sight’.58 Little wonder that, waddling about with all these encumbrances, he got mistaken for a pedlar by a pair of fellow artists, Richard Redgrave and Charles West Cope, future friends who first came across him one evening at an inn in Wales.
To look at his 1847 Gypsy Dell by Moonlight, its ragged travellers huddling about their bright fire while the darkness gathers around them and a barn owl glides from the rocks, is to suspect that Palmer is not merely appealing to a then popular taste for pictures of travelling folk which the painter Francis Topham had turned into a fashionable speciality, but remembering his own happy days as a roamer, whether wandering free over the hills of Shoreham or clambering the shaggy moors of the West. ‘In exploring wild country I have been for a fortnight together uncertain each day whether I shall get a bed under cover at night; and about midsummer I have repeatedly been walking all night to watch the mystic phenomena of the silent hours,’59 Palmer wrote. He revelled in his precious weeks of freedom, sheltering out on the hills in a rough shepherd’s hut; disembarking at a lonely little cove near Clovelly, his shoes filling with water as he leapt from the boat; getting trapped by the tide in a cavern at Kynance as (rather like Turner who had lain down at Land’s End so that he could look up at the rock face) he scrambled under a cliff to find the right sketching point; or lying unclothed in bed while his rain-drenched garments dried over the kitchen fire of an inn. Little wonder that so often he caught dreadful colds.
This socially inept little man felt far more at ease scrambling about in the mountains than negotiating the pinnacles of London society. He felt quite at home as, guided only by the sound of the torrent, he clambered down a Welsh rock face at dusk or joined the evening gossipers in the chimney corner of a hostelry. He would sit as the villagers smoked peacefully over their tankards, or join them eating their pilchard pies ‘clouted’ with clotted cream. He would chat to a landlady in the kitchen one evening as she milked the goat; or scratch the pigs that snubbed about in the yard. Such scratching seemed to the animals, he observed, ‘a pleasure equivalent to honours among mankind’.60 And when one week in Wales the weather was particularly wild, he walled up by a fire, reading his way straight through a seven-volume edition of Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison for the second time.
Palmer would return to London laden with work: with the sort of broad landscape sketches that he had learnt to do in Italy, with crayon studies of dawns and sunsets and twilights; views of wheat fields and coastlines and mountains and farmyards; studies of foliage and wildflowers, rustic cottages and ancient machinery. These would be worked up into the elaborately composed landscapes that, throughout the 1840s, he continued to produce. But they, like the Italian compositions that he worked on simultaneously, had little success. His admiration for nature was undiminished, but he had lost his idiosyncratic panache. The rich glow that used to illuminate his images was replaced by a superficial garishness. His handling had grown increasingly conventional. He had sacrificed personal vision for a fashionable style that he hoped would please.
With growing desperation, Palmer tried to identify the causes of his failure. His energies were dissipated in endless theorising, diffused in the slew of notes that he accumulated in a portfolio labelled ‘Written Memoranda’ in which, like some mad secretary taking minutes at a meeting between an artist and his subject, he tried to record on paper every difficulty of composition and design. The world’s natural phenomena were boiled down into columns and bullet points and lists and laws. But it did no good. In the decade that followed the birth of his son in 1842, Palmer, according to his accounts, sold some forty-five pictures for an average price of around £16 each. This was simply not enough to support a family and, in one letter to Linnell, he confessed that he had ‘only one sovereign in the house – most of which will be paid away today’.61 Hannah could not help. As her work was again and again rejected, her hopes declined apace. The once-spirited little redhead turned picture after picture face to the wall.
In 1844, Hannah gave birth to her second child, a grey-eyed girl who was christened Mary Elizabeth. Family life offered the Palmers some consolation for the loss of their once cherished vision – of husband and wife working away busily in a peaceably shared studio, he stretching the canvases, she grinding colours, while some bright little maid made their beds and boiled the dinner potatoes. Palmer would read aloud to his wife in the evenings and in 1848, away on a sketching trip, he wrote to tell her how greatly she was missed. ‘Your charms my dear Annie are no weak inducement to lure me back,’ he pined. ‘To me you are fairer than at 17 and though by this time I have got pretty well used to your scolding your love is always fresh and always precious. I hope to prove myself worthy of it by renewed exertions in Art.’62
In Italy, Palmer had felt himself a manly figure, protecting his pretty young wife from the improper advances of impudent Neapolitans, beating off a wild cow in the Roman campagna with his sketchbook and confronting a furious knife-wielding landlord with aplomb. Now, he found himself unable to provide properly for his family. And, as Anny finally abandoned her artistic aspirations, and with them the engagement with painterly problems which would have led to a sympathy with her husband’s plight, she began to turn more and more to her parents. Linnell became an increasingly overbearing presence in his son-in-law’s life. On top of this, Palmer’s health was not good. ‘The filthy coal pit of London’63 aggravated his asthma, leaving him debilitated, wheezing and weak. The man who had used to stride lonely hills by moonlight would no longer go out and deliver a letter of an evening in London because he was fearful of catching a cold.
Financial anxieties strained Palmer further. Turning his problems over and over in his head, he was all but incapable of making decisions. He continued to consult Linnell on everything, from how much he should charge for his services as a teacher to which doctor he should hire to attend on his children. At one point, Linnell took it upon himself to go behind Palmer’s back to John Giles and ask him directly how Palmer’s finances stood: Giles was persuaded to impart some information, though later wrote refusing to disclose anything further and expressing regret that he had already told so much. This stand against his authority must have taken Linnell aback for, more usually, when god-like he dispensed money or advice, it was received with tail-wagging gratitude by his son-in-law. Meanwhile his adoring daughter seemed almost to have equated him with a divinity. Writing to thank him for funding a recuperative trip to Margate for her and her son, who had both been ill, she declared the improvement in their healths ‘a great blessing for which I feel a great thankfulness to God and to you for so kindly helping us to procure it’.64
A new low point in Palmer’s career came in 1846 when an art dealer called round to Grove Street full of extraordinary professions of indifference as to buying. He could only be persuaded to stretch his humiliatingly low offers for Palmer’s paintings when he learnt that Linnell had had a hand in retouching a few. Instead of feeling mortified, Palmer wrote gratefully to his father-in-law. With an ‘hour or two of your skill on the Ponte Rotto’, he told him, that painting too might also sell.65
As Palmer watched his ambitions grow increasingly improbable, he laid more and more store in the future of his son and set about trying to turn him into a paradigm of religious piety, of diligence, learning and devotion, of filial obedience and moral rectitude. His dreams were to become a heavy burden on the delicate young boy.
Palmer was a devoted father. He would carry Thomas More around the city on his shoulders, hoisting him even higher when he wanted to see above a crowd; take him on day trips to Primrose Hill to drink tea; invite him into his study and show him how to draw, teach him his alphabet from a big box of letters or how to play the piano by putting his fingers on the keys. Often he would read to him from his own favourite volumes so that the cadences of Blake’s Songs of Innocence were interwoven with More’s earliest memories and by the age of five he had learnt The Lord is my Shepherd by heart.
More was not yet three years old when he received the first of the many letters that his father was to write to him. Palmer sent it from Guildford. ‘I went so fast in the steam coach!’ he wrote. ‘How you would like it! Here are high hills and the birds sing in the trees.’ ‘Who loves Thomas More?’ he asked at the end of the letter. ‘PAPA!’ came the answer in capital letters.66 Palmer was attuned to a child’s imagination. He knew how to select the stories that would most delight his son and often added illustrations to the margins of his letters. He sketched a fair that he had seen in Surrey, telling his son of its ‘little men not so high as the table . . . and men without arms that could hold a pen between their toes . . . and a learned pig that knew his letters’.67 He dispatched missives from purple moors where, had his son been there, he said, he would have lain down to roll in the heather; or from sandy beaches in which he would have loved to dig. He wrote from a pier from which a little girl had just taken a six-foot tumble without breaking anything (though More, who was delicate, had just broken his leg by tripping in the hall); and from landscapes which had once been trodden by a race of giants. Their bones could still be dug up from the soil, Palmer said. His descriptions could be wonderfully vivid. ‘I wish you were here,’ he wrote from a rocky promontory, ‘although you would really be frightened to look down from these savage rocks at the foam of the sea far beneath dashing against them. For some moments perhaps the waters are sucked into a black cavern, and then forced out again in a cloud of white foam with a deep growl like thunder.’68
Palmer greatly missed his son when they were apart. He tried to keep up their lessons. Transcribing two bars of music, he instructed More to: ‘place your thumb upon C’ and ‘play slowly’.69 He told him to shut his eyes when his face was being washed so that the soap wouldn’t sting. He explained how italics work – ‘read the slanting words a little more loudly than the rest’70 – and, having sent a postscript requesting him to send a kiss to his little sister, he remembered to tell him: ‘P.S. means “Post Scriptum – or after written”.’71 As the boy grew older he began to respond, sending his father drawings – ‘I think the man sitting upon the coach box is the best you have done’72 Palmer praised – and then, at the age of six, his first letter. And yet, for all his manifest tenderness, Palmer never passed over an opportunity for moral instruction. It began in his very first letter when More was instructed to: ‘Ask GOD to make you a good boy,’73 and it never stopped from that point on. A lively description of a travelling fair with its mermaid woman and fiery lynx was spoiled by what, even in an era of Victorian values, must have sounded a death knell to joy. People come from as far as fifteen miles to enjoy the fair, Palmer wrote, ‘but I think that is silly because it takes up so much of their time. I think we should spend our time in doing things that are useful – in learning to make things – being careful not to break them – and we should try to be very good and wise.’74 The moral hectoring seldom let up. ‘The way to become Good is to pray to the Good and Blessed God to make you good,’75 he informed two-year-old More. ‘Talk to your Mamma about the Holy Child Jesus,’ he instructed him when he was three. ‘You should try most of all to be good at those times when you feel inclined to be naughty,’76 he told him. ‘My dear boy pray daily to the blessed Jesus to make you something like what He was when He was the same age as you.’77
Anything could provide the excuse for a sermon: a walk to a cliff edge was fodder for a grim meditation upon the end of the world and the loss of a tooth, in exchange for which More had been given a book, the starting point of a lecture on loss and gain. The letters stacked up into a weighty burden of advice. It was not unusual for the period. Nursery stories of that era were heavily freighted and often frightening to boot. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children was among More’s bedtime books. He knew the tale of the little lamb that, not liking to be penned up at night, had ignored its mother’s warnings and stayed out after dark to play. The wolf had come along, carrying the errant creature away to ‘a dismal dark den all covered with blood and bones’78 to feed it to her cubs.
Palmer’s attitude to his son’s education was similarly unsparing. ‘As you read every day with your Mother I shall expect to find you improved when I return – therefore take pains or I shall be sadly disappointed,’79 he wrote in 1845. Even as More was learning to read – and he was told to read very clearly attending to punctuation – it was suggested that he should also try to write; as soon as he could write well enough to send his father a letter he was being pushed to embark on a journal – a journal that, moreover, he ought to keep up every day. As soon he had mastered his own lessons, More was enjoined to start instructing his little sister, passing on to her everything that he had himself been taught. First he was simply asked to show her the alphabet – ‘play at PEEP BO with the letters’,80 Palmer suggested – but soon he was expected to teach her also the errors of naughtiness. Next Palmer instructed More that he must look after his mother as well, to be kind and take care of her when she was ill. ‘What a high ladder is that of Christian perfection!’ Palmer had declared;81 his poor son was placed on the first rung and set struggling to get to its top.
A similarly narrow path was being prepared for little Mary. She was barely three when Palmer wrote to her brother who was holidaying at the seaside: ‘Tell Mary that I love her dearly and that when you dig a grave, a deep wide grave in the sands, she must help you to bury the giant Naughtiness.’82
The family had gone to Margate for the sake of More who was a sickly child, but it was the strong little Mary who, a short while after their return, fell desperately ill. ‘What would you do if you were in my case?’ Palmer wrote frantically to Linnell. He was in a state of ‘horrible perplexity’ about the incompetence and high fees of the pair of doctors attending. They offered conflicting opinions. One told Palmer that if his daughter managed to live through the next twenty-four hours, she might get through her illness. But ‘I am cut to the heart to see how they have begun,’ Palmer wrote, for the little girl had spent a sleepless night, coughing incessantly. The other doctor assured him that the girl would recover: ‘But how comes it then that the old cough has returned with redoubled violence?’ the stricken father asked. ‘Every cough is a dagger to me,’83 he wrote. Palmer had tried to turn his Lisson Grove study into an artistic haven, decorating it with paintings and etchings and classical busts, but none of these could mean anything now. Cancelling a work trip, even though the doctor had told him that it would be fine to go, he sat in a torment of anxiety. ‘I EARNESTLY trust Mrs Linnell will be able to see us today – I have sent for both doctors – I remain in an agony of distress,’84 he wrote.
‘Could Mrs Linnell do us the great kindness of coming immediately?’ a panicking Palmer implored. ‘Dr Mackenzie gave 6 drops of laudanum last night which Anny thinks has caused the sad state of Dear Mary this morning – We have both with one consent – dismissed Dr Mackenzie and depend up Dr Mackintyre – but alas I fear too late.’85 The last words of the letter are almost illegible. Palmer was distraught. And though his earnestly awaited mother-in-law did eventually arrive, she was too late to help. ‘My dear daughter Mary Elizabeth died at 25 minutes to 6 p.m.,’ he recorded on 15 December 1847. ‘She was three years and nine months old.’
Eleven days later, Palmer recounted the details. ‘Her mother was sitting at the end of the bed when Mrs Linnell said “I think she is gone.” Anny put her face close to Mary’s, but could hear no sound of breathing. Her eyes were open and fixed, but her face turned deadly pale . . . SHE WAS DEAD. Mrs Linnell closed her eyes. The last I saw of her dear grey eyes was in the afternoon, when I watched them. The lids closing a little over them made it seem like a mournful and clouded sunset. She had appeared for the most part unconscious for two or three days, but on the morning of the day she died Anny was going to bed, when she held up one trembling arm and then the other. Anny put her head down between them, when she held her tightly round the neck for about a minute, and seemed to be thus taking a last leave of her mother. She had done so to me about two days before.’86
Palmer and his cousin Giles were there when Mary was buried in All Saints’ Cemetery, a peaceful private burial ground in Nunhead in the then still undeveloped outreaches of Camberwell, where mourners could wander among neoclassical monuments, along meandering paths overlooking leafy views. ‘It was not until some time after dear Mary’s death that we had any notion as to the cause of her illness,’ Hannah would much later write. ‘The doctors could not understand the seizure, and asked several times if we knew of her having swallowed anything. At the time the questions were asked we did not know – but afterwards dear More remembered having seen his dear Sister suck (when playing in the field adjoining the house) a poisonous weed which when the stalk is broke yields a fluid which looks exactly like milk.’87 It is possible that Mary had found a Euphorbia, the milky latex of which is an extreme irritant, blistering skin and burning the throat if even its fumes are inhaled. When ingested, it can lead to death, especially in a young child. Post-mortem examinations of victims have revealed severe inflammation, and sometimes even perforation, of the stomach wall.
Palmer felt completely defeated. As he bent over his paintings or sat through his teaching engagements, his eyes would blear over and his voice start to choke as memories of his golden-haired daughter drifted through his head.