2
The gate into the world of vision
from Samuel Palmer’s 1824 sketchbook
Samuel Palmer was born on 27 January 1805. It was a wintry night. The weather all over England had been bad all week. In the country thick snowfalls had left villages stranded. The stones of the cities were encrusted with ice. And in the capital, on the corner of Adam Street, The Times reported, the house of a tallow chandler had caught on fire, forcing a terrified serving girl to leap for her safety from a second-floor window only to break both her legs on the cobbles below.
Apart from this mildly sensational episode, nothing considered of public note had troubled the peace. But in one quietly respectable Surrey Square dwelling, the residents would not have slept that night. A small upper room – lit by the glow of the visiting doctor’s lantern, warmed by the flicker of a sea-coal fire, disturbed by the bustle of a midwife with her kettles of hot water – must have been the scene of much anxious fluster as a fragile young woman went into her first labour. At five o’clock on Sunday morning she finally gave birth. She would have been pleased to discover that her first-born was a son.
The world into which Palmer arrived was a world at war. In 1789 the storming of the Bastille by an enraged Parisian mob had raised the curtain on a revolutionary drama, the repercussions of which were to affect the entire century in which he lived.
Many in Britain had at first welcomed this rebellion. France’s ancien regime had been greedy, cruel and corrupt and it was hoped that something more like a parliamentary system might replace it, that over-gorged empires and rotten dynasties would be followed by a fairer, more democratic form of rule. But optimism soon faded as aristocratic heads rolled. Political panic flared. Would France’s revolutionary fervour prove contagious? The British Establishment felt under grave threat.
In 1793, France declared war on Britain and Holland. It was the first salvo of a conflict that would not only prove very long – it would continue pretty much unbroken for the next two decades – but would also be fought on a gigantic scale. Mobilising the first ever citizen army, France sent it marching across the European map. The emergence in 1796 of Napoleon Bonaparte only further exacerbated the situation. Britain found itself facing the most powerful military leader that it had ever known. As Nelson and Wellington battled doggedly to defend their nation and its most valued institutions, a patriotic spirit of crusading conservatism ruled the day.
A peace signed briefly at Amiens in 1802 lasted just a few months. By 1803 hostilities had opened again. The baby Samuel was born into a country at real risk of invasion. It was only eight months later that, with Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, Napoleonic ambitions to occupy Britain were decisively thwarted – not that the conflict would end with that. By 1807, having defeated Russia and occupied Berlin, the by-then self-crowned Emperor decided that the most effective way to get the better of his English enemies would be to attack their already war-weakened economy and close European ports off from all British trade. This, the first major example of economic warfare, was to prove highly effective. In Britain, as taxes soared to foot military bills, markets plummeted and bankruptcies loomed. The populace, faced with food shortages, grew increasingly desperate. Social unrest and rioting followed. But the country managed to pull through in large part because Napoleon, affected by his own trading bans, was forced to relax them and finally, in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo, twenty-two years of almost unbroken warfare in Europe drew to its close. Britain was the only nation involved in this cataclysm to emerge with traditional structures of monarchy, aristocracy and parliament intact.
Samuel Palmer’s birth was registered at Dr Williams’s Library in Red Cross Street, an institution which, originally set up to house a collection of Nonconformist literature, had come to be treated as a place of safekeeping for the baptismal records of dissenters. Dr William Williams, a descendant of the library’s founder, was a friend of Palmer’s father, a relationship which this new birth would further cement. Two men who already had books and beliefs in common now also had boys of about the same age. Years later, Palmer would still continue his acquaintanceship with this family of old friends.
Palmer was called Sam at home. He was a delicate child and from an early age showed signs of the respiratory problems that would trouble him throughout his life. He was only a few months old when his anxious mother first took him to stay with her family in Margate in the hope that the fresh air might do him some good. Margate, with its sandy beaches and its sea-bathing hospital, had by then been transformed from a humble fishing town to an elegant Georgian resort and this was the first of many holidays that Samuel was to spend there. He would always love its wide, windy views. The skies over Thanet were the loveliest in all Europe, believed the great Romantic landscapist Joseph Mallord William Turner, who remained all his life a regular visitor and took his Margate landlady as a long-standing mistress. The same marine vistas that enchanted this painter sank down through the depths of Palmer’s baby stare as his mother, busily fussing over little muslin bonnets, dabbing at dribble and adjusting shawls, carried him in her arms along the sea front.
Palmer’s lasting interest in the supernatural would be nurtured in Margate. As a child, he would listen, wide-eyed, to the town’s many ghost stories, especially to the one that involved an ancient brick house in the high street from the window of which his own grandmother, spooked by some vaporous apparition, had once leapt. ‘It is reported that the people who now live there leave it every Saturday and inhabit elsewhere,’ Palmer informed a friend more than fifty years later. ‘Only think of a restless spirit wandering about one house for nearly a century!’1 Palmer was always to harbour a lurid fascination for ghosts. Psychic sensibilities, he suspected, ran in his mother’s family and one of the stories that he would later tell involved another relation, one Sarah Covell, who claimed to have been paid a call by a friend who, even as she appeared to be making her sociable visit, was in fact in her own home several miles away.
Palmer’s mother, Martha, however, showed no paranormal propensities. An affectionate and devoted parent, she was the product of that enlightened generation which, influenced by John Locke’s groundbreaking treatise on education, had all but invented the idea of childhood. No longer were infants expected to behave like miniature adults. Unlaced from tight costumes and suffocating conventions, they were encouraged to play. They were part of a family that for the first time in English history had begun to define itself less as an economic entity than as an affectionate group. Palmer grew up amid tenderness, encouragement and love. ‘Sorry to say our dear boy’s Cough has prevented his bathing,’ his mother reported back from Margate to a husband who had had to remain working in London. ‘He is a lovely child.’2
Sam’s sickly constitution began to improve once a nurse, Mary Ward, was engaged. She prepared solid food for the infant instead of insipid pap. On the day that she first gave him a plate of smoked salmon, he stretched out starfish hands in greedy excitement – an early sign of the hearty appetite he would later enjoy. Samuel had a peacefully uneventful life. There are no recorded disasters beyond that of the day when his chair toppled over and his mother, screaming with fright, dashed to apply ‘Riga ointment’ to the bump. This sharp-smelling juniper salve would no doubt have had to be used fairly frequently for, as Palmer remembered, he had a particular trick of tumbling upstairs. He was probably tripping on the hems of the petticoats in which all young children, regardless of gender, were at that time dressed. It was not until the age of six or seven that the moment for ‘breeching’ finally arrived and a boy, in what came to be viewed as an important rite of passage, was dressed in his first pair of trousers. No promotion in later life could ever quite match it, Palmer suspected, and yet he was not a boisterous child, preferring sedentary pleasures to more active pastimes, pop-guns and kite-flying to running races or piggy-back rides. The only game of which he was ever to grow fond was backgammon.
Though he would have encountered other children in Surrey Square’s communal garden, companions scarcely feature in accounts of his youth. There are very few mentions of his cousins in Clapham and barely a reference to his younger brother William who, born in 1810, was the only one of the many babies whom his mother conceived to survive. Palmer remembered her intermittent periods of confinement well. ‘They used to be golden days,’ he wrote. ‘Boy-like I knew the closet where all the diet-bread and cakes and cold boil’d chickens were kept, and I took care to be as much confined to that spot as my Mother was to her room, except when the nurse pushed me out.’3 But Palmer did not long for siblings to play with. He was a solitary child with a grave disposition and a propensity for daydreaming. He delighted in music – few people could love it more than he did, he said – and books offered a pleasure that would never pall. ‘What a wonderful thing is a good book,’ he would later write: ‘next to a clear conscience, the most precious thing life has to offer.’4 His father, delighted to find that his first-born shared his literary enthusiasms, would bring home volume after volume from his stall and Palmer discovered a world that entranced him between their leather bindings. Curled up by the parlour fire or huddled behind the curtains with a glass of syrupy cordial, a pocket of ginger nuts and his purring pet cat, Watch, snuggled up on his lap, he would work his way through the treasures of literature. If we were placed in this world ‘merely to please ourselves then I think that reading at all events would be worth living for’, he wrote.5
Beyond Surrey Square lay the crowded jumble of a vast metropolis: ‘No! Not the city but the nation of London,’6 as Thomas de Quincey, an amazed first-time visitor to the capital in 1800, had exclaimed. Palmer, putting down his books and scrambling out on to the roof, would have been able to gaze out over that great city, that ‘colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts and intellectual power’,7 which de Quincey described. Keeping close to his mother, he would have jostled through the market crowds or visited the Southwark leather-binders’ workshops with his father, or the chapel on East Street where the famous Welsh divine, Dr Joseph Jenkins, would preach to his impassioned congregation of Particular Baptists, an exclusive sect which believed in the redemption of only a predetermined elect and to which Palmer’s father, with the exaggerated fervour of a convert, would for a time belong.
It was only a mile or so from Surrey Square to the Old London Bridge, the main thoroughfare into the city from the south. Samuel would often have gone there, jumping to safety from the fast-dashing carriages; pushing past overburdened pedestrians or beating a path through bleating flocks of sheep. The cries of the drovers, the shouts of the pedlars, the songs of the flower sellers, the pleas of the beggars, the curses of the boatmen: all would have been familiar to Sam’s attentive ear. Below, on the river, the mists drifted gloomily over the water; fires glowed sullenly from craft moored off dark wharves. The putrid stench rising from the leather-tanners’ pits of urine and faeces mingled with the rich pungency of brewing hops. This was an area that was famous for beer. By 1810, the Anchor Brewery in Park Street was turning out so many barrels a day that Charles Dickens’s Pickwickian character Count Smorltork put it on his itinerary of unmissable tourist sites.
Dickens, whose novels Palmer was to come to enjoy, knew this part of London very well. He spent several months of his childhood in Southwark when his father, imprisoned as a debtor, was sent to Marshalsea. Later, in Oliver Twist, he would describe the riverside, east of St Saviour’s dock, in an area that came to be known as Jacob Island: ‘Crazy wooden galleries common to the back of half a dozen houses, with holes to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it – as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage.’
Dickens campaigned against the social evils of his day, against the poor laws that condemned honest people to the miseries of the workhouse and the long hours of child labour that stole young lives away. But then he came from a family which knew only too well what poverty meant. Such social injustices did not impinge upon the life of the privileged young Palmer. He may well have bestowed the odd charitable coin on some soldier invalided out of the Army or left jobless by peace, but the rough world of the slums which sprawled along the southern banks of the Thames did not appear to have troubled his conscience. Nor did he refer to any of the momentous local happenings: the whale which in 1809 was carried on a barge, its tail projecting four yards over the stern, to London Bridge where it was sold in vast chunks at a shilling a customer, creating excellent business despite the intolerable stench; or the frost fair of 1813 when market stalls were erected on the frozen Thames, when carriages were driven right across the river and ox roasts and dances carried out on the ice; or the Bankside mustard mills fire of 1814, one of many conflagrations that flared in the overcrowded slum courtyards and which created a particularly spectacular sight. The whole heterogeneous medley of urban existence lay less than half an hour’s walk from his childhood home, but Palmer from the start turned his back on it, preferring the fertile domestic landscapes and sylvan villages that lay to London’s south.
Given the delicate condition of his lungs this is not surprising. The capital was growing increasingly polluted; its air thickened by coal smuts and dank river-borne fogs. ‘It is difficult to form an idea of any kind of winter days in London,’ an American visitor recorded in 1810: ‘the smoke . . . forms an atmosphere perceivable for many miles.’ Towers, domes and steeples poked skywards through a smothering pall. London was a sorry place to bring up a child, Palmer reflected. Muriatic acid pervaded the air, corroding the very stone, and ‘what will peel a stone wall is not likely to put flesh on a baby . . . Then there is the case of the filthy gas . . . and the typhus steaming up through the drain vents in the streets.’ Not even a ‘horse breeder or dog trainer would consent to rear his whelps or fillies in such a medium’, Palmer later wrote, and yet we strive to ‘rear the tenderest infancy’ in such vile spots.8
Following paths that led out through an unregulated straggle of development, past smoking brick kilns and pens of muddy hogs, by piles of stinking refuse and the discarded corpses of dogs, Palmer and his father would head off in search of rural pleasures. Sometimes they would go eastwards, following the river as it broadened between banks of smelly mud towards the village of Greenwich where a gentle chalky slope had once provided a picturesque setting for Henry VIII’s palace (long since demolished and replaced by Wren’s seamen’s hospital) and a steep hill rising above offered a fashionable perch for the home of some Palmer relations on whom father and son would occasionally pay a call. At other times they would wander southwards across the fields to Peckham, then still a quiet country spot, though at night timid villagers would not have risked the walk home for fear of footpads. It was in these very fields that, some fifty years earlier, the great visionary William Blake had been witness to heavenly apparitions. He had seen bright-feathered angels roosting in branches and, gazing out across hayfields, had spotted glorious seraphim. But for Palmer it was Dulwich rather than Peckham that was to become what he later, under Blake’s intoxicating influence, would describe as the ‘gate into the world of vision’,9 and Dulwich lay a little further on.
One way to walk there was along the ridge of Herne Hill, passing under chestnut boughs and between billowing lilac bushes before descending downwards into lush meadowlands. The village itself was then still prettily rustic with cows and sheep ambling down its grass-lined streets. A few fine houses were scattered along the lanes and upon the gentler slopes. There was a common where gypsies camped with their donkeys, where the butchers grazed their cattle and old women chivvied their flocks of flat-footed geese. There was a village pond with a mill and a couple of public houses to which young men would ride out. Families would enjoy pleasant day trips in picturesque surroundings. And it was here, to this village, that Dickens imagined the amiable Mr Pickwick retiring.
The River Effra, now flowing for the most part underground, wound through it, a slender rivulet, its plaiting currents crisscrossed by little wooden bridges leading up to the cottages which nestled among sheltering laburnums and hawthorns. The young Sam, like the critic John Ruskin – whom he was later to know – learnt much of his love of nature here, sharing the same sort of boyish pleasures that Ruskin describes: squatting down by the waters, poring over the tadpoles that squiggled in pools, stuffing himself with blackberries from the over-spilling hedges, collecting bunches of cowslips and gathering the wild dill from which the village – Dilwihs or Dylways meaning ‘the damp meadow where dill grows’ – takes its name. And later, also like Ruskin, Palmer would bitterly lament the development, that ‘foul and unnatural enlargement of London’,10 which would lead to the destruction of this enchanted spot. He was always to treasure it, a rural idyll in his memory. ‘Remember the Dulwich sentiment at very late twilight time,’ he would note, ‘with the rising dews . . . like a delicious dream.’11
The relationship which Sam and his father now forged set a pattern for the strong male friendships that Palmer was always to foster. The pair must have presented a companionable picture, walking side by side along country lanes, the elder striding along in a flapping overcoat, the younger bobbing beside him in short jacket and cap making periodic forays into hedgerows and fields to fetch birds’ nests or flint stones, mushrooms or beech nuts. There were treasures to be hoarded and Sam, having emerged in one bound ‘from short petticoats . . . into trousers and . . . O rapture! – into pockets’,12 had found just the place. Amid the lucky-dip of delights – ‘gingerbread nuts, story books, toffy, squirts and pop guns’13 – which his bulging pockets harboured, he would always keep his most prized gift of a knife. One day he had asked his father to file its blade even sharper and it had had to be explained to him that if an edge was too finely honed it would do nothing but shave because, if put to any other purpose, it would turn. Palmer would discover in this advice a metaphorical lesson: the human mind, also, could become too acute. ‘Whatever sharpens narrows,’14 as the philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he would frequently cite, had once said.
Palmer’s own education was broad. Considered too fragile for school, the foundations of his learning were laid at home. The Bible was a bedrock. Sam was made to learn a passage from it daily. But his father, on very rare occasions with the aid of a rod, also taught him good Latin and the rudiments of Greek. He was allowed to graze freely in the pastures of literature with only the vaguest of programmes to guide him. Volumes discovered in solitude were to become matchless companions. ‘There is nothing like books,’ as he would later say: ‘of all things sold incomparably the cheapest, of all pleasures the least palling, they take up little room, keep quiet when they are not wanted and, when taken up, bring us face to face with the choicest men who ever lived, at their choicest moments.’15 The lessons of these men were to form the weft of his life. He would never forget, for example, his first reading of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a didactic composition which pursues a discussion as to whether poetry should be ‘natural’ or written according to set classical rules. Pope resolves the problem by arguing that classical rules are natural. It was an idea that Palmer was later to explore in his painting. Joseph Glanville’s Sadducimus Triumphatus, which decried scepticism about witchcraft, was, with its lurid illustrations and its tales of drumming spirits, a particularly favoured volume according with his boyish tastes but also, in its more serious aspects – its reconciliation of the rise of science with supernatural powers – serving to validate his faith in metaphysical possibilities, preparing him for his meeting with Blake, who believed ardently in magic.
Palmer’s father added to his knowledge on their rambles through the country, talking and reciting and reading to him as they walked from one of the little vellum-bound notebooks which he always kept tucked into a waistcoat pocket. These books were stuffed with a haphazard assortment of observations, quotations and facts which had been harvested randomly from whatever he happened to be reading. Ranging from the scribbled solution to an algebraic problem, through a few lines of poetry to the religious pronouncements of some admired divine, their ideas would, one by one, be slipped into the formative mind of young Sam.
Palmer’s father, in many ways, was not a good role model. An unworldly dreamer, he could be carefully methodical in small things; but when it came to matters of more serious import – not least, financial provision for his family – he was prepared to act upon improvident whim. Even when it became obvious that he was misguided, he would continue stubbornly on. Once, finding the gate to a bridge over a river locked, he had without hesitation waded straight out into the flow. And yet, he was as lenient as he could be obstinate and Palmer was always to remember the day when, due for a birching, he had pleaded with his parent to turn his mind to other more pleasant matters and so been let off.
Many years later, Palmer would look back with gratitude on the upbringing that an affectionate and enthusiastic father, a man who had ‘loved knowledge for its own sake’,16 had offered him. He would always value the kindness and, even more importantly, ‘the liberality’17 with which he had been allowed to pursue his interests when a more worldly parent, eager to be rid of financial encumbrance, would have pushed his son into trade.
Around 1814 the Palmer family left Surrey Square, moving to Houndsditch on the eastern border of the City of London. This road is now a steep gulley of glass, all but deserted outside business hours, but then it was part of a labyrinth of narrow, crowded streets, overlooked by ramshackle houses and blocked by horse-drawn-traffic jams. The move was probably made for financial reasons. Two young sons were not cheap to support and the bookselling business, it was hoped, would be brisker in this part of the capital where a stallholder, setting out his wares on the pavement, could attract the custom of walkers returning from work in the City to the residential West End. To the country-loving Sam, however, the change would have felt bleak. Houndsditch was rough, surrounded by the notorious rookeries of the Jewish Quarter and famous for its rag fair: a ‘mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendour’.18 It was said that a silk handkerchief could be bought back here within hours of its having being stolen. It was certainly not a salubrious area and Palmer would later recall with disgust the sight of a dead man’s brains lying in the middle of Ludgate Hill with only a little hastily scattered sawdust to cover them.
Worse was to come. In May 1817, Sam was sent away to school. Merchant Taylors’ was chosen: an institution founded in 1561 by the City livery company of that name. Now located outside London, in Palmer’s day it was established in some bare old buildings in Suffolk Lane in the shadow of St Paul’s. The school motto, Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt – ‘small things grow in harmony’ – could almost have served as a professional maxim for the painter that Palmer was to become, but it far from reflected his experiences at the time. A cosseted child with a tendency to shed ‘delicious tears at performances on the organ’19 did not cope well with the coarse rough and tumble of school life.
The diminutive twelve-year-old with his thick russet hair, his pale complexion and his asthmatic’s cough, gazed with misgiving at the boisterous creatures around him. ‘I . . . thought they resembled baboons,’ he later wrote. He was always to disdain the public school system in which ‘the fag crawls to be kicked, and, in his turn, kicks the fag who crawls to him’, even as he sardonically acknowledged that the system ‘perfectly represents and so admirably prepares for the requirements of public life’ for ‘what is statesmanship but successful crawling and kicking?’20
The timid young Palmer sought, as ever, a safe haven in books and it may well have been around this time that his particular affection for the work of William Cowper was nurtured. Cowper, then, was one of the nation’s most popular poets. His homely vision was deeply to move Palmer. He saw his mother as the living counterpart of the domestic paragons of Cowper’s verse and ‘Tirocinium’ – a poem in which Cowper urges a clerical friend not to send his sons off to boarding school but to opt for private tuition instead – contained painful resonances for the unhappy little boy.
Why hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his!
Maybe Palmer followed the same pleading tack. By the time autumn came, his parents had brought him home. The Merchant Taylors’ experiment had lasted barely six months.
Palmer was delighted to be back in familiar surroundings from which, like the protagonist of Cowper’s most famous work, ‘The Task’, he could peep at the world through ‘the loop holes of retreat’; watch ‘the stir/ of the Great Babel’, but not ‘feel the crowd’. Seclusion was always to suit him and most of all when it was shared with a small companionable group. ‘SNUG’, he was later to write: ‘how much lies in that little word . . . Did you never put up your feet on the fender and . . . wish you could roll yourself up like a dormouse? . . . a cosy corner is the thing to sit down in.’21
His nurse, Mary Ward, was a cherished member of his homely circle. More than just a hired help, she became a much-loved part of the family with which she would remain for the rest of her life. She was clearly an unusual woman for, at a time when most servants would have been illiterate, she had read deeply from her two most treasured volumes: the Bible and a popular copy of Milton’s verse. It was to Mary, Palmer said, that he owed his first true poetic experience, one that would shape his vision for the rest of his life.
Palmer had not yet turned four at the time and had still been living in Surrey Square where, tucked up in bed on a winter night, he remembered lying wakefully, watching the moon rising through the bare elm branches, floating away into a deep violet dusk. Its silvery light flooded into his room. Palmer gazed at the shadows that were cast by the trees, at their shapes fiddling and tangling upon painted walls. But it was Mary, he said, who gave meaning to these ephemeral patterns, fixing a picture of them forever in his head. ‘Well do I remember,’ he recalled many years later, ‘while the long shadows of moonlight were stealing over an ancient room, her repeating from Dr Young: “Fond man, the vision of a moment made,/ Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade!”’22 This couplet – Edward Young’s poetic echo of the philosophical allegory in which Plato imagines that mankind is imprisoned in a cave, perceiving reality only in the form of its shadows as they are cast by a fire upon surrounding walls – entranced the youthful Palmer. Shadows for him accrued a soulful new resonance from then on, conjuring not just an awareness of life’s fragile mysteries but also a wistful yearning for a greater reality beyond. Again and again, as an artist, he would paint crepuscular scenes. ‘Of all creatures the owls and I love twilight best,’23 he would say.
Mary Ward also instilled a deep reverence for the poetry of Milton. She would have known the great poet’s work from her youth when it had been very much part of popular culture, its epic dramas inspiring the era’s leading artists or conjured up for the masses in the Eidophusikon, an entertainment palace in London’s Leicester Square in which, by means of complicated systems of mirrors and pulleys, huge theatrical paintings of Miltonic scenes were made to appear to move. Mary had a Tonson’s pocket Milton, an illustrated collection of his poems which, first published by Jacob Tonson in 1688, was to run into more than sixty editions between 1770 and 1825. This was the volume, seldom far from her side, from which Mary would recite to Sam as a child and which she would bequeath him upon her death. It was a legacy he would always treasure, along with her pair of simple, roughly worked spectacles and the tin ear-trumpet which she used in old age. Binding the book with brass corners, he would carry it in his pocket for more than twenty years. He came to know most of it by heart. Its images stocked his artistic imagination; its sonorous rhythms stirred the depths of his soul. ‘I am never in a “lull” about Milton,’ he would write more than fifty years later; ‘. . . nor can tell how many times I have read his poems . . . He never tires.’24 ‘I do believe his stanzas will be read in heaven.’25
Mary Ward became almost a second mother to Palmer. She had to be for, on 18 January 1818, his real mother suddenly died. She was not yet forty. Sam was almost thirteen and was visiting his grandfather when an uncle arrived to break the tragic news. ‘It was like a sharp sword sent through the length of me,’26 he wrote.
Portrait of Sam Palmer 1819 by Henry Walter.
This is likeness of Palmer taken by his childhood
friend presents a solemn fourteen year old at
the very beginning of his artistic career.