20
Midnight has struck – and the hours – however slowly,
creep towards dawn
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
Palmer had dreamt all his life of a rural existence but in May 1862, as he packed up his paintings into a few small boxes to leave for his last ever home, it was not to some pastoral idyll that he found himself moving but to the suburban realities of Victorian life. The house was Hannah’s choice. Palmer had spent seven months hunting fruitlessly, tramping – even in a weakened state when two miles a day was the most he could manage – fourteen miles of coach road from south to west Surrey; but nothing he found met his fastidious criteria. Hannah, wanting to be near her family, finally settled on a modest, detached house in Mead Vale, a suburb of Redhill, in the borough of Reigate.
Redhill, named after the local common that was itself named after the red fuller’s earth – a clay used until the end of the nineteenth century for absorbing grease from natural wool in a process known as ‘fulling’ – which was mined in the region, was a new town that, since 1818, had been gradually creeping across the waterlogged wastelands flanking the increasingly busy London to Brighton Road. With the opening of the railway in 1841 it had flourished and, by the time that the Palmers moved there, its population had risen to around 10,000. It was about ‘as ugly a town as you could find’, declared Herbert, ‘with no history beyond the history of the railway, and no old association’.1 The same might be said of Redhill today: a soulless aggregation of Edwardian leftovers and harsh modern blocks with a pedestrianised shopping precinct instead of a heart. But nowadays, Palmer’s leafy suburb of Mead Vale is more readily associated with the town of Reigate: the more appealing Georgian neighbour with which Redhill merges as it leaks down the A25.
It is still possible to follow – give or take a few traffic junctions – Palmer’s instructions for how to get from Reigate Town station to his home. A road leads steadily uphill between lines of new houses and a sprinkling of prettier cottages that he would have known. Keeping the old stone wall of Reigate church to the right, as Palmer suggested, the walker follows the road round and then upwards into a world of big gardens and gravel driveways, double garages and magnolia trees. The solitary gas lamp which once marked the Palmers’ lane has gone, but the house – at the top of a road that is now called Cronks Hill – is still there, tucked away at the end of the little right-hand turning. A big solid building on the corner was Palmer’s landmark.
Palmer’s home is now called the Chantry, but then it was called Furze Hill House and was marketed by the letting agents as a Gothic villa. It could hardly have felt further from the aesthetic that Palmer so loved. What today’s buyer might covet as quirky seemed ridiculously pretentious to his tastes – not that he, in a state of depression, could rouse himself much to care. It met his requirements. It was built on high ground, standing about 400 feet above sea level, and yet was not lofty enough to be bleak. The soil was dry. ‘We see the evening reek stopping just below us,’ he wrote, and if it often ‘strikes cold’ just at the bottom of the hill, ‘all is dry and pleasant above’.2 It was cheerfully near to a town and, with two stations nearby, it would take only half an hour for Palmer to get into Charing Cross, while Brighton, where Hannah could go shopping, was also conveniently reached by rail. When the wind was in the right direction you could even smell the sea breezes, Palmer observed – or at least those who didn’t take snuff professed that they could.
To stand there today – if the clutter of houses that have subsequently clambered up what used to be furze-covered slopes is disregarded – is still to appreciate the potential of this spot. Over the tops of the trees, panoramic views stretch across a wide valley to the distant South Downs in one direction, or along the gently undulating horizons of the sandy Kentish Hills.
Furze Hill, built in 1858 by a man called James Fisher whose initials along with the date still adorn a quatrefoil on one of the three bays that form the house front, is constructed of local Reigate stone. It is a curious not to say somewhat fantastical place. Its steep pointed gables and central arched door echo the architecture of the chapel which reputedly once stood on the site. A little bell tower and gargoyles add to the ecclesiastical effect though the further adornments of decorative ridge tiles, of carved wooden finials and fancy bargeboards, make it look as much like a gingerbread house. The visitor, entering through a neo-Gothic arch, finds himself standing in a dolls-house version of a medieval hall, its high roof open to the rafters, a big open grate inviting a fire. The three main reception rooms lead off from this hall, for the house was first built for an immobile old lady who wouldn’t have been able to negotiate the stairs which lead down to the basement where the kitchen, scullery and servants’ quarters would formerly have been found. These basement rooms, though small and low-ceilinged, do not feel too dingy or cramped as the house is built into a hillside and they open out airily onto sloping lawns at the back.
Hannah was delighted with this quaint if somewhat inconveniently organised home and even Palmer, for all that he would mock its gentility, endowing each of the rooms with a pretentious nickname (he called the drawing room ‘the saloon’; one bedroom ‘the boudoir’; another, which was damp, ‘bronchitis bower’; and a little downstairs closet where some of his old books had to be stored away ‘the butler’s pantry’), could be persuaded to acknowledge its merits. ‘I sometimes think what a pretty little box it might be,’3 he admitted. Hannah set busily about making it so: arranging various ornaments on a heavy oak sideboard; placing a statue of Hercules on the marble mantelpiece; hanging the prized copy of the Titian that she had painted on her honeymoon; putting her husband’s drawings in the dining room; piling Blake’s engravings from Job and Dante on a grand piano, finding another spot for his Virgilian woodcuts and choosing only the gilded and leather-bound books for the stack on the table to create an elegant but learned effect. Palmer’s less presentable treasures – the skull of a man said to have been killed in the Battle of Hastings, his shabbier volumes, or the parcel which, wrapped in grubby brown paper and found (after Palmer’s death) to have contained the manuscript of an unpublished poem by Blake – were stuffed out of sight into closets and cupboards.
Palmer for the most part left his wife to arrange things as she liked. He had only ever known of three domestic establishments in his life in which Sarah obeyed Abraham, he said. She was the ‘Head of House’ and ‘Tail wags placably’, he declared.4 And so a man who considered a fine cat to be the only ‘really beautiful ornament of a living room’5 bent to his wife’s bourgeois will. Life in what Palmer called ‘Filigree Folly’ dictated that a nosegay should be placed right in the middle of the table and the books arranged in ‘solemn parallelism’6 to its sides; that geegaws should be arrayed on empty mantels and druggets laid down to indicate routes between doors. And though when Hannah was away Palmer would replace the gilded ‘fal-lals’ on the dining table with a ‘mighty mass of Virgils’7 – ‘then indeed,’ he told Herbert, ‘I felt that things looked “respectable” in the true sense of the word, and not in the sense of “keeping a gig”’8 – for most of the time he let his wife hold sway. His only caveat was that he should be allocated his own inviolate retreat, a place to which he could withdraw to work, read and sleep. A little fifteen foot square bedroom just off the main hall is the one that he chose. This room, shut away from the remainder of the house by a wood and ironwork door, became his den. It fell far short of the perfect painting room which he had long imagined he might one day work in – one which would have ‘glass at top and windows all round – closeable by shutters’9 – but at least he could make his own, even if sometimes it felt more like a trap. There being only one entrance, when visitors called round whom he did not want to meet, he would have to hole up there until they had finally left.
Palmer made the place snug – which to him meant happily disorganised. He crammed it with the hoarded treasures that he had only just managed to rescue, his wife having instructed the removal men to leave most of them behind. The furniture, from the rough-hewn shelves through the primitive palette racks to the decrepit armchair, was decidedly shabby and the house-proud Hannah, poking her head round the door from time to time but only rarely daring to make a domestic raid, deplored their very presence in her home. But Palmer stood stubbornly against her social pretensions. It was not that he could not afford better – his paintings were beginning to fetch higher prices and commissions were arriving in a more predictable flow – but he wanted his study to stand as a last protest against ‘cursed gentility’.10 Almost everything in that room was makeshift, his son remembered, and there was little that did not bear evidence of his father’s clumsy tinkering.
Lodged in the depths of his dilapidated armchair, Palmer would preside over his hoarded clutter. Behind him, along one length of wall, were row upon row of curtained shelves laden with plaster portrait busts, wax sculptures, boxes of pigments, brushes and books (with at least four dictionaries among them) as well as his private gallery of little antique casts which he kept safe in a series of specially adapted cedarwood boxes. Here too, lying about gathering nostalgia and dust, were his precious relics of happier times: an old-fashioned smock of the sort that would once have been worn by farm labourers; the battered tin ear-trumpet that had belonged to his nurse; the violin, now unstrung, which would once have struck up its tunes on the banks of the Darent and on which his son had first tried to learn. Palmer himself would never play it again for the music only reminded him of how much he had lost. Running down another side of the room were wider shelves bulging with homemade millboard and canvas folders and box portfolios into which artworks of all sizes and subjects, differing media and degrees of finish were sorted. Nearby stood a chest of drawers, holding anything from the cherished mementoes of his dead children to a little box labelled ‘brights’ in which, carefully wrapped in white paper, he kept his most luminous cakes of colour. And on top of the chest balanced an old packing case which Palmer had turned into a cupboard and in which he stored his etching materials and kept a small collection of miniature classical busts, each carefully wrapped in a protective calico bag. This was his favourite corner of the room. It may well have been here that he hung the tiny glowing rectangle of Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth; this little gold-tinted tempera – now in Tate Britain – was owned by Palmer until his death.
There was not much room for manoeuvre. The painting table – a rickety wooden washstand – creaked under a hoard of piled china palettes; brushes of all sizes from the broadest fresco painter’s hog bristle to the miniaturist’s hair-point sable; mugs of water, saucers of pigments and mixers’ gallipots, most of them stained with the rich colours in which Palmer delighted and whose succulent recipes he was constantly reinventing. A further table was laden with heavy folios and quartos and a bed was pushed up against another wall leaving only one place where the easel – a student’s simple construction of plain deal wood – could be set. Palmer barely had room to back away from it to assess what he had done.
Palmer fitted Venetian blinds on the windows which had to be lowered at noon, but still the sun would come slicing through the slats, sending reflections from the garden shimmering round the room. Eventually he painted the glass with whitewash.
For the first months at Furze Hill, Palmer continued to live the life of a recluse, his painting the only refuge from despairing thoughts. ‘I am obliged to work, for I dare not leave leisure,’ he wrote. ‘There is a time for prayer and a time for sleep; but every other moment I am obliged to snatch from the monopoly of grief.’11 Even a couple of vacant minutes could be the ‘leak through which the black waters gush’.12 He would often have to struggle to see his work through his tears. Frequently, unable to sleep, he would sit up late into the night, writing letters, or rise in the lonely darkness that preceded the dawn. He felt listless and dull, as if his skull was full of sawdust, he said. He could find no inspiration. Each new day felt like a burden to which he had painfully to stoop. By the end of that first summer at Furze Hill, he had lost his appetite. He took comfort only in contemplating the fewness of the years he had yet to live.
His relationship with Hannah remained distant, and though in the evenings they would still sit together perusing volumes of sermons or reading aloud passages from their respective books, their intellectual ways had wandered along different paths. Palmer must have felt a wince of envy when he heard from a former pupil that she was learning to engrave so that she could illustrate her husband’s forthcoming book on human bones. Once, he and Hannah had had shared ambitions too.
With Redstone less than two miles away, Hannah saw her family more than ever. It must often have been awkward for Palmer who, in moving there for her benefit, had lost his teaching income and so, for all that he was doing a little better as an artist, still depended heavily for financial help on his father-in-law. But Linnell, delighted to have his daughter back, made their situation easier when, two years after the Palmers had taken the tenancy of Furze Hill, he bought the house from the local builder who let it and gave it as a present to one of his sons, John. Palmer was no longer directly beholden to Linnell and John proved a kindly and considerate landlord who, leasing the property at a much-reduced rent to the Palmers, eventually bequeathed it to their son Herbert in his will.
Linnell and Palmer never re-established the close friendship they had lost. The former’s beliefs grew even fiercer with age and in 1864 he published a tract, Burnt Offering not in the Hebrew Bible, a discussion of his views on the mistranslation of the Bible. Visitors to Redstone were invariably handed a copy. Palmer, in his turn, could still be tactless and awkward and though Linnell would still occasionally come to visit his daughter, these calls became less and less frequent, all but ceasing after 1862 when his wife fell ill. In September 1865, Mary Linnell died and was buried the next week in the Reigate churchyard. Linnell was glad to have a Nonconformist minister to read the service. Thirty years earlier, when he had buried his father, he had had to perform the ceremony himself.
The next year, 1866, Linnell started regularly seeing an old friend of his wife’s. Mary Ann Budden – or Marion as she was called – had known Mary Linnell for more than twenty years, but now the widower discovered that he had much in common with her, most importantly fervent Nonconformism and a fascination for Greek. In July that year, at the age of seventy-four, Linnell proposed, and Marion accepted; but although he wanted to be wed as soon as possible, she persuaded him to wait until after the first anniversary of his wife’s death. That September they were married in the local registry office. Linnell had been told that it was not customary for the bride to come to the groom but he had disregarded the convention. ‘There is full authority for it,’ he declared. ‘Rebecca came to Isaac. Why should not Mary Ann Budden come to John Linnell. The only difference I see is that Rebecca brought all her wordly goods on a camel, whereas my bride’s belongings came by Pickford’s van.’13
As the months passed into years, Palmer slowly grew reconciled to his grief. In society he appeared so cheerful, so animated in conversation and so ready to join in a hearty laugh, that a guest remarked that he seemed a bon vivant. His immediate neighbours might not have agreed. Palmer would hide himself away when Hannah’s acquaintances called. He hated the pretensions of the local ‘villarians’ as he dubbed them, far preferring ‘good stay-at-home sensible Christian people’ to these ‘pleasure-taking ninnies and jackadandies with their “aesthetics” and exhibitions and Soirees and concerts and quizzing glasses’.14 Herbert always remembered how one of them, convinced that an etching had been done with pen and ink, set out to elucidate the matter by scratching at one of his father’s finest proofs with a knife.
Palmer, however, was unsuited to solitude. He had barely been at Furze Hill for a month before he began recommending its merits to his former London neighbour Charles West Cope, trying to persuade him to buy a nearby plot. It was a pleasant enough place, he encouraged: far enough from ‘the dismal sentiment’ of Redhill not to be tainted and with ‘pastoral crofts’ and ‘overhanging orchards’ and a two-mile run along the hill tops for his children to enjoy. He held out the added temptation of blooming sunburnt country girls as models to work from. ‘How is it that the very artists who live to embody ideal beauty can confine themselves to London skins?’15 A couple of months later he tried to tempt Richmond and then Giles with other plots and a short while after that wrote to Richmond’s daughter wondering if any of her friends would like to rent a nearby house. Palmer may have felt that any happiness could only be momentary, ‘like tinsel and spangles on a black ground’, but still he missed company. ‘Seeing the face of a friend does us much good; and we seem for the moment cheerful and merry,’16 he wrote. If a man has lost his last earthly hope, he said, one last crumb of comfort can be found in his speaking of his misery to a kind friend.
He was cut to the quick when, in the summer of 1862, after suffering a succession of strokes that had left him largely paralysed, the companion of his childhood and fellow Ancient, ‘that good man Mr Finch’,17 died. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Palmer penned a little ‘In Memoriam’ that would appear in a first edition of Gilchrist’s biography of Blake. He encouraged Finch’s widow to gather her own thoughts, which she did, publishing her Memorials of the Late Francis Oliver Finch in 1865, a book which included among other testimonials Palmer’s own recollections of his erstwhile companion. ‘In Finch we lost the last representative of the Old school of watercolour landscape painting,’ he wrote. ‘If among Blake’s deceased friends we were suddenly asked to point to one without passion or prejudice, with the calmest judgement, with the most equable balance of faculties and those of a very refined order, Finch would probably have been the man . . . among Blake’s friends he was one of the MOST REMARKABLE – remarkable for such moral symmetry and beauty, such active kindliness and benevolence.’18
Meanwhile, the genial Richmond continued to move from success to success. In 1860 he had been elected a member of The Club, an exclusive gathering founded by, among others, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. In 1866 he was made a Royal Academician. The letters that passed back and forth between him and Palmer, though less frequent than formerly, were just as impassioned. ‘Almost tomorrow morning’, Palmer dated an 1869 missive in which he decided to disburden himself of intemperate attitudes to atheism. Rationalism, he raged: ‘it is only infidelity with a fraudulent label’. His excitable arguments flew vigorously on before, pausing for breath, he drew his rant to an end ‘with many apologies for my garrulity’.19 Richmond would occasionally come down to spend a few days at Furze Hill, or Palmer would see him in London when, staying in the home of Giles, they would all three meet up.
Giles continued to spend Christmas with his cousin. From the time of his arrival, Herbert remembered, he and Palmer would retreat to the study where, secure of all interruption, they would converse of old days, ‘deploring modern innovations, and extolling antiquity’. The ‘plethoric “Shoreham Portfolio” was invariably in requisition’, recalled Herbert,20 its dusty colony of pictures carefully leafed through, placed image by image on the easel for eager discussion. There was not one of these works that was without its story, or that failed to call up a host of associations, which, even at second hand, had a charm of their own. ‘To hear those two old men talking together over that portfolio was to live through the seven years of secluded happiness over again,’ said Herbert: ‘to abandon oneself to the same enthusiasms, to see the same “visions”, and to creep with awe or shake with laughter at the stories and adventures’.21 Year after year, Giles’s admiration for these pictures augmented and, one by one, he would buy them until he was the owner of several of the very best. And each purchase, Herbert remembered, would lead to some refreshing paint touches for which it was necessary to re-open the ancient oil-colour box. Its smell of copal and spike-lavender would stir more memories up.
An occasional letter to Calvert also survives, although Calvert by now had become something of a recluse. He had lost his visionary spirit and, befriending the fashionable artist William Etty, had sacrificed his integrity so far as to become little more than a mimic of this then applauded painter’s style. His work was so derivative that when, in 1850, at a sale of Etty’s work, Calvert had seen a painting of his own being sold he had shouted out to the auctioneer: ‘That is not Etty’s,’ to which the auctioneer had replied: ‘A gentleman present has declared that the study is not genuine, but buyers would do well to bear in mind that the same gentleman was bidding for it.’ Calvert dissipated his talent on pointless projects, among them the development of an impenetrable musical theory of colour: it climbed from the ‘golden earth’ of the chryseic, he suggested, ascending through the rubiate to the celestial saphirrine. Even Palmer thought he was wasting his time. Deputed by friends to express his misgivings, he wrote Calvert a letter which, thankfully, his old friend decided to take in good heart. ‘You have been friendly enough, under the delicacy of suggestion, to caution me in regard to my protracted study of colour,’ he wrote in 1868. ‘You will be glad to hear that the past summer saw the chase . . . at an end, though not abandoned.’22
Palmer maintained several of his more recent London friendships, including those with the artists Hook, Cope and Redgrave. Sometimes they would go to stay with each other, and when they were apart they would enjoy lively epistolary interchanges on anything from the profundities of Milton to the manifold advantage of larger engravings (Palmer argued this last point by using handwriting that grew first larger and larger and then shrank again to a size that could hardly be read). He was delighted to hear from his former pupils and, though Palmer was no longer being paid to teach them, the Misses Twining and Wilkinson continued to receive pages of the most punctilious painting instructions, painstaking descriptions of his own slow-learned and long-practised techniques.
Palmer also engaged with eccentric affability with several of his neighbours: a preacher whom he had met in the lane and regaled with horror stories of extravagant living and the distortion of the human skeleton through the use of stays (‘which surprised him’, Palmer observed23) and a Miss Thomas who usually called round as he was about to have dinner. He would eat in front of her ‘like the Kings of France’, he wrote. ‘I told her I was not up to the politeness of the French Court in the reign of Louis XIV. When the king would show a particular mark of favour, he took a morsel of something, a sweetmeat perhaps, and having bitten of a piece for himself, sent the rest down the table to the favourite guest.’24 Palmer must himself have been the subject of much amused local gossip.
Other new friendships were struck up. In the summer of 1864, Palmer advised Edwin Wilkins Fields, a law reformer and amateur artist, on a forthcoming trip to Cornwall in a letter which, coming complete with a little illustrative sketch, was packed with helpful information on anything from viewpoints to guidebooks to how to keep his feet dry. Fields, an old friend of Henry Crabb Robinson, was a great admirer of Finch and proposed that Palmer should do a series of illustrations to accompany a memoir. He was disappointed when Palmer refused, not just because he didn’t have the time, but to translate Finch’s pictures into ‘dashing woodcuts would be as difficult’, he explained, as ‘to write a nightingale symphony for a brass band’.25 Palmer and Fields maintained a lively correspondence punctuated with occasional visits to each other’s homes. ‘Will you name an hour for a “hot joint” or leave yourself free and have it cold?’26 Palmer wanted to know in advance of one of his calls.
Frederick George Stephens, a former artist turned critic and collector, was another new acquaintance of Furze Hill years. He had been a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, posing as Ferdinand being lured by an impish green Ariel for Millais and as Jesus washing the feet of Peter for Ford Madox Brown. Stephens, however, had lost faith in his own talents and, putting down his brushes, become a public mouthpiece for the group instead. By the time he met Palmer he had written a number of books, among them a monograph on William Mulready. He may well have been contemplating his next subject when he first came to Furze Hill. If so, the plan never matured, but he appreciated and collected Palmer’s work and, as the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, relished the opportunity of discussing the treasures of the museum’s collection with a fellow connoisseur.
Palmer had a particular fondness for the company of young people. His friendships with men and women whom he had first known as children flourished into a fond maturity. Julia Richmond remained a particular favourite. When she told him of her engagement to a Mr Robinson whom she had met in Iona, he was almost as thrilled as a parent might have been; later he took so much pleasure in the news of the birth of a lively daughter (christened Iona) that he said he felt like an honorary grandfather to the child. The other Richmond children were also important to Palmer and though, especially in the months immediately after More’s death, he found it painful to imagine their close family life – their ‘dear parents sitting down in the evening surrounded by their treasures’27 – he remained in many ways a part of their precious circle. ‘A letter would refresh me, but I like a long one full of matter,’28 he told Laura. Walter and John were treated to a somewhat gruesome meditation upon how suffering leads to sympathy (‘I dread coming near anyone who has never been in trouble,’ Palmer told them; ‘he might tear me in pieces for his amusement; as the old feudal lords . . . When, after a hard day’s hunting, they came home very tired, it is said that they found warm human blood refreshing to steep their feet in’29). He warmly congratulated Inglis on his academic success and earnestly warned him against drinking cold water when he was very hot and the illness not long after their wedding of Willie Richmond’s wife led to endless fussings about ‘defensive flannels’,30 recommendations of milk and cream with a dessert spoon of brandy and optimistic tales of neighbours who had survived with only one lung. Unfortunately Inglis’s wife had tuberculosis and died little more than a year later.
Frances, Redgrave’s eldest daughter, had also become a friend. Herbert particularly relished her visits. When she stayed at Furze Hill, he remembered, ‘it seemed changed, glorified serene and full of new interests’.31 Palmer greatly enjoyed the company of her younger sister too. He nicknamed her ‘Preceptress’ after she had teased him about his grotesque attempts at pronouncing French – shove-do-over for chef d’oeuvre – and this intelligent young woman, brought up by her father (of whom she was later to publish a memoir) in the company of Academicians, fostered a deep and lasting affection for him in return, as well as a firm belief in the integrity of his work.
Palmer took a warm interest in the wellbeing of Cope’s son Harry whom he had first got to know in 1863 when, escaping an epidemic that had broken out in Kensington, he had come to stay for a few weeks at Furze Hill. He continued to follow the boy’s progress from then on, imagining him busy over his books in his ‘snug quaintly-angled room’32 when he went up to Oxford. And Hook’s son Bryan – another friend of Herbert’s – was also a favourite. ‘You and I are such old friends that I quite missed you,’33 Palmer told him after one visit and Bryan became the beneficiary of Palmer’s favourite pieces of advice: he was instructed to always tackle the most unpleasant task that faced him first and to give his whole mind to one thing at a time. You will call me ‘a fusty, rusty, musty, old “fogy” for my pains’, Palmer wrote before teasingly arguing that, though fogy was slang, one of its definitions (Palmer would frequently have recourse to his several dictionaries) was ‘a stickler for old things’, which was not, he insisted, a term of reproach.34
The most important friendship which Palmer forged in his Furze Hill years was that with a neighbouring family, the Wrights. Mrs Wright was the daughter of his own father’s bookish companion Dr Williams (in whose Nonconformist library the records of Palmer’s birth had been lodged) and she, having married a wealthy parson, Thomas Preston Wright, now lived in Reigate in a grand house with extensive grounds, a model farm and stables. She had two sons: John Preston and Thomas Howard. They were still schoolboys when the Palmers moved to Redhill and he would entertain them with tales of his Shoreham antics which years later they would parody in a humorous story set in the fictional headquarters of Cobweb Castle. As they grew up – John going to Cambridge and taking holy orders to end up eventually as Prebendary of Hereford Cathedral, Thomas studying at Oxford and becoming a barrister – they offered an increasingly treasured companionship. He took to them almost as if they had been his own, Herbert recorded, welcoming their visits ‘till in time these became a settled ordinance interrupted only by school and university duties. Poems, essays, magazine articles, red-hot schemes for various sweeping reforms – all were brought and laid before him; but not always with the anticipated success in securing a straightforward opinion.’35
Shut away in the studio, seated either side of the table – John Wright with a meerschaum, Palmer with an old-fashioned churchwarden’s pipe – long, animated, opinionated, sometimes mocking and occasionally intemperate discussions would take place, their favourite point of dispute being the relevance of antiquity as Palmer defended ancient authors and their philosophies from the ingenious and often feigned attacks of these ardent exponents of contemporary thought. When the boys were away at university they kept up their varied and vehement conversations via letters, sometimes infrequent, sometimes arriving in flurries, dense with allusions, quotations and references and burdened, as so often, with endless advice. Here in these missives was Palmer’s mind in full flight: they are not the ‘negligently elegant . . . natty native grace-Gainsborough kind of letters’36 which fashion found tasteful; they poured from his mind like a pent-up torrent. Here Palmer would pick up ideas and run with them, or return over and over to some favourite bête noire; using one tiny incident as an excuse for a sermon, railing and preaching, recommending and advising, ranting and confiding, fussing and fuming and dragging entire casts of peripheral characters into the debate. In one letter, Alcides, Cerberus, Lord Bacon, Bishop Horsley and Pythagoras all crop up in the space of a few paragraphs. The boys would write back and Palmer would carry their letters about in his ample waistcoat pockets for days, perusing them frequently, picking over their points one by one.
Sometimes the Wright brothers must have thought him an insufferable fusspot. Once he managed to turn Howard red with rage. But for the most part they enormously appreciated Palmer and, many years later, after his death, they wrote to Herbert recalling their memories of his father. ‘Though he doubted human nature and belittled and abused mankind, at times with freedom and acerbity, he never distrusted a human being,’ they reflected. ‘I never heard him utter a hard word of any person in the world and I do not believe that he cherished a hard thought of anyone he had ever spoken with. His attacks were not against men and women but against qualities, vices, wickednesses . . . if he had striven with every fibre to make himself an ordinary being he would have failed . . . his was the life that knew nothing of the common and sordid incentive to action,’ they said.37
The Palmers settled into a routine at Furze Hill. Breakfast would be early and was invariably followed by family prayers at which Palmer would read from the Bible, selecting passages he thought apposite or revisiting such grisly old favourites as the story of Judith or Ahab and Jezebel. Then, if the weather was good, he would spend half an hour in the garden before giving Herbert his lesson and himself retiring to his studio to work.
At home he always wore shabby, paint-stained clothes, rescued from a marauding wife who would have preferred to see them burnt. He would find strange and elaborate techniques of repairing them, recalled Herbert, who became his co-conspirator. Together they would stealthily patch up his battered old shoes by a laborious but ‘entirely original process’38 of their own.
Palmer’s working time would be undisturbed – except at such moments of high drama as when some tinkers came round and turned out their donkeys to graze on his lawn, whereupon Palmer summoned help by loudly tolling the bell, the rope of which dangled down from its tower into his studio room. They would have dinner around midday after which Palmer would relax for a while, puffing away at his pipe and reading a novel and more often than not nodding off for a nap. He would then work again until tea time at five o’clock. In winter, after tea, he and Herbert would occasionally play backgammon before Palmer, pulling out a novel by Scott or Dickens or a volume by some favourite poet, would read to Hannah and Herbert until it was the boy’s time for bed. Palmer read very slowly and clearly and without affectation. ‘He abhorred few things more than quick reading,’ Herbert said, and detested ‘the modern custom of abbreviating the preterites’ as a ‘barbarous innovation’39 that destroyed the sonorous rhythms of English. But some passages – particularly the biblical story of Lazarus who had risen from the dead – would move him so deeply that he would be forced to lay down the book. Palmer hated any disturbance when reading. Interruptions always seemed to him to come at some important moment and he would ostentatiously stop short if there was even so much as a whispered instruction to a servant, a tinkling of tea things or a rattle in making up the fire.
In the summer, when the evenings were long, Herbert and Palmer would go for a stroll, wandering along the ridges, down through the furze slopes and by fields of young corn. ‘Few sunsets have seemed comparable in beauty to those he showed me,’ Herbert later remembered, ‘and when he could go no longer the twilights seemed to lose half their poetry.’40 Afterwards, when Herbert had gone to bed, Palmer would light his little paraffin lamp – Nancy he called it (he often gave names to familiar or particularly loved objects) – and return to the ‘congenial solitude’41 of his room, preparing designs, compiling portfolios or just sitting and pondering one of his ‘unsettlers’: the paradoxes which he collected and liked to subject to his patient processes of thought. These came in such forms as: ‘How is an artist to be a Christian if, as Michelangelo said, “Art is jealous and demands the whole man?”’42 Usually, with his paraffin lamp glowing and a pot of green tea on a tray piled with books, he would read late into the night, anything from favourite old classics through volumes of sermons to the periodicals to which friends and family gave him subscriptions as a gift. For many years his little black cat would sit on his knee, patting the leaves with her paw now and then. When she finally died, he mourned for her loss. ‘I dearly love solitude, but miss poor Tabby,’ he wrote to his son.43
Sundays were rigorously observed. Palmer would don his best clothes: a vast broadcloth coat fitted with enormous pockets and a cravat of an obsolete fashion, which he would tuck into his buttoned-up double-breasted waistcoat. Attired like this, he looked so clerical, Herbert remembered, that a rural clergyman had once asked him to assist with the service. Old-fashioned silver spectacles with very broad rims were used for distant objects; but sometimes these were exchanged for a more ordinary pair which, once lost, he would stumble about groping for, with much accompanying grumbling, often treading upon them in the process of looking. The family would set off early to morning service, walking along the ridge that led from their house to the church. They always got there in good time so that Palmer could study the readings before the rest of the congregation arrived. He particularly loved the collects and psalms. ‘The poor world-withered heart begins to open like shrivelled leaves in a gentle summer shower’44 when it hears them, he said, and when he found their cadences massacred, their ancient phrases scrambled by some young High Church reader, his face would darken with anger. When the service was over, however, religious observances were done with for the day. Palmer was not a fanatic and though he refused to sign any petitions calling for the opening of art galleries on Sundays, he disliked the idea that this day should be made miserable by forcing children to put their playthings away. ‘A little child brought up in this way asked its mother what Heaven was like,’ he once told a friend. ‘“My love,” said mama, “Heaven is a perpetual Sabbath”; upon which the poor little thing expressed a wish that, when she died, she might go elsewhere!’45 ‘Unaffected piety was as marked a feature in his character as a craving for knowledge,’ said his son, ‘but he never attempted to cram either intellectual or moral food down unwilling throats. The young mind was allured but never driven to its fairest pastures.’46 Readers of his unrelenting letters to More may be surprised by this opinion. Perhaps Palmer had learnt a lesson. Certainly, for the devoted Herbert, a Sunday spent with his father was counted the happiest day of the week.
‘Herbert is a most dear amiable charming child,’ Palmer had written shortly after his eldest son had died. ‘He has lived with me eight years without once displeasing me – but they say he is too weak to be educated – and education including as its foundation the fear and love of God is all in all – besides experience leads me to suppose that I shall lose him like the rest and I love him violently.’47 Palmer seemed almost frightened to open his heart again and Herbert, still only seven when his elder brother fell sick, must often have felt himself to be inadequate. He longed for his father’s approval; but instead, after More’s death, came a long separation. He was taken by his mother to live with his grandparents. To a boy who had just spent the summer running free with the farm lads, riding shaggy horses and roaming wild hills, the routine at Redstone must have felt oppressive. It was not a relaxed place. Frances Redgrave remembered visiting as a child. Though she had liked chatting with Mrs Linnell by her bedroom fire, she had always been wary of the presiding patriarch. Where Palmer’s conversation had always been ‘so delightful and so amusing and so enlightening’, Mr Linnell’s remarks on the whole were admonishing, she recalled.48
Palmer described Herbert at the age of ten as looking ‘old and unchildlike’.49 He had had a difficult boyhood. Growing up in a house of mourning, he remembered often being miserable during his years at Furze Hill. Trips with his mother into town did little to alleviate loneliness since, what might otherwise have provided a pleasant opportunity to get out and meet neighbouring children, became an ordeal because of his clothes. Dressed in homemade petticoats with a frill for a collar and a ridiculous coat, he was openly mocked by the local boys as he passed. When no one was visiting – which was often – he was much neglected. His mother would retire to her study to write letters and his father to his studio to paint, leaving Herbert alone amid the polished mahogany, the neatly ranked ornaments and regimented books. A visit to the Wright family was a revelation. ‘For the first time I saw toys and games (of which there were a multitude in the “Play-room”),’ he remembered, ‘and for the first time I tried to take a share in a round game. And it was there on Xmas Day 1862 at the great glittering table I saw for the first time what English hospitality and unstinted wealth could accomplish with unostentatious pride. There also I saw with astonishment the great pile of presents round the Xmas tree for everybody in that great company down to the cowman and the page. It was then that I received my first gift a little pencil case.’50 The younger son, Howard, was to become Herbert’s close friend.
For years, however, Herbert’s main companion was Palmer, though he was only too pitifully aware that he was not the first choice. ‘You may please God be a balm to my heart – but I fear the odds are against it,’51 his father had once told him. And yet, as Herbert pragmatically put it, he was ‘one of those who love the society of their children and, as we were now thrown together more than before, I soon learned to look upon him not only as a most indulgent teacher, but as a favourite companion’.52 To the isolated Hub, to be with his parent was to step into a charmed sphere. He hardly missed playthings, he said, for there were artistic projects to take the place of toys and Palmer knew how to make these amusing. One of Herbert’s earliest memories was of sitting in a baby chair helping to mount drawings: ‘an opportunity for mischief and mess which he turned into an elementary lesson in painstaking’,53 he recalled. Palmer bore patiently with childhood bunglings and he and his son became brothers-in-arms against Hannah’s domestic onslaughts. They would retreat into the studio together to work on assorted makeshifts, to mend slippers with boiling cobbler’s wax or prepare materials for art. Sometimes they made expeditions to other parts of the house for various purposes kept secret from Hannah, once firing a gun up the flue of the hall chimney in a catastrophic attempt to clean out the soot.
Herbert would have liked to have gone to school but his parents were terrified for his health. ‘Dear Herbert is so delicate, though without any specific disease, that we hardly think he will live to grow up,’54 Palmer told the boy’s godfather, Reed. Besides there was no educational establishment in the area that seemed quite to suit because, although there was a local grammar school with a clergyman for a headmaster, Hannah, having heard that the blacksmith’s son went there, wouldn’t let her own son attend. Palmer mocked her snobbery and yet accepted it: Herbert was kept at home where his father started teaching him, giving him lessons in Latin, arithmetic, drawing and English. These were administered in infinitesimal doses, Herbert remembered. He would have liked to work more, but Palmer, while acknowledging that he was quite as quick as his brother, would not let him, even when he was twelve, spend more than half an hour with his lesson books.
When Harry Cope was sent down by his parents to avoid a London epidemic, or when the Redgraves and their daughters came to visit, Herbert was thrilled. He loved his stays at the Hooks’ or the Wrights’ and was delighted when he was sent a little white dog called Phil to look after. He fed it sugar lumps and rolled around with it playfully on the lawn. Unfortunately the dog was less happy, growing more and more homesick, expressing its grief in a continuous falsetto howl until eventually, making a dash for the gate, it escaped. When it returned a week later it looked emaciated and the pads of its feet were quite worn.
A friend encouraged Herbert to start collecting beetles, a hobby that soon developed into an entomological mania as he spent hour after hour in pursuit of butterflies and moths. He wanted to be a naturalist when he grew up. His father was not completely discouraging. ‘He allowed me to gloat over my captures,’ Herbert remembered, ‘thinking that good might come in the shape of nicety of handling, and habits of observation.’55 But when he tried further to enlist his father’s attention and showed him his boxes and setting boards he was firmly rebuffed. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ his father admonished with a quotation from Pope. He far preferred ‘the other B – Biography’ to beetles. ‘It’s biography that makes moral muscle,’ he said. ‘All the great men have set venerated models before them, and tried to work up to them.’56
For all the many years that he had lived in rural Shoreham, for all the long hours he had spent admiring natural beauty, his father could not have answered even the most elementary questions on the sciences, Herbert said. Palmer could not have recognised any but the most common of plants, insects or birds. Herbert did not give up his hobby, however, and his uncle, John Linnell, who had become the curator of the entomological collection at Reigate Museum, would occasionally invite him to visit. Herbert learned to handle the tiny brittle specimens without breaking them and it was to this precision of touch that he was later to attribute the aptitude for etching which his father would one day appreciate.
Herbert’s other childhood pastime was, somewhat improbably, military drill. It was Mrs Redgrave who had recommended it, she alone realising that the boy, walled up with his grieving parents and lacking proper exercise, ran a very real risk of going into decline. There followed, Herbert said, ‘a long and delightful period of instruction by an ex-sergeant major of the Grenadier Guards; whose course in my case went further than usual and included Broad-sword exercise with single-sticks’.57 It was to lead to a lifelong fascination with firearms. When Herbert was seventeen, the eccentric Mrs George presented him with a gun: a splendid fowling piece that he showed his drill master. ‘The sergeant thought the stock quite a master-piece,’ Palmer recorded, ‘and kept fondling it after the manner of a doll.’58
Herbert came to enjoy an increasingly vivid relationship with his father who little by little, amid constant fears of overtaxing his mind and perpetual anxieties over his health, began cautiously to expand his education. Realising that his son would never acquire enough classical learning to follow a leading profession, he would have liked him to have become a farmer instead but there was no prospect of ever being able to purchase enough land, so Palmer, without paying the slightest heed to Herbert’s zoological bent, decided that he should become an artist. This, Herbert said, revived a love of teaching which thereupon began ‘every day and more or less, all day’.59 ‘For more than fifteen years I was gradually taught S.P.’s views on the principles of Art,’ he said: ‘on composition; on clouds and skies; the imperative importance of linear and aerial perspective; and a host of other matters which went to form his great tests of good and bad in Art – to form his intensely earnest creed.’60
At the age of fourteen Herbert was enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. He was beginning to learn a profession – ‘a great Christian duty’61 Palmer told him, but an arduous task. Letters from father to son were increasingly crammed with instructions. Palmer wanted to give Herbert the sort of academic grounding that he himself had lacked. Geometry and perspective had to be properly tackled, he told him; and though the former could feel like that ‘sudden check presented’ during a field walk in Cornwall by a high stone wall, there was ‘nothing for it but to get over’.62 Further to that, the figure had to be mastered. ‘Don’t think it’s enough to let a lesson merely lie upon memory,’ Palmer said; ‘make sure that it enters you as a power.’ It is ‘of very little use to know how many degrees the scapular bone will stretch to, unless you fix the information by making small sketches of your own.’63 Withdraw to the quiet of the library, Palmer recommended and, after issuing page after page of advice, he instructed his son to read it all twice. Everything could become a lesson, Herbert remembered. ‘All that we did in the garden – all that we saw through the trees of the wide view over Surrey and Sussex, he used to explain in order to demonstrate his views and his principles in regard to composition, and chiaroscuro, and colour, and Poetic Art. The Past for Poets; the Present for Pigs.’64
Herbert was steeped in his father’s vision: quirky and stubborn, outmoded and strange; but always infused with an animating passion. ‘How could a child, even a stunted, prematurely old, and ignorant child, avoid the fascination of such a teaching?’65 he asked.
The garden was one of the greatest shared pleasures of Palmer and Herbert. It was a steep stretch of land divided by a holly and laurel hedge from the precipitous furze field beyond, with sloping lawns and two cedars around which rabbits chased and a copse of larch and beech that was rustling with squirrels and birds. This was their little kingdom – or at least the small patch that lay outside the studio window was for, though a gardener (taking his orders from Hannah) kept the lawns and the flowerbeds in strict suburban order, one little area was exempt from his jurisdiction. There in that corner, Palmer told Julia Richmond, ‘nothing that is beautiful comes amiss’.66 All his favourite flowers grew in untidy profusion: foxgloves and harebells, honeysuckles and primroses; wood anemones and narcissi, his ‘dear convolvuli’67 and ‘loveliest of all’68 the woodbine. Pottering about in his patched old shoes, wielding an enormous worm-eaten whalebone-ribbed umbrella wrapped clumsily with string, Palmer tended them all. Each was a friend. His ‘pet narcissus’ was ‘the eye of the garden’;69 the blue gentian which flowered so delightfully in January was procured because Mr Ruskin had described it as growing so profusely and brightly in the Alps that walking amongst it had felt almost like walking through heaven; and, if the gardener surreptitiously flung one of his plants over the hedge, he would bring it back tenderly and replant it again.
The garden was far from the lush Eden that he would have hoped, for the soil was dry and sandy, and water, a precious commodity pumped up by hand from a tank, was so limited in summer that it had to be bought for a ha’penny a bucket, and even though Herbert and Palmer, inspired by a passage from the Georgics, together devised a system of artificial irrigation, many of the plants would still wilt away. Palmer would save all his washing water for his pets. And when a new maid, set to weeding, accidentally uprooted the harebells that for three years he had been encouraging, Palmer gave way to one of his rare angry fits. Another was provoked when Hannah dispatched a housemaid to tell him that his trousers were embarrassingly shabby. Palmer took his walking stick, his son remembered, and started violently lambasting the ornamental yew.
Palmer and Herbert would sit in the garden listening to the whitethroats and nightingales that sang in the hedges (though Palmer would complain that the latter kept him awake). They would watch the thunderstorms as they came rolling in. His pleasure in these storms, said Herbert, ‘was quite as keen as in the days when the peals, rolling from combe to combe among the hills had called forth the Ancients from their cottages’ and ‘as a tempest crept towards us in twilight . . . the flashes, to his delight, sometimes revealing stupendous chains of cloud mountains – we simply revelled in the sight, till the great drops upon the dust and the crash of near thunder drove us in doors’.70
Sometimes Palmer, with Herbert beside him, would range further, cutting low winding paths through the surrounding shrubs. These led to hidden arbours from which they could peep out secretly at surrounding views. Once they made a little bench together. Palmer was not a proficient carpenter but he had a reverence for all handicrafts and lamented the ‘moral debasement’ of a society in which ‘court dress was looked upon with more respect than a carpenter’s tool basket’. ‘The things in harmony with religion and art,’ he said, ‘are not fashionable follies but tool baskets, spades and ploughs, house brooms, dusters, gridirons and pudding bags.’71 On another occasion, Herbert recalled, ‘by means of prodigious expense of time and toil, we raised a small hillock (“The Spectacular Mount” as we called it) whence, over a very unclassical paling, we could get a downward glimpse of the steepest slope . . . and imagine if we liked, that it was haunted by a faun or two, or perhaps a beautiful Dryad.’72 With the help of their fantasies (and the large heap of kitchen breakages which had gone into the construction of their ‘Mount’), a prim suburban patch was transformed into a charming wilderness in which every twig had its work to do: it helped to shut out the sight of the hideous slate-roofed villas which, as the months went by, were steadily multiplying below.
By the time he was sixty, Palmer had lost all his former pleasure in walking. ‘How much has been written upon exercise, how little upon keeping still,’ he complained; and yet ‘we owe the discoveries of Newton not to his legs but to his chair.’ He would recount the story of how the great thinker, when lodging out of town, had been seen lounging about by his landlady who had declared that he was but ‘a poor creature and would never be anything better than a philosopher’. The people in the next house had also seen him sitting by the hour in the garden blowing bubbles of soap and had concluded that he was an idiot. ‘How proud I should be to be thought an idiot by most people I know,’73 Palmer wrote. He preferred the universe of hill and dale that could be found in the Belvedere torso, he said, to the undulating landscapes of Reigate, but instructed to take more exercise he would embark obediently every morning on what he described as ‘my monotonous walk’.74 There were only two practicable routes and both had been spoiled by development. Flinging on an old garden hat and a veteran Inverness cape, seizing a pocket edition of The Bucolics, he would stride to a certain five-barred gate, touch it and then stomp back in disgust, much as a member of a chain gang goes back after exercise to prison, Herbert wrote.
Once Palmer had thought that he would go mad if he couldn’t escape on his sketching trips, but after moving to Redhill he never returned to the wilds of the West Country again. Memories of journeys made with More crowded too painfully upon his mind; besides, as he aged, bad weather and the illnesses which accompanied it began to take an ever heavier toll. Instead, he made do with sketching what he could see from his windows. Matter abounded, he insisted, even though the sunset couldn’t be properly seen and, apart from a sewage works, there was not ‘that sparkle of water which no landscape can be without’ for the ‘sullen Mole’ that wound through the valley, when it could not run underground, seemed to him to make a point of running out of sight. Herbert vividly remembered his father’s joy when, one year, after heavy rains, this sullen Mole revealed itself as a veritable river winding in and out among the spreading meadows.75
Palmer continued, however, to make the occasional trip to Margate, even though in his last years these trips would be made alone since the resort was no longer considered sufficiently fashionable for Hannah. The train had made holiday excursions cheaply available to the masses and, as Palmer explained to Redgrave, ‘people won’t go there; for if they do they see poorish folks enjoying themselves, which of course is quite shocking!’76 Hannah now preferred Brighton. ‘One must be genteel writing to Brighton,’77 Palmer told his son, the words in italics being scripted with an elaborate flourish. He did not accompany his wife in 1865 when, complete rest having been ordered after illness, she took a long autumn holiday with her sisters for which her father paid and again, in 1866, his family travelled without him to ‘that respectable mud-side resort, The Marina St Leonards’. ‘I can’t make the letters slant enough,’ Palmer mocked.78
In the summers Palmer regularly paid a visit to James Clarke Hook. His relationship with this artist is a little unexpected. The athletic Hook was almost fifteen years younger than him and when he had first walked into an Etching Club meeting Palmer certainly hadn’t foreseen that he and his wife Rosalie – ‘so discreet, so genial, and so good’79 – would become such close friends. Beyond art they did not share many interests: Hook loved sailing and fly fishing and shooting; but Palmer would look forward for weeks to a stay in his Surrey home for, Herbert said, ‘loving dearly the breath of cows, the sweet smell of the new furrow, and all the wonders of the gardener’s art’, Silverbeck seemed (as his sketchbooks and letters testify) an Elysium compared to ‘the prim, densely peopled neighbourhood of Red Hill’.80 Herbert loved the company of Hook’s sons, a pair of amphibious boys, never happier than when in water and always keen to tempt visitors, Palmer among them, onto the pond for a voyage in one of their homemade craft. The attendant catastrophes were proverbial, Herbert recalled.
During the annual cleaning onslaught Palmer would still be turned out ‘neck and crop for a couple of days’,81 while his books (no volume too venerable for its covers to be banged), his papers, portfolios and plaster casts were deposited on the lawn to be vigorously dusted, while carpets were beaten, floors re-varnished and armies of earwigs routed from his painting rags. He would find refuge with friends, usually Hook or Richmond, while Herbert remained a loyal ally on the home front, receiving letters of detailed instruction on such tasks as the oiling of shelves. ‘What a hideous vortex is all this domestic perturbation!’ exclaimed Palmer. ‘Orpheus looked back on purpose: he dreaded a second bout of housekeeping.’82
The occasional trip made by Palmer to London was always preceded by a tremendous kerfuffle as Herbert, who loved to accompany him, remembered only too well. ‘For days, perhaps weeks, beforehand,’ he said, ‘a list of things to be seen, done and got, was carefully compiled . . . and the route was systematically planned out so as to economise time to the utmost.’ Then ‘on the eventful morning, the broadcloth coat with the long, flowing skirt was brought forth, and the white cravat was adjusted with unusual care. One or more sets of underclothing were donned, according to the time of year, and sometimes indeed a second pair of trousers in severe weather. The silver spectacles were reluctantly laid aside for those of thin steel, and a mighty silk hat was disinterred from a box where it dwelt secure for months together . . . I verily believe that that hat,’ Herbert added, ‘was the biggest that could be bought. The label on the bandbox had been directed by the hatter to “The Rev S. Palmer” and there was certainly a sort of very venerable curl about the brim.’83
Arriving at the station at least half an hour too early, father and son would walk back and forth, Herbert squirming with embarrassment at the attention which his father’s outfit attracted while the pacing Palmer remained perfectly oblivious. Even if its oddness were pointed out to him, he would not, Herbert wrote, have been in the least put out. It was not that he wilfully sought eccentricity but few things, he believed, were more pernicious than the dread of being peculiar. Once in London he devoted himself to showing his son everything of interest that lay in their route, stopping dead in the middle of the pavement, regardless how crowded, to point out some church spire or memorable spot. On one occasion, Herbert recalled, when his father had been walking with a young friend, Palmer had suddenly drawn up short before a milliner’s shop and begun with some vehemence to declaim loudly against the ‘Jezebel Tops’ within. This was his name for the silk-ribboned bonnets on display for the biblical Jezebel with her love of finery had become for Palmer the very paradigm of a woman of high fashion. A few passers-by, scenting his eccentricity, had stopped and his father, turning, had found that his erstwhile companion had fled in mortification and that he was standing alone at the centre of a gathering crowd. And yet for all the embarrassment that his father would cause him, what Herbert remembered most particularly about Palmer was his unfailing courtesy to everyone he encountered, regardless of class or wealth.
Palmer always had an aim in mind on these trips: some mission that, in his pencilled list of things-to-be-done, had been printed in large letters. He made the most of his opportunity to visit the London galleries and could remain in front of one painting for an hour or more, sometimes returning with amusing anecdotes of things he had overheard while he stood. Once, while ‘drinking in’84 a work by Fuseli at Somerset House, a man and a woman had come by. ‘What’s that?’ the woman had asked. ‘“Oh, that’s imagination,” said he, with a most contemptuous emphasis upon the word. “Come along!” giving her a vigorous pull to the next picture.’85 Once, on a cold winter’s day, ‘swathed like a mummy and at risk of [his] worthless life’,86 Palmer went to London expressly to look at a canvas by Poussin; on another occasion the object of his journey was to study ‘a bit one inch square, in a single picture’.87
Usually he would meet up with old acquaintances, joining Richmond in the portrait gallery or dining at Giles’s house. He was tremendously touched to find himself welcomed. ‘I am everywhere claimed by friends,’ he told Herbert, ‘and all but pulled in pieces with kindness. The finest Burgundy is broached.’88 Occasionally he would make a much-treasured purchase: an old book or print, a photograph of some favourite picture or a miniature antique bust. ‘These were the things that found their way into his bag or pockets during the day,’ Herbert reflected, ‘and they gave him that keen pleasure known only to cultured men of small means who grievously pine for an object for months before they venture to buy it.’89
For the most part, as the 1860s progressed, Palmer preferred to remain at home. His letters are peppered with excuses and apologies for cancelled plans. His ‘old acquaintance asthma’90 remained a problem and he was constantly afflicted with colds because his house – for all that it had been chosen for its bracing dry atmosphere – turned out to be horribly exposed to the winds. ‘The Draughts’, he called it at the head of one letter. ‘Bronchitis window’, he addressed another. The East wind could discover him even in his bed. And so, more and more often, he remained housebound, sitting in his studio bundled up against chills, watching the evenings drawing in earlier and earlier, the leafless tree branches being battered by rain. It must have come as quite a shock to the valetudinarian fusser when his younger brother, William, died first. Five years younger than Palmer, he was only in his mid-fifties when he passed away in 1866.
Palmer’s study was his kingdom, a walled citadel in which everything mattered and meant something to its eccentric ruler. Words would be chalked up on his easel, clues to some truth or maxim which he wished to keep in mind. ‘Parsley’ was one that Herbert particularly recalled. It referred to an anecdote he had recently read which had been related thus: ‘I happened one day to converse with an excellent French cook about the delicate art which he professed. Among the dishes for which my friend had a deserved reputation was a certain gâteau de foie which had a very exquisite flavour. The principal ingredient, not in quantity but in power, was the liver of the fowl, but there were several other ingredients also and among these was a leaf or two of parsley. He told me the influence of the parsley was a good illustration of his theory about art. If the parsley were omitted, the flavour he aimed at was not produced at all; but on the other hand, if the parsley was the least excessive, then the gâteau, instead of being a delicacy for gourmets, became an uneatable mess.’91
Palmer would talk to himself as he shuffled about, chatting away audibly with imaginary companions who were familiarly known as Mr Jackson, Mr Jinks, and Mr Jick, and who played an everyday part in the family circle, though a new housemaid, whose previous master had also talked to himself and had ended his days in a mental asylum, would be heard after a couple of days in her new post bewailing her bad luck to have entered the service of yet another gentleman who was ‘queer in the head’.92 It was the same girl, Palmer was to recall, who had expressed her astonishment that her employer should have two frames of tailors’ patterns hanging up in the drawing room: the ‘patterns’, it turned out, being Blake’s Pastorals. But Palmer was untroubled by what people thought of him. He continued, unperturbed, in the quiet tenor of a life so peaceably uneventful that small occurrences of a sort that would more normally be forgotten became, much to the amusement of friends, progressively magnified by his imagination until they were remembered as great adventures.