3
Oh that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
The death of a devoted mother would fall heavily on any young boy, but for the home-loving Sam it was particularly painful. He struggled to cope with a confusion of feelings and even many years later the wounds had not healed. He would sit and weep softly over Cowper’s On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, a work which, recalling the poet’s own bereavement, would always move Palmer to tears.
My mother! when I learn’d that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hover’d thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gav’st me, though unseen, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss . . .
It was, he thought, the most affecting poem in the English language.
The more practical consequence of the loss, however, was to set people thinking about the direction which thirteen-year-old Sam’s life should take. An artistic path, it was decided, would suit his proclivities. Attitudes to painters had altered greatly over the course of the previous fifty years. Where formerly they had been considered mere craftsman, by the end of the eighteenth century they had acquired professional respect. Immanuel Kant had effected what he had himself claimed to be the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in philosophy: where Enlightenment thinkers had sought to describe a strictly objective world, he had argued that reality could only be interpreted from the unique viewpoint of each individual and in so doing he had paved the way for Romanticism. He had set the creative spirit free to soar up to imaginative pinnacles, to a place where the dreamer could commune with a higher reality and the visionary discover truths in the solitude of his soul.
Palmer, as a boy, had dreamt of becoming an author like his grandfather. He had attempted verse from early youth, but as a poet he was never to advance beyond an ornately self-conscious style:
Methinks the lingring, dying ray
Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,
And lights the soul up more than day,
When wide-spread, sultry sunshines are.
Yet all is right and all most fair,
For Thou, dear God, hast formed all;
Thou deckest ev’ry little flower
Thou guidest ev’ry planet ball
And mark’st when sparrows fall.1
In prose, however, Palmer was to discover a more authentic voice. His letters reveal a descriptive verve, a stylistic flair and freshness of perception that suggest that, had he shed a lecturing tone of long-winded and sometimes pious pomposity, he might have made something of the writer’s calling. He speaks of ‘our earthly hopes’ being ‘shed like shirt buttons’;2 he describes a damaged etching plate as being ‘bent up like an earwig disturbed in an egg-plum’;3 he explains that ‘to stuff the mind with a legion of little facts makes it stupid and heavy as a bed is made heavy by its fullness of light feathers’;4 he describes the tortured flourishes of modern operas as running ‘up and down, backwards and forward, and round and round, like a squirrel in his cage’.5
‘Attention [is] the daughter of Curiosity who seldom can be prevailed upon to go anywhere without her mother,’6 Palmer wrote; or ‘in the North when there happens to be a dull summer – nothing but grey grey grey – the poor mind begins to feel as if it were going to bed with cold feet’.7 His images are resonant and his relish for language can almost be tasted on the tongue when he describes a cup of cocoa with its ‘oleaginous globosities bobbing about as you stir it like porpoises of the deep’8 or discusses the ‘sapid hotch potch’ of Southey, in which he has been ‘routing like a hungry hog’,9 or rails against ‘all this gaseous rhodomontade about the Ideal’.10
However for all the vigour of the copious letters that Palmer would write throughout the course of his life, his literary ambitions, remained those of the ‘true bookworm’. ‘Some place their bliss in action,’ he wrote to his boyhood friend Walter Williams in 1839, effortlessly slipping in a line from Pope, but on ‘a dull, pattering, gusty December day, which forbids our wishes to rove beyond the tops of the chimney-pots’, what he would most want would be ‘a good register stove; a sofa strewed with books; a reading friend, and above all, a locked door forbidding impertinent intrusions’. A day like this, he wrote, punctuated by ‘a light dinner about one o’clock’, ‘a little prosy chat (not too argumentative), just to help digestion; then books again, till blessed green-tea-time winds us up for Macbeth or Hamlet’,11 was his idea of ecstasy.
As far as a profession was concerned, however, it was decided that Palmer should apply himself to the visual arts. Looking back, he considered the choice misguided. ‘It is too commonly the case,’ he observed, that when a young man ‘prefers scribbling over paper to his Latin and Greek, he is supposed to have a “taste for painting”’.12 He had liked music and architecture more, he said. His earliest known picture – a tiny watercolour done when he was seven of a windmill, with a man fishing in the pond in front of it – though dated and proudly preserved by his mother (and then kept by him for his ‘dear Mother’s’13 sake), reveals no especial talent although its small size and rural subject matter might be considered prescient.
It is possible that his family had pushed him towards painting because they felt they were pursuing a deceased mother’s wish. Martha had always encouraged her son’s creative efforts. In an 1814 letter from Margate she told her husband that Sam had been sketching the local church for a cousin and that now this same relative wanted a picture of a mackerel too. This letter, however, also hinted at the source of the misunderstanding regarding his choice of career. His earliest artistic forays, he much later explained, stemmed not from an inborn attraction to painting but from a ‘passionate love’ – and the expression was not too strong, he assured his correspondent – ‘for the traditions and monuments of the Church; its cloistered abbeys, cathedrals and minsters’, which he was always imagining and trying to draw; ‘spoiling much paper with pencils, crayons and watercolours’.14
Palmer had grown up steeped in the Baptist faith. His parents’ shared beliefs created a powerful marital bond. On Sundays they would attend a succession of religious services and the content of sermons would be much discussed. And yet Sam, from first youth, showed a particular fascination for Anglican traditions. In his earliest surviving letter he reports to his father on the Margate vicar and though, at the age of nine, he is rather more riveted by a mighty blow dealt by the choirmaster to a boy in the organ gallery than anything more conventionally clerical (and is soon diverted to telling how he has written the name of his cat on the sands of the beach), it was an ecclesiastical interest that was to gather rapid pace.
The church would, quite literally, have served as a beacon in the young Sam’s life. As he crossed London Bridge the shadows of its twin sentinels, the tower of St Saviour’s and the steeple of St Magnus’s, would have fallen across his path. The scattered pinnacles of the City’s churches would have poked up through the smog. The great dome of St Paul’s would have been a prominent landmark and, as a miserable schoolboy, he often found solace in its echoing spaces, frequently visiting on Sunday afternoons. ‘Gazing upwards into the sublime obscurity’, he would listen to sacred music: music which he came to ‘prefer to all other of every kind’. The way that it brought together ‘sublimity fullness and power with the most luscious sweetness and last delicacies of sound’,15 he said, could allay all nagging anxieties and feverishness of mind and many years later he was to rail against the (never-to-be-accomplished) plan to tile the ‘dim and solemn’ cupola of Wren’s majestic cathedral with ‘metallic reflectors’ to make it ‘gay’. ‘There is a kind of craziness which neither raves nor mopes: – it rummages,’ he protested. ‘Whatever it encounters it desires to change into something else; to reverse to pervert.’16 ‘Fancy putting frescoes into the dome to give it light, when its essence is gloom and mystery!’17
For Palmer, the sacred calm of the city’s stone temples felt akin to that peace which he discovered in the countryside. Religion and nature, first beginning to mingle in his mind as his father read to him from the Bible among meadows and woods, continued to blend in his thoughts. Moved by strange mystic feelings, he applied himself to drawing pictures of the church buildings that bred them. His parents, eager to help but misunderstanding his motives, took this as evidence that he wanted to be an artist and so supplied him with architectural drawings, botanical engravings and art historical prints of famous canvases and frescoes to copy.
After the death of his mother, a drawing master was engaged for Sam, a minor artist who would have fallen through a hole in art history if it were not for the passing role that he was to play in Palmer’s life. William Wate was a landscapist of unostentatious ability: a competent painter of pleasant topographical views. Not for him the passionate extremes of a Romantic aesthetic; Wates leant safely towards the mildest form of ‘the picturesque’.
In 1782, the clergyman, author and artist, the Reverend William Gilpin, had introduced the idea of the picturesque to cultural debate. Looking for ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’,18 he had toured the country, squinting upwards at rocks from vertiginous angles, framing foregrounds with trees and sprinkling distances with ruins as he had sought to present a new painterly ideal. He had found much room for improvement in nature’s sense of composition and a colourful peasant or misplaced hovel could easily be added to or subtracted from a scene. Ruined castles and abbeys were objects of particular ‘consequence’ and a low viewpoint which tended to emphasise the sublime was always preferable to a higher prospect.
Soon, the picturesque as Gilpin had defined it was considered the very apogee of cultural fashion. With the continent closed off by conflict, there was hardly a beauty spot to be discovered in Britain without finding also an amateur artist in its midst. Equipped with their easels and a portable clutter of artistic knick-knacks, they surveyed the landscape in their dark-tinted ‘Claude’ glasses – small, convex mirrors which, by isolating a fragment of the natural scenery and unifying its tones, created a hazily atmospheric composition of the sort which the seventeenth-century master Claude Lorrain had made highly popular. The wild places of Britain were treated like hunting trophies: they were taken to be mounted on drawing-room walls.
The more clear-sighted were sceptical, even scathing, of the picturesque’s formulaic rules. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, drafted and written in the 1790s (though only posthumously published in 1817), Catherine Morland, the naïve heroine, while out on a walk, is given such an effective crash course on the subject, on foregrounds and distances and second distances, that by the time she and her teacher, Edward Tilney, have reached the top of Beechen Cliff she has ‘voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape’. And, in 1809, the comic writer William Combe, working in collaboration with the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, dispatched a satirical character, an impoverished schoolmaster called Dr Syntax, off on a tour of Europe atop his grey mare Grizzle in search of fashionable prospects the recording of which, he hopes, will make him ‘a real mint’. ‘I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there,/ And picturesque it every where’, Syntax informs his wife in the opening canto. The ensuing narrative with its accompanying illustrations, published in monthly instalments between 1809 and 1811 in the Poetical Magazine and subsequently turned into a book that ran into several editions, proved an immense success. But such satire did little to shift popular tastes. By the time Palmer was learning to paint, Gilpin’s principles had become as narrowly prescriptive as a painting-by-numbers chart. Any bravely original thinker would by then have abandoned them; but Wate was no flaringly talented Turner, no stubbornly rebellious John Constable: he followed a peaceably commercial path and it was along its obedient course that Palmer was now led.
Only two of his early sketchbooks survive. The earliest – a slim rectangle, about the size of a cheque book, bound in soft battered leather and fastened by a brass clasp – is now in the custodianship of the British Museum. The visitor who makes an appointment at the Department of Prints and Drawings and leafs through its pages with white art-handler’s gloves can wander off on a sketching trip with the fourteen-year-old Palmer, stroll alongside him through his south London haunts, rambling upriver from Greenwich to Battersea, visiting rural Chiswick or Richmond’s lush meadows or embarking on forays to Bedfordshire or Kent.
The sketchbook is dated 1819. King George III – ‘old, mad, blind, despised, and dying’ as Percy Bysshe Shelley describes him in his passionately radical political sonnet England in 1819 – was entering the last year of his reign. His son, who for almost a decade had already presided as regent, was on the verge of ascending to the throne. A foppish and dissolute figure, he was hardly likely to fulfil Shelley’s hopes of a ‘glorious Phantom’ to ‘illumine our tempestuous day’. It was he who, in the aftermath of the infamous 1819 Peterloo massacre – in which the cavalry had charged a crowd of demonstrators in Manchester, peacefully campaigning for parliamentary reform – had issued royal congratulations to the cutlass-wielding hussars.
The Napoleonic wars were over but the political problems of Britain were still far from resolved as the second generation of Romantics emerged, Keats publishing in 1819 two of his most famous works, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad of a knight who falls under the fatal enchantment of an ethereal temptress, and The Eve of Saint Agnes, a passionately charged poem which tells of the elopement of two lovers, and Byron producing the first cantos of his satirical epic Don Juan in the same year. Meanwhile Constable, though still unrecognised by the painterly establishment, was embarking on the unique six-foot sketches of local Suffolk scenes which were to represent his great breakthrough and mark him out as a modern, while Turner, inspired by a trip to Italy, by the classical lineaments of the buildings and the clarity of the light, was learning to unite atmosphere and architecture, past and present, art and history, in his work. In 1819 he showed his largest canvas ever: a landscape painted on Richmond Hill, a picture of a real England made ideal, and he was about to begin another canvas which, like some imaginative verso, would present an ideal Rome made real.
This was the cultural milieu into which Palmer was setting out, but his first sketchbook reveals quite how far he had to go. Occasionally it offers intimate glimpses of the developing artist. A special feeling for trees is revealed by a particularly attentive pencil sketch – ‘the willow behind the cottage was thin and playful’ he noted – or a still unformed personality is found trying out different versions of his signature: the name ‘Sam Palmer’ is followed by the more grown-up ‘S Palmer’ and then – as he contemplates posterity – a date is added as well. But for the most part this book consists of a series of unremarkable topographical studies by a young man who is learning basic skills.
Wate would have introduced him to the elementary drawing lessons of the popular tutors of the day: to the eighteenth-century Alexander Cozens who wrote four major treatises on ‘practical aesthetics’, setting out to fix the basic forms – ‘shape, skeleton and foliage’ – of thirty-two species of tree, or producing nineteen plates that purported to define the ‘principles of beauty relative to the human head’; or to Rudolph Ackermann’s books, including his 1811 study of watercolour which was to become one of the most influential manuals of its day. Illustrated by David Cox (though he was not actually credited), it had the unforeseen effect of training a whole generation of artists to adopt Cox’s style – albeit that of his earlier more picturesque landscapes rather than of the later atmospheric works for which he is now more admired. In 1808, Cox had settled in Dulwich. His subject matter – gypsy encampments on the common, kite-flying children, grazing donkeys and rustic cottages – would certainly have been familiar to Palmer and, in his 1819 sketchbook, he follows Cox’s instructions for the capturing of atmospheric effects as he carefully records the sepia gradations of twilight or studies the Margate pier by the glow of the setting sun. But later he would come to dismiss him: ‘Cox is pretty – is sweet, but not grand, not profound,’ he wrote after a day out in Dulwich. ‘Carefully avoid getting into that style which is elegant and beautiful but too light and superficial.’19
Palmer had by then found a master to inspire him. In 1819 he had gone for the first time to a Royal Academy summer exhibition. This annual art show was a major event. The Royal Academy was a prestigious institution. Election to its charmed circle was a coveted honour for, established in 1768 under the patronage of George III, it had been founded to raise the professional standing of artists by providing not just a school which could guarantee a sound classical training but a public forum in which to display new work. The Academy conferred status and with status came commissions and wealth.
At that time, an art show was a novelty in England. The Academy’s summer exhibition, a higgledy-piggledy parade of densely packed paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, was among the great spectacles of Georgian and Regency London: a glorious bear garden which every ambitious artist would have aspired to be part of and no gossiping socialite would have wanted to miss. This was the stage upon which the triumphs and the tragedies, the scandals and sensations, the celebrations and controversies of the British art world were played out. It was here, upon the canvases of the most fashionable painters, that the public could meet aristocrats, dignitaries and stars; come face to face with Thomas Lawrence’s Prince Regent in all his flamboyance, see Thomas Gainsborough’s Georgiana in her rakishly tilted hat or admire Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons in full theatrical flight. It was here that artists would introduce their most eye-catching ideas; that, in 1771, Benjamin West would challenge the traditions of history-painting by clothing the figures in his tableau of a dying General Wolfe in contemporary rather than classical dress; that, in 1781, Henry Fuseli would assure himself of a lasting reputation by revelling in the sensual eroticism of a woman abandoned to nightmarish sleep or that, in 1812, Turner would show off the sheer audacity of his vision, whipping up a great vortex of a snowstorm in his Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.
Success at the summer exhibition was crucial and competition was fierce. Only a fraction of the works submitted could be selected. The jury was far from impartial; and even having been chosen, an artist still had to hope that the hanging committee would accord his works an honourable spot. In 1784, Gainsborough withdrew his contributions in a huff because he felt that they had not been treated with the dignity they deserved and, in 1809, the placing of Benjamin Haydon’s Dentatus in an insignificant side chamber ignited a quarrel with the Academy which was never to be soothed. Everyone aspired to have their work hung in the Great Room (rather than in one of the cramped subsidiary spaces) and ‘on the line’ which now means roughly eye-level but, at that time, had a quite literal connotation for in the Academy’s galleries, first at Trafalgar Square and then in Somerset House, a dado rail ran around the room about eight feet above the ground. A picture was ‘on the line’ when its frame rested almost upon it. Large works were almost invariably placed above the line and, if they were higher up, tilted slightly forwards; smaller pieces, distributed like space fillers among them, would often be all but impossible to appreciate, even though spectators would bring spyglasses or even telescopes.
As artists competed for attention, jealous rivalries broke out. In 1781, Fuseli and Reynolds went head to head. The former, having spotted Reynolds at work on his Death of Dido, decided to challenge him by painting his own version of the subject. This was the sort of stunt which could make a name known. The combative Turner was certainly not above such behaviour. In 1832, he made his usual visit to the summer exhibition on ‘varnishing day’. This was a day just before the public opening which had originally been allocated so that artists who had submitted freshly painted canvases could apply a protective gloss to their works; but for many years it had been used instead to make last-minute alterations. Turner, fond of parading his daunting technical skills, was particularly famous for putting this extra time to good use: he would submit half-painted canvases and then, on varnishing day, proceed to complete the entire picture right in front of his fellows in just a few hours. When, in 1832, he found his muted seascape Helvoetsluys hung alongside a festively coloured Constable canvas, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, he thought it looked drab and so added a small red buoy to his composition: a bright dab of scarlet to give it a new life while, just as importantly, making the work of his rival look gaudy. ‘Turner has been here and fired a gun,’ Constable remarked in dismay when, at the grand opening, he saw what had been done. A canvas that had taken him almost a decade to complete had been suddenly diminished by his competitor’s stunt.
The more sharply the artists elbowed for attention, the more eagerly the public crowded to see, pushing and shoving to gawp at the most gossiped-about pictures. Parasols, umbrellas and walking sticks had to be banned and in 1806 when David Wilkie, then still an unknown Scottish teenager, made a debut with his Village Politicians, a realistic portrayal of rustics arguing in their local inn, a subject of such mundanity that no previous artist had ever aspired to paint it, crush barriers had to be erected to contain the chaotic throng. Everyone wanted to look at this most extraordinary image of completely ordinary life.
For emerging artists, the summer exhibition was a formative experience. The first that Palmer attended was to be fixed in his mind forever by Turner’s 1819 Entrance of the Meuse: Orange Merchant at the Bar, going to pieces. Even to the modern-day viewer familiar with this master’s late canvases, in which light and colour dissolve in tempestuous flurries and sublime passions are whipped up by the sheer power of paint, this cloudscape feels stirring. The young Palmer was rooted to the spot. Here was a freedom he had never before encountered. He was, as he put it, ‘by nature a lover of smudginess’.20 He could find a painting lesson, he said, in the sediment at the bottom of a coffee cup. A lifelong admiration for Turner was instilled. ‘I have revelled in him from that day to this,’21 Palmer recorded more than fifty years later. The finest artists, he came to believe, could combine both precise visual description and hazy vagueness of mood but, of these two, he considered the indefinite part to be the most difficult as well as the most desirable. ‘When I think of a pocket sketch-book of soft printer’s paper, a piece of charcoal, or very soft chalk, and a finger to blend it about, I think of improvement,’ he wrote.22 Turner led the young artist away from mere description towards a pursuit of the ‘effects’ that he was to fight to capture all his life. He began to experiment with a new vigour, even trying out blustery Turneresque scenes, attempting to convey the glower of a rainstorm as it sweeps its sullen shadow across a bay’s glittering expanses. And yet, for all the gusty freshness of the gales that, over the course of his life, he would find himself dashing down, his landscapes would tend to owe more to the peaceably nostalgic views of Dutch painters than to Turner’s dramatic visions.
Little in Palmer’s early work heralded his distinctive talent, though future subjects can be spotted – the softly domed hills that enfold humble dwellings, the church towers that speak of higher spiritual truths, the cattle that will wander off to re-emerge as sheep (the more conventional denizens of the pastoral dream) – and themes that will later be developed emerge. Palmer followed Turner to the riverside vantage point from which he had painted his 1819 Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent’s Birthday. This impressive view, its vistas stretching away down lush green slopes across the ancient Petersham meadows and beyond to the broad curve of the Thames, was already famous as the landscape that had inspired Henry Purcell to compose and tempted Thomas Gainsborough away from his portraits and, retiring in old age to Richmond, James Thomson, the author of the words to Rule Britannia, would describe it as the very quintessence of ‘happy Britannia’.
At a time when painters were first turning away from the tenets of antiquity and, with an affection nurtured by fear of invasion, starting to associate native scenery with Britishness, it is significant that Palmer should have tackled so emblematic a view. ‘Landscape is of little value,’ as he was later to put it, ‘but as it hints or expresses the haunts and doings of man.’23 In painting his local countryside, he was also speaking of a quintessentially British way of life.
The young artist also made several studies of his beloved churches which, from the soaring cathedral to the humblest grey turret, seemed to him as a Christian ‘the most charming points of our English landscape – gems of sentiment for which our woods, and green slopes, and hedgerow elms are the lovely and appropriate setting’. Take away the churches, he said, ‘where for centuries the pure word of God has been read to the poor in their mother tongue . . . and you have a frightful kind of Paradise left – a Paradise without a God’.24 For Palmer, the English countryside embraced the lives of its people like the walls of a church surrounding its congregation. It seems no accident that one of the few overtly religious subjects that he tackled was that of the Old Testament wrestling match between Jacob and the Angel. Palmer’s work grappled with the spiritual world in much the same way. He struggled to give it a physical presence, to bring it back down to the earth. Slowly but ineluctably a sense of landscape, Church and nation drew together in his imagination. It is not hard to see why, after much time spent ‘in controversial reading which ought to have been given to painting’,25 he moved towards the Establishment faith. He became a committed member of the Church of England and considered even those he most loved – his father and his dear old nurse – to be misled. One cannot help wondering what his hero, John Milton, an almost heretical freethinker and a ‘surly republican’,26 would have thought.
Palmer enjoyed a modest early success. In 1819 he exhibited two oil paintings at the British Institution, a club which, founded in 1805 by private subscription to promote national talent, had provided an important alternative to the Academy at a time when an open market for art was fast developing and the number of practitioners escalating apace. One of his pictures found a buyer much to Palmer’s delight. The scrappy little note that he got from the keeper informing him of a sale made to a Mr Wilkinson of Marylebone was discovered among his papers at the end of his life.
Mr Wilkinson suggested that Palmer should pay him a visit. He may have been a little surprised at the youth of the artist who arrived on his doorstep. Palmer, having just turned fourteen, had not embarked upon his career at an uncommonly early age but, judging by the drawing which his friend Henry Walter did of him at this time, he looked little more than a child and, for all that he has trussed himself up in wing-collar and cravat for the portrait, was possessed of a child’s earnest innocence to boot. It was an impression that Palmer was often to give for, small and pink-cheeked, he had a high piping voice which, though imbued with a richness that made him a fine tenor, was always to keep the clear timbre of youth.
Palmer was hopeful. His career was showing promise – not least when compared with that of his father who, supported by an annuity from his brother, Nathanial, was in the process of uprooting himself again. He was moving his home, his sons, his loyal family retainer (on whom, without his wife to tell him to put on fresh small clothes, he was more than ever dependent) and his bookshop to 10, Broad Street in Bloomsbury. It was a dingy house, disturbed by the rattle of incessant traffic, but the social cachet of the area was on the way up. ‘You must not confound us with London in general, my dear sir,’ insists Jane Austen’s haughty Isabella Knightley of her house in the locality. ‘The neighbourhood . . . is so very different from all the rest. We are so very airy!’
Airiness would have suited the asthmatic Palmer but his father’s new home was rather closer to the cramped tenements of the run-down Covent Garden than the Regency terraces that Miss Knightley extols, and his health started to decline around this time, causing him to miss appointments and deadlines. Nonetheless, the move fitted his career. He was now just around the corner from Charlotte Street which, as the upper classes decamped to the fashionable West End, was increasingly colonised by painters and so became known as the new artists’ quarter, while the British Museum, the capital’s richest repository of books and antiquities, was only a short walk away. It was here that Palmer would later spend a lot of time drawing.
The young painter also benefited from the help of his grandfather’s friends. Thomas Stothard offered advice and encouragement and would occasionally present the young artist with tickets to Academy lectures at which he would hear such celebrated figures as the sculptor John Flaxman, then the single most influential artistic practitioner of his day, enjoining his students to search out the ideal lineaments that lay hidden within nature, to look to such great home-grown talents as Milton, to appreciate the beauties of a lost medieval aesthetic and respect the simple purity of line. ‘Sentiment is the life and soul of fine art!’ Flaxman said. ‘Without it all is a dead letter.’27 Such ideas lodged themselves firmly in Palmer’s mind.
Palmer was also forging his first artistic friendships. George Cooke, a line engraver, often used to call in at Broad Street for rousing discussions. He encouraged the young artist to keep looking at Turner for whom he and his brother, from 1811 to 1826 (when they fell out with the artist), did many engravings. They possessed a magnificent collection of Turner prints which ‘formed part of the pabulum of my admiration’, Palmer wrote.28 A watercolourist, Francis Oliver Finch, three years older than Palmer and at the time of their first meeting studying under the renowned drawing master John Varley, joined Henry Walter as an artistic ally. Palmer was also to remain friendly with Wate and when his old teacher succumbed to cholera a decade or so later leaving his widow with nothing but a few sticks of furniture, Palmer went to some effort to secure her an annuity from a beneficence fund.
In 1820, Palmer had a picture accepted by the Royal Academy and the next year another while the British Institution took two. The year after that, despite having none at the Academy, there were three at the British Institution, one of which was singled out (along with Constable’s Haywain) by the critic of The Examiner who praised it for ‘touches at once so spontaneous and true, and light so unostentatiously lustrous’.29 Prospective buyers were beginning to make appointments. And yet, despite these tokens of public success, Palmer was floundering. He lacked the confident grounding of a classical training. He had not learnt the rudiments of anatomy. ‘O that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head thirty years ago,’30 he was later to lament, wishing that he had been ‘well flogged when somewhat younger’31 and so forced to adopt a less dilettantish approach. He came deeply to regret the ‘years wasted any one of which would have given a first grounding in anatomy – indispensable anatomy’. ‘The bones are the master key,’ he would say. ‘Power seems to depend upon knowledge of structure.’32
At the time, however, it was not his lack of formal learning that dismayed him so much as a sense that his poetic impulses were fading. He felt that he was losing touch with those dreams which the countryside had once stirred, with those visions of shadowy enchantment that his nurse had first fixed. Later, looking back on what he called ‘his soul’s journey’,33 he wrote: ‘By the time I had practiced for about five years I entirely lost all feeling for art . . . so that I not only learnt nothing . . . but I was nearly disqualified from ever learning to paint.’34 It was just at this moment that John Linnell arrived in his life.