5
A good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art
from The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer
Few works remain from the period when Palmer and Linnell first met, but it was a pivotal moment for the younger artist as his only surviving self-portrait, which most likely dates to around this time, suggests. Drawn in black and white chalks on a piece of cardboard coloured paper, it may at first glance seem a fairly scrappy memento, smudgily finished and carelessly splashed. But there is no mistaking the unflinching intensity of his look as, bringing his eyes, nose and mouth into sudden sharp focus, picking out each eyelash and the adolescent moustache that dusts his upper lip, Palmer searches his face for signs of the future, even as he captures his mood of introspective retreat. This is an image that speaks of profound self-exploration. It presents a Romantic spirit at the moment of awakening.
Feeling the sudden fresh influx of his new teacher’s energy like a numbed limb feels the rush of returning blood, Palmer filled notebook after notebook with his ideas, busily recording, as his father had taught him, everything that he considered to be worth remembering: lines from poems, passages from essays, lists of unusual words, columns of accounts. Even his problems were punctiliously listed because, in so doing, he often found that a solution would suggest itself.
Only one of these metal-clasped pocket books survives: the sketchbook of 1824. Its pages, cut out and mounted, can now be seen in the British Museum. They are the first record of Palmer’s visionary future. Gone is the meek obedience to the picturesque manuals. Here is a vivid new strength of design. Palmer credited Linnell for the change. He had fallen into a pit, he said, and entirely lost all taste and feeling. ‘I not only learnt nothing . . . but I was nearly disqualified from ever learning to paint.’ But then ‘it pleased God to send Mr Linnell . . . a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art’.1
What Palmer thought of as ‘the pit of modern art’ was on display annually at the Royal Academy’s summer show, for, though in theory this institution had been set up to inculcate classical principles, to instruct developing artists in a rigorous academic style, the stern discipline which Reynolds had promoted in his seminal Discourses was, by the early nineteenth century, beginning to look outmoded. The ‘History Painting’ – grand renditions of battles, Bible stories and mythological dramas – that he had championed as the noblest genre, had fallen from favour. Reynolds might have hoped that by offering the British public access to the best works of art the Academy would elevate the nation’s taste, but fewer and fewer people were prepared to pay for some vast military picture. Portraits were far more desirable: they added a personal touch to the drawing room and showed off the frills and the furbelows of high society tastes. Even Reynolds had earned his bread and butter by painting them.
Landscape was also growing increasingly popular. The history of this genre dates back many hundreds of years. Its skies and its mountains, its pastures and trees can be admired in anything from ancient Greek murals through the manuscript illuminations of the medieval era to the glowing oil canvases of the High Renaissance. But in these earlier images, landscape remained merely a background, the setting for some mythical encounter or biblical event. It was only in the seventeenth century in the hands of such masters as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain that it found its beginnings as a genre to be appreciated in its own right. It was to the example of such forebears, and most especially to Claude – almost half of whose entire oeuvre of almost three hundred paintings would by the early nineteenth century have passed into British collections – that Turner and Constable had started to look.
Turner had proved a consummate master. He had managed to turn his pictures into talking points. This mattered. Painting was still a fairly precarious profession and most practitioners were presented with two basic choices: either they became popular, commercial entertainers or they had to face impoverished obscurity. Most chose the former, but competition was fierce. First impressions were vital, however superficial: the louder, the brighter, the more audacious the picture, the better; it would increase its chances of attracting a buyer.
Palmer’s contemporary, the author Edward Bulwer Lytton, satirised the art scene of the era through the persona of his Mr Gloss Crimson. This character ‘ekes out his talk from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ discourse . . . is intensely jealous, and more exclusive than a second-rate countess; he laments the decay of patronage in the country; he believes everything in art depends upon lords; he bows to the ground when he sees an earl’. But ‘his colours are as bright and gaudy as a Dutchman’s flower-garden for they are put on with an eye to the Exhibition where everything goes by glare’.2
Turner, applying his own competitive dab of gloss crimson to his exhibition canvas, would have recognised the truth of this description. His rival, Constable, certainly did. In an 1802 letter to his East Bergholt friend, the plumber John Dunthorne, he put his finger on the problem: ‘The great vice of the present is bravura,’ he said; ‘an attempt to do something beyond the truth . . . Fashion always had, & will have its day – but Truth (in all things) only will last.’3
Constable eventually proved his point. His ‘truth’ in the long run was acknowledged; but he had had to wait many years. Meanwhile, in the marketplace, a crowd of diverse styles and manners and idioms all jostled for attention. Palmer was setting out into a confusing world. Cash counted for more than aesthetic acumen as rich manufacturers replaced perceptive connoisseurs. Flashy techniques supplanted spiritual feeling. ‘The low and the mercantile creep over the national character,’ declared Bulwer Lytton, who created another character called Snap, a minor academic who, having studied Locke at Cambridge, laughed down his sleeve if he heard the word ‘soul’.
Palmer was not tempted by the ‘flashy distracted present’.4 ‘The modern English art is all bustle – surprise – excitement,’ he said, which did not seem to him a ‘legitimate aim’.5 ‘How superior is Mr Linnell’s style and colouring to that of any other modern landscape painter,’ he observed, even if ‘not half so captivating to an ignorant eye’.6 He confidently placed his career under the auspices of the older man who set him to concentrating on the rigours of line: to discovering its strength and its subtlety, its gentleness and severity, its pliability and its discipline. He encouraged Palmer to look anew at his artistic heritage, to study the crisp detail of early Flemish masters, to admire the fluid tenacity of Dürer’s designs.
Linnell, as a student, would have spent hour upon hour in the Academy’s cast room where plaster replicas of the world’s most famous sculptures posed and sprawled and reared and pranced. The Uffizi Mercury, the Callipygian Venus or the Furietti centaurs would be rolled on castors across ample spaces to catch the changing light, while shelves of busts, racks of limbs and whole libraries of frieze-fragments lined the walls. Palmer, however, had to rely upon the nearby British Museum. There, under the watchful eye of an old German warder, he joined a body of students – among them a young man, George Richmond, who was to become one of his closest friends – drawing from the antiquities in the Elgin and Townley Galleries.
‘The time of trifling . . . is passed forever,’7 declared Palmer. He set fervently to work, but with no one to instruct him he found himself floundering. His ‘sedulous efforts to render the marbles exactly, even to their granulation’, led him, he said, ‘too much aside from the study of organisation and structure’.8 He could not see the wood for the trees. Linnell’s great friend Mulready was encouraging. A painter could not take a step without anatomy, he said, but having learnt that he had then to go on to ‘investigate its most subtle inflections and textures, for if he has not learnt to perceive all that is before him, how can he select?’ All the best artists had begun with ‘niggling’, he explained.9
The freshly heartened Palmer would return to the fray. ‘I shall not be easy,’ he noted in one of his sketchbooks, ‘until I have drawn one Antique statue most severely.’10 Hunched over his pad, he would pass entire days in the galleries, only finally uprooted from his little wooden sketching stool when the patrolling warder called out that it was time to close.
Occasionally Palmer could delight in moments of ‘delicious vision’,11 and it was in the museum’s Townley Gallery that he encountered one of his earliest loves: a recumbent Graeco-Roman shepherd lad carved in the late second century AD. Palmer was enchanted by this perfect slumberer, this Endymion ‘who ever sleeps but ever lives and ever dreams in marble’. He was always to remember him and his ‘hard-to-be-defined but most delicious quality of perfection’,12 and thirty years later, picking him up as a parent might pick up a sleeping child, he would carry him from Mount Latmos to lay him down softly in a watercolour painting, in the sunlit doorway of a Kentish barn. This ‘peerless shepherd’, an ageing but still ardent Palmer would write, evoked ‘the tenderest pastoral’ and offered a ‘sure test of our imaginative faculties’. ‘Bend over it,’ he enjoined his friend Leonard Rowe Valpy in 1864. ‘Look at those delicate eyelids; that mouth a little open. He is dreaming. Dream on, marble shepherd; few will disturb your slumber.’13 The words, tender as a lover’s, are almost erotic in tone.
Linnell encouraged Palmer to try outdoor oil sketching and together they visited many old Dulwich haunts. Palmer, ingratiatingly attentive to his new teacher, took down long lists of ‘fine things to be seen’, but he was no longer looking through the lens of the picturesque painter; he was seeking a more direct vision, an honesty of a sort that ‘would have pleased men in early ages when poetry was at its acme and yet men still lived in a simple pastoral way’.14 His progress, however, was far from straightforward. His vision had been so occluded by ‘slime from the pit’, he declared, that it had taken him a year and a half just to clear enough away to see quite what a miserable state he had got himself into. ‘I feel ten minutes a day, the most ardent love of art, and spend the rest of my time in stupid apathy, negligence, ignorance, and restless despondency,’15 he noted. ‘The least bit of natural scenery reflected from one of my spectacle glasses laughs me to scorn, and hisses at me.’16 ‘Sometimes for weeks and months together, a kindly severe spirit says to me on waking . . . the name of some great painter and distresses me with the fear of shortcoming,’ he recorded in one sketchbook.
He persevered, encouraged on his way not only by Linnell but by the eccentric Mulready who, as well as instructing him in artistic technique, kept his ‘Mulreadian cabinet of anecdotes’ well stocked. Almost sixty years later Palmer was still drawing from this store, enjoying his memories of the Irishman’s gift for mimicry, recalling how he could send his friends into such convulsions of laughter that, rendered completely incapable, they would roll about helplessly on the floor. Palmer would willingly have been dragged about in a sack if it meant he would get a sight of one of Mulready’s ‘wrought and polished gems’, he said.17 He admired him enormously and for the rest of his life would quote his opinions on pretty much anything, from the complexities of flesh painting to the folly of imbibing too much liquid in a day. Certainly, as a young man, determining to ‘make my conversation with all clever men . . . a process of pumping – or sucking their brains’, he resolved to ‘get as much knowledge out of him’18 as he could. Linnell, on at least one occasion, had his nose so put out of joint that Palmer had earnestly to reassure him: ‘I hope when I put those questions to Mr Mulready you did not think that it meant the least distrust of your own judgement,’ he wrote in a postscript to an 1835 letter. ‘If I could have one man’s opinion I would sincerely rather have your’s than anybody’s.’19
It was Mulready rather than Linnell, however, who gave Palmer the lesson that he counted among the most important of his life. Mulready had been looking through a portfolio of studies by young artists of great promise when a fellow Academician, also leafing through them, had cried: ‘Why can’t we begin again?’ Mulready’s reply had been quick. ‘I do begin again!’ he had said, with a sharp emphasis on the ‘do’.20 Palmer owned a book of aphorisms. ‘Who can act or perform as if each work or action were the first, the last, and only in his life, is great in his sphere,’ was one he particularly remembered.21 He considered Mulready to be among the few who actually realised this piece of advice. For all his outward joviality he took his art very seriously. ‘I have drawn all my life as if I were drawing for a prize,’22 he would, as an old man, declare.
Palmer tried hard to follow his example. He would begin over and over again, struggling and failing and picking himself up, starting each new sketchbook with renewed hope and humility, a fresh resolution to find the language of feeling, to be a better artist, and a better person to boot. ‘Now it is twenty months since you began to draw,’ he reminded himself in a scribbled memorandum. ‘Your second trial begins. Make a new experiment. Draw near to Christ and see what is to be done with him to back you. Your indolent moments rise up, each as a devil and as a thorn at the quick. Keep company the friends of publicans and sinners, and see if, in such society, you are not ashamed to be idle.’23 Palmer was not just pursuing an artistic training, he was also following a spiritual path.
The sketchbook of 1824 opens a window into a young man’s mind. The conventional topographies of earlier works have been abandoned. Instead, searching for simplified shapes, trying out textural effects, exploring patterns and designs, Palmer feels his way towards a unique graphic style. Drawing with pencils, pen and ink and occasionally a fine brush, he experiments with anything from the flicks of a nib which can capture a form at a stroke, to that sharpness of focus which can pick out a chin’s unshaven bristles or the individual hob nails in the sole of a boot.
His vision is far from mature. In a notebook which ranges from landscapes to portraits, from botanical studies to extravagant fantasies, from the fair copies of poems to a recipe for laxatives, his attention can drift from a single frail seed head to an entire heavenly vision. At one moment he may be planning an elaborate polyptych – ‘a grand subject for a series of pictures’, he decides, would be ‘the springing of man from God & the fellowship of God & man in the patriarchal ages’24 – but on the very same page that he announces this monumental project he makes minutely detailed studies of an ash tree’s pinnate fronds.
To flip through the pages is to embark on one of the journeys that the young painter would make with his pet bulldog, Trimmer, an ebullient creature which, when not whining and kicking in its sleep, wearing out the carpet with its convulsive friction, would bark at passing horses, chase sheep and even, one day, get run over by a goods van until, after five years, Palmer felt compelled to confess himself to be ‘so UnEnglish’ as to prefer his pocket Milton as a walking companion to a dog.25 Palmer starts in the capital, looking back across the river towards Westminster Abbey, its tower luminous as mother-of-pearl in the ‘mild glimmering poetical light of eventide’, before, in a progression that becomes typical, moving from close observation to a technical analysis of how appearances might be captured in line, shading and tint: ‘perhaps we should oppose a brilliant coloured warmth to a brilliant coloured cool (as ultramarine)’, he suggests, ‘though an elaborate building with strongly marked shadows would through a neutral tint bear out against a flat mass of the most vivid colour’.26 But then Palmer leaves London behind him. By the next page of the sketchbook he is in the countryside, wandering through gently rounded hills and across newly ploughed fields, past slopes of ripe corn and girls picking apples, under shady chestnut boughs and along the edges of woods to pretty thatched villages that nestle in the shadow of churches. It is here, in ‘cottage gardens of sweet herbs and flowers’, that the painter drowses, forgetting the ‘wretched moderns and their spiders webs and their feasts on empty wind’.27
His progress is fitful. He may start punctiliously enough with little framed landscapes and neatly penned notes, but before long he has been swept up by plans for grand cycles of paintings. He leaps enthusiastically forward in a sudden flurry of sketches before, abruptly confronted by his own limitations, he brings his attention back down to the facts. He practises figures, studying the anatomical masses of muscle, the patterns of drapery falling over a body, the classical stances of contrapposto – that asymmetrical counterpoise in which the weight of the body is shifted onto one leg. ‘To prevent meagreness of composition from single limbs might it not be useful sometimes where there are several figures to cluster together several limbs in one full mass?’ he wonders.28 He brings his attention to bear on the ridge of a knuckle, the bend of a knee or a foreshortened foot. He tries out the expressive possibilities of line, his emblematic early pictures giving way increasingly to more impetuous sketches. He explores surface textures, learning to capture their various qualities with cross-hatching or stipples, with flicks, loops or spiralling coils. He experiments with perspectives and shifting viewpoints, sketching the approach to a village twice: once from a way off, and then again from up closer as he finds out what difference a few yards can make. He plays with scale. As he lies down among meadow grasses – the ‘sun shines through each blade making masses of the most splendid green; inimitably green and yet inimitably warm so warm that we can only liken it to yellow & yet most vivid green’29 – he enters a microscopic world in which fescues grow tall as the distant church steeple or the furthest horizon is formed by warped thistles and dandelion clocks. ‘These round ones go down to the utmost littleness,’30 he notes as he picks out each speck of a clover’s tripartite leaf. But in other pictures he gazes as if through a telescope at some far-off landscape, rendering trees, houses and flocks with a precision that the foreground lacks.
Encouraged by Linnell, Palmer pays particular attention to trees. He notices how foliage clusters into masses, how sunrays stream through leaves and stars glister through gaps in a canopy of ancient elms. He looks at their distinctive shapes and silhouettes, at their trunks, gnarled, knotted or smooth, twined with clambering ivy, embossed with burly excrescences or silvery supple as a sapling birch. Each tree, he observes, has its own unique character: sometimes they seem almost human, he says: ‘I saw one, a princess walking stately and with a majestic train.’31 He stares with the concentration of a naturalist at anything from the creviced face of a rock through the patterns of ploughed furrows to the circles of light that surround Saturn’s planetary orb. He looks at the bristle-backed hogs in their pens, at his pet cat sleeping, its paws softly curled, at a bony-faced sheep that confronts him head on.
He studies the old masters as Linnell has directed him, admiring the variety of Raphael’s textures (‘hard enamel face, soft silky hair and hard jewels on the cape’),32 or noting how Michelangelo, when working on the Sistine ceiling, would scratch in his outlines with a sharp point and fill the grooves with pitch.33 ‘Outlines cannot be got too black,’34 he observes. He remembers his mentor’s injunction – ‘delightful in the performance’35 – to look at Dürer and, like this great draughtsman, he sets out to describe entire landscapes with line alone. Linnell has also introduced him to the works of the sixteenth-century Bolognese engraver, Giulio Bonasone. ‘To copy precisely in pen and ink some limb of Bonasone’s,’ Palmer notes, is to ‘understand shadow in its poetic sleep’.36
Palmer learns also from his peers. He takes a note of Finch’s suggestion of using a ‘dark cool stem’37 as a framing device and, trying to keep up with Richmond, his former British Museum companion who is now a student at the Royal Academy, he transcribes part of a lecture by Fuseli. Clearly struck by the work of this histrionic painter, Palmer makes sketches of the ‘wicked thief’ on the cross; he shows the crucified criminal, head flung violently back, mouth gaping, eyes rolling, as he tugs out his nails amid cartoonish showers of blood. But Palmer, unlike Richmond, does not have the notoriously caustic Fuseli to scold him for his mistakes. He has to be his own master. ‘Place your memorandums . . . more neatly you dirty blackguard,’38 he admonishes himself in a note.
In the end, however, it is an individual vision that Palmer must discover. This is what he reaches for, most importantly, in his 1824 sketchbook. Scattering stars like a child scatters glitter, casting crinkle-winged bats out upon the twilight, hanging moons like shining lanterns and igniting vast glowing suns, he speaks of the marvels that for him can transform the mundane. His world becomes a magical one in which natural phenomena are personified, where the sky is ‘low in tone’, as if ‘preparing to receive the still and solemn night’39 and the rising moon stands ‘on tiptoe on a green hill top to see if the day be going & if the time of her vice regency be come’.40 A donkey is transformed into a spindle-legged, bristle-backed, armour-plated monster; the feathers of a bird’s wing can lend an angel flight.
Palmer still likes to draw the ecclesiastical architecture that first inspired him, its steeples and arches and traceries and vaults, but more and more frequently his churches are found merging with the landscapes that enfold them. ‘These leaves were a Gothic arch,’41 Palmer notes as fronds rise in a trefoil that frames a distant tower. Trees grow in groves with church spires. A peasant woman soars solid and columnar as a cathedral pillar. A rustic shepherd becomes a Christ figure. A cornfield takes on a sacramental glow. ‘The earth is full of thy richness’: Palmer puts a quote from the psalms on the cover of the Bible that he places unopened in the hands of a recumbent figure who, pondering this wisdom, gazes dreamily out across a far-reaching rural view.
Leaf by leaf, Palmer draws his vision together in his sketchbook of 1824. Here in black and white – with a rare wash of pigment when the prism of a rainbow or the sudden radiance of the sun demands it – is a vivid picture of the young artist’s soul. Linnell has sharpened the young man’s perceptions. He has shown him how to look. But now Palmer yearns not just to look, but truly to see. He is ready for his meeting with the visionary William Blake.