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 o
n 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’.
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