Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  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.

  4

  John Linnell

  Time was misused until my introduction to Mr Linnell

  from The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer

  Linnell was thirty and Palmer was seventeen when, in September 1822, they first entered each other’s lives. For the next sixty years, their courses would run closely together, at first easily interweaving, but increasingly tangling to create intractable knots.

  Linnell, born in 1792 into a Londo
n family of respectable but far from wealthy craftsmen, had had a very different upbringing from the cosseted Palmer. Brought up in the dismal backstreets of Bloomsbury, he had been forced to understand from an early age that success, if it came, would be a hard-fought commodity, for his father, having completed an apprenticeship as a carver and gilder, had tried to set up his own business and failed. Facing ruin, he had panicked and fled home, leaving his wife and three children – including four-year-old John – to fend as best they could. He had enlisted as a soldier in the service of the East India Company and would have vanished abroad forever had a cousin not managed to save the situation just in time by dashing down to Plymouth and purchasing his release from the military at the cost of £40.

  Returning, Linnell’s father had found employment once more as a gilder and regained his mental balance. But for his eldest son the memory would always remain. Linnell would, for the rest of his life, be meticulous about financial matters. He would keep the most precise accounts, recording every transaction in a leather-bound ledger down to the five shillings that he had once bestowed upon a gypsy who had happened to be in his garden as she gave birth. He would clarify the exact terms of any business agreement and, often at risk of offence, insist upon prompt payment from clients.

  Linnell, from an early age, loved reading and would devour anything he could lay his hands on – from Dr Johnson’s dictionary to the four large folio volumes of Roman history which the family owned and which thrilled him with their battles and their big illustrative plates. But it was his artistic rather than his intellectual talent that first came usefully to the fore. A skilled draughtsman who, as a child, had often decorated kites for his friends, he would frequently trot along to Christie’s auction rooms to sketch the sale paintings. His father, spotting a commercial opportunity, set him to copying populist pictures to sell. Linnell was happy to oblige. Even in church, when his hands should have been piously folded, he would be drawing, scratching portraits of the congregation onto the pews with a nail. He would even sketch with his fingers on the empty air. It taught him to see forms in his mind’s eye, he later said, fostering the remarkable visual memory which, along with fierce powers of observation, would serve him well as a portraitist.

  One day, while furtively sketching a Girtin watercolour at an auction house, he was spotted by the connoisseur William Varley who, struck by the boy’s skill, dispatched him promptly to see his brother, John, a landscape painter, who, though his placid vision has long since fallen from fashion, earned a niche in art history as one of his era’s most sought-after drawing masters. John Varley, impressed by Linnell’s talent, encouraged the adolescent prodigy to go on working as widely and from as many different subjects as he could, and most particularly to draw from nature. He invited him to visit his studio whenever he wanted. It was the beginning of a lasting friendship between Linnell and this ebullient master who would not only put in a fourteen-hour day at the easel but, by way of a break, don a pair of boxing gloves and go a few rounds with his pupils, or, tiring of that, divide his protégés into teams and get them to toss him back and forth between them across a table. This last was to become an increasingly onerous challenge; always a big man, Varley was eventually to top seventeen stone.

  Varley was financially hopeless but, resolutely Micawberish, he was generous to a fault and refused to see anything but the bright side of life. He was imprisoned several times for debt; his house was burnt down; he had an ‘idiot son’; but, as he told Linnell, ‘all these troubles are necessary to me. If it were not for my troubles I would burst with joy.’1 Linnell would, over the years, have to come to Varley’s aid with increasing frequency, but he never resented it nor forgot the debt that he owed him – not just for help offered in childhood but for continuing support for, when Linnell was first trying to set up himself up as a professional artist, Varley would recommend him to the sort of aristocratic clients who could afford to pay generously to have their portraits done.

  With his visits to Varley’s house, Linnell found himself moving into artistic circles. He made friends with William Henry Hunt who had only recently signed up as one of Varley’s pupils and with whom the ten-year-old Linnell, ‘wondering if I should ever be able to accomplish as much as he had attained to – he was so far in advance of me in general knowledge of Art’,2 would go on sketching expeditions. He also took an immediate liking to William Mulready, an Irishman six years his senior who, while studying at the Royal Academy, had been fêted as one of its most promising pupils. When Linnell first met him, he was embarking on a career as a landscapist, although later, turning to genre scenes, depictions of everyday domestic realities, the romanticised twist that he could give to ordinary life would prove very popular to Victorian tastes. Mulready was a complicated character: genial, irascible, sentimental and extravagantly Romantic, he was a professional success but a failure in his private life. At eighteen he married Varley’s elder sister, Elizabeth, but after seven years and four sons the relationship ended in separation – he blaming her for unspecified bad conduct; she accusing him of cruelty, pederastic inclinations and unfaithfulness.

  Mulready and Linnell became inseparable companions. They would burn up their youthful energy in enthusiastic bouts of boxing, go sculling on the Thames or take off on escapades that could last for several days. Once, returning in the small hours to find themselves locked out, they had had to clamber up the back wall of their lodgings much to the consternation of Mulready’s drunken landlady whose habitual malapropisms were a frequent subject of mirth among the two friends. (She called Linnell ‘Cotton’ because she thought his real name was Linen and frequently spoke of their fellows as ‘Acadaminions’.) But, most importantly, Linnell and Mulready painted together, the younger learning much from his older companion.

  Another visitor to Varley’s house, the miniaturist Andrew Robertson, offered Linnell an introduction to the President of the Royal Academy, the American-born Benjamin West, and from then on Linnell would visit West in his Newman Street studio once or twice a week, showing him the drawings that he made from casts and watching him work on his grand historical tableaux. This kindly American was always supportive: it was he who had famously tried to encourage a dismayed Constable after one of his pictures had been rejected for exhibition – ‘Don’t be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again,’ he had said. ‘You must have loved nature very much before you could have painted this.’ Many years later, in 1818, he would still remember Linnell, writing a recommendation for him when he applied for permission to copy a Holbein painting at Windsor Castle, praising him in the letter as ‘an ingenious young artist’. It was not the last time a president of the Academy was to help Linnell out. In 1822, he sent up a picture to the summer exhibition which was slightly too small to be hung on the line. Thomas Lawrence, seeing the problem, promptly dispatched the work to his own frame maker so that it could be made bigger and hence hung in the best spot.

  On the strength of Linnell’s talent, Varley managed to persuade his father to put a stop to the picture copying and let his son come to live in as a pupil instead. It would affect the family’s finances in the short run, Varley explained, but in the long term it would prove an investment. He was evidently convincing: Linnell’s father even produced £100 in fees. ‘Go to nature for everything’,3 was Varley’s motto. His pupils wandered the parks and meadows of London with rectangles of millboard and boxes of paints. Linnell applied himself to sketching outdoors with such dedication that, as a naturalist, he could rival Constable.

  When his year with Varley was over, Linnell applied to enter the Royal Academy as a probationer and, at the end of 1805, was admitted to the life-drawing class. The youngest pupil, at just thirteen years old, he was affectionately nicknamed ‘the giant’ by the diminutive and famously foul-mouthed Henry Fuseli, Keeper of Schools. In 1807 he was awarded the Academy’s life-drawing medal, Mulready having won it the previous year. In 1809, exhibiting at the British Institution, he went on to win a fifty-
guinea prize. His versatility was extraordinary. In the Academy’s annual competition between sculptors and painters, in which each was challenged to tackle the other’s discipline, Linnell took first place.

  At the Academy, he was tutored in art theory. He attended Turner’s last lecture on perspective and was there for the first by Flaxman on sculpture. He pored over the art of the past, studying the brawny designs of Michelangelo in which the physical and spiritual meet with a muscular force, as well as the subtler harmonies of Raphael which he knew from the copperplate reproductions of Giulio di Antonio Bonasone, a fine selection of whose engravings he would one day own. He was deeply indebted to these masters of the Italian Renaissance, but it was the work of their German contemporary, Albrecht Dürer, which he most loved, admiring its unique combination of precision and excess: an appreciation that one day he would pass on to Palmer.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, after his day at the Academy was over, he would go to visit Dr John Monro, the physician who had attended George III in his madness. Monro would pay him one shilling and sixpence an hour to make copies from his fine collection of drawings, reproductions which Linnell suspected would sometimes get sold on as originals. He enjoyed the companionship of his fellow students, figures such as David Wilkie and Benjamin Haydon, both of whom were to go on to make names for themselves, but who then were still lads, lunching together on the heavily marinated stews of London beef houses or, when there was no money to spare, larking about in the streets. Sometimes, in summer, they would go down to Millbank to swim in the Thames; or make their way to the house of the hospitable Varley to dine on eggs, bread and butter all washed down with porter and to argue with each other late into the night. And all the time Linnell was reading. He devoured endless volumes: Paley’s Moral Philosophy and Natural Theology, Francis Bacon’s essays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s Odyssey and the Bible along with a profusion of Baptist tracts pressed upon him by Cornelius Varley (one of John’s brothers) who by way of supporting argument also persuaded him to go and listen to John Martin, an impassioned but plain-spoken old Baptist pastor. Linnell was impressed by his unflinching conviction and liked to tell the story of how once this old preacher, invited to a grand dinner, had found himself confronted by an array of rich delicacies. ‘There is nothing here that I can eat,’ he had informed his hosts who had immediately made enquiries as to what further choice morsels might be brought. ‘Bring me,’ Martin had said, ‘an onion and a pot of porter.’