Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  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 pen
ned 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.

  6

  William Blake

  The Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  William Blake, born the son of a London hosier in 1757, was reared amid nightcaps and stockings, garters and gloves. He could almost have been some star child or changeling, suggests Peter Ackroyd, his most vivid biographer, for right from the beginning he found himself living in a world that was inhabited also by heavenly hosts. He saw seraphim roosting in the trees of Peckham and angels wandering amid the haymakers as they mowed the summer grass. As a boy, his mother had once beaten him for saying that he had just seen the prophet Ezekiel, but it would have taken far more than a mere thrashing to convince him that he was wrong. ‘When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? . . . Oh no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ Blake declared.1 His soaring imagination slipped free from all earthly restraints, his childhood perceptions of alternative realities unfurling and elaborating over the course of his life into the vast, fantastically complicated and almost incomprehensible mythic system of his books.

  ‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity.’2 A divine messenger had instructed the boy as to what path he should take and so, at the age of ten, having proved hopeless behind the shop counter, Blake was sent off to Henry Par’s Drawing School in the Strand, a respected institution which offered the sort of academic training which Palmer was always to wish that he had also had. Blake had long nurtured an interest in art. His indulgent father had got into the habit of buying him prints that, considered dull or unfashionable at that time, could be picked up for mere pennies. These laid the foundations of what was to grow into a valuable collection, the piecemeal sale of which would help to stave off penury in later life. But Blake was also a talented draughtsman and, at the age of fourteen, having completed his first training, he was indentured to the engraver James Basire.

  Basire was his second choice. Blake had origi
nally been destined to work with William Ryland but, on meeting him, had refused. ‘Father,’ he had said, on leaving the studio, ‘I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged.’3 His premonition had turned out to be true. Ten years later, charged with the forgery of notes, Ryland would swing from the gallows at Tyburn. Basire, however, was to prove a kind and thorough master. Old-fashioned and peaceable, he instilled in his often-impetuous pupil the virtues of precision and patience. He taught him a carefulness to temper his arrogance. He was embarking on a time-honoured profession, he told him, for the art of engraving went back to the Hebrews and their Chaldean forbears and beyond them, via Zoroaster, maybe even to God who had engraved the tablets of stone which Moses had brought down from the mountain.4 The hopeful young apprentice could hardly have guessed what a long, arduous, backbreaking, sight-blurring, spirit-battering future his craft held in store for him.

  In 1779, Blake enrolled for six years as a student of engraving at the Royal Academy. He was an assiduous learner, though he loathed the life room. What good was the slavish copying from nature, he wondered. Life drawing smelt of mortality. Modern man stripped of his clothing was but a corpse. He was equally revolted by what he saw as the bland urbanity and faux humility of the, by then, grand old man of the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He detested his ponderous lectures on the virtues of ‘general beauty’ and the pursuit of ‘general truth’. ‘General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess,’5 Blake raged, scoring the margins of Reynolds’s Discourses with furious annotations. ‘Damn the Fool’. ‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’ he inked in black letters on the title page.

  Blake refused to follow Reynolds’s classically influenced course, far preferring the art of what he saw as a profoundly spiritual age: the monuments of Gothic antiquity and the effigies of the medieval church. He was not alone in his tastes. A small community of fellow artists shared his predilection for the Middle Ages, among them Thomas Stothard who, when he had first met Blake, had been working on a set of illustrations to the Poems of Ossian. This Gaelic epic, purporting to record the songs of the blind bard Ossian about the battles of Fingal the warrior, had caused a literary sensation when it was published by James Macpherson in 1773, though subsequently it was condemned as fake. Stothard and Blake became artistic allies but, where the former went on to become an art world grandee, the latter never rose to be more than a jobbing engraver: a craftsman with undoubted skills but some decidedly unconventional views. Blake’s choice of a bride did not help. In the aftermath of a failed courtship, he had met a sympathetic but probably illiterate gardener’s daughter, Catherine. ‘Do you pity me?’ he asked her. ‘Yes indeed I do,’ she said. ‘Then I love you,’6 he replied and shortly afterwards they married. She signed the register with a cross. It was not a liaison that would bring access to society or membership of an Academy which valued social status. Nor did Blake show the sort of financial acumen that a rising artist needed. Detesting ‘the merchant’s thin/ Sinewy deception’,7 he refused to engage in a scrabble for wealth and, though Catherine learnt increasingly to help him, he was always to find it difficult to make ends meet.