Palmer’s closest and most loyal friend among the Ancients was the artist George Richmond (1809–96). Barely fifteen when the group was founded, he was small, almost squat, with big hands and feet and long waving brown hair which, judging by a youthful self-portrait, he would have been constantly sweeping back from his high, clear brow. The son of a painter of miniatures, Richmond had right from the beginning, when he and Palmer first met in front of the marbles at the British Museum, an artistic facility which his friend, with his obsessive tendency to niggle, lacked. Richmond had gone on to enrol at the Royal Academy where the passions of the histrionic Fuseli would have prepared him for the erratic tempests of Blake, a figure whom, like all his fellow Ancients, he was to come deeply to admire. ‘Never have I known an artist so spiritual, so devoted, so single-minded or so full of vivid imagination,’2 he would tell the poet’s future biographer Alexander Gilchrist; yet, at the same time, Gilchrist reported, he would also make so bold as to argue back against Blake.
Palmer and Richmond shared a genial disposition, a pleasure in debate and a delight in the ridiculous. They would often visit exhibitions together and, stumping up the shilling entrance fee, could frequently be found standing side by side in front of a canvas at Somerset House, or studying canvases in the ‘enchanted school’3 of the National Gallery which, from the moment of its foundation in 1824, was to become one of their favourite points of call. They both exulted in music and one of Richmond’s earliest memories was of being crushed in the pit listening to Paganini play in a concert in which the audience had been roused to such a fever pitch of frenzy that they had risen almost as one to shake their fists in each other’s face. Years later, Richmond would also hear Chopin play in Paris, in a concert for which the great maestro of Romance, wrapped in blankets and sweating in the last stages of consumption, had had to be carried to his piano stool; but as soon as he had touched the keys, Richmond remembered, his inspiration had returned.
Richmond, with his boyish vivacity, his conviviality and his wicked talent for mimicry, made a sympathetic and amusing companion. John Ruskin noted the kindness of his soft brown gaze while another friend described how, when part of a gathering, ‘he drew out those around him with the tenderest skill [and] . . . never allowed the humblest company to feel left out’. ‘Where others might see blemishes, Mr Richmond always saw beauties,’4 he said. But Richmond was also the most ambitious of the Ancients. While his fellows wasted time dithering about exactly which path to take, he was travelling in France trying to broaden an education which, if the impossible handwriting of letters littered with spelling mistakes is anything to go on, had been at best informal. While his friends were debating a communion of saints, he was in Calais exchanging pinches of snuff with the exiled Beau Brummell and, while they were living in rural retirement, he was building up a society portraitist’s clientele. He never indulged the eccentricities that could jeopardise a career.
Edward Calvert (1799–1883) was to be another lifelong companion to Palmer. He was a committed fellow visionary as well as a faithful friend. The son of a naval officer, reared on England’s rugged south-western coasts, he had been only six years old when wandering at sunset in his grandmother’s garden he had had his first mystic experience, being suddenly possessed by a feeling which, as his son would later describe it, was ‘as of a loving spirit taking up his abode within him, and seating himself beside his own soul’.5 And yet Calvert was not some fey dreamer. He was a robust country lad who, at the age of seven, had rowed out alone to visit a fishing fleet trawling several miles from the shore and, at the age of fifteen, when his fellow Ancients were first picking up palette and brush, he had enlisted in the Navy to serve as a midshipman. He was wounded in 1816 during the bombardment of Algiers – the spectacular climax of a punitive British campaign intended to put a stop to piracy in the Mediterranean and prevent a thriving trade in European slaves – but though Calvert soon recovered and more than a thousand Christian captives were liberated, his closest friend, hit by a cannonball, was killed.
The harsher realities of a career which until that moment had seemed more like an exciting adventure were brought home. From then on the man of action faded and the thinker came to the fore. With several years still to go before he could obtain his certificate of release, Calvert found what must have seemed to his shipmates an eccentric way of filling them. He set about learning to draw, filling page after page with his sketches as, in the confines of his midshipman’s cabin, he practised his draughtsman’s skills by the lurching lamplight. Soon he was relishing a journey through the Aegean not for its seafaring opportunities but for the chance it afforded him to study the rocky landscapes of myth. Calvert had been presented with a copy of Virgil on his baptism and it had filled his mind with vivid imaginings of a pantheistic world. This voyage through the islands now brought them to fresh life. Pagan enthusiasms – or ‘naughty disobedient heresies’6 as Palmer would call them – would always compete with the Christian commitments of the man who would later build an altar to Pan at the bottom of his London garden.
As soon as Calvert had secured his release from the Navy – to the consternation of a family who feared he was abandoning a sound career – he started to study under an art teacher in Plymouth and, within a year or two, was producing accomplished miniatures. He met the ringleted Mary Bennell, a Londoner, on a visit to her family in the West Country, and after a brief courtship involving a great deal of poetic recitation, they married and moved to the capital in 1824. Calvert was admitted to the Royal Academy the next year. He had simply shown Fuseli his drawings and Fuseli had said: ‘That will do, we want more of this.’
One of the first people whom Calvert had met in London was Palmer’s cousin, John Giles, with whom, in the course of negotiating the sale of some shares, he had discovered a mutual fascination for the art of antiquity. The two had quickly made friends and it was probably Giles who had told Calvert about Palmer and Richmond. He had certainly spoken of the sailor-turned-artist to these two and when Calvert spotted Richmond in the Somerset House Library he had come immediately across and, holding out a hand, said: ‘You must be Richmond,’ to which Richmond replied: ‘And you Mr Calvert whom I have wished to see.’
Squarely built, with a broad forehead and an expression more contemplative than observant, Calvert had looked on first acquaintance, Palmer later remembered, like ‘a prosperous stalwart country gentleman . . . redolent of the sea and in white trousers’.7 Linnell thought that he resembled an Old Testament prophet and the young Ancients seem rather to have regarded him as such. One of Calvert’s sons (he was to father six children, one of whom died in infancy) captured a sense of the role that he played in their circle: ‘His voice was subdued and impressive as his manner was dignified and unassuming, while his countenance, fair and almost unfurrowed, glowed with interest and simplicity. He would listen attentively to whoever was speaking, after which, when disposed to reply there would be noticed a slight movement in his features – an indication that he was about to say something – and those around would withhold further remark.’8
Calvert’s home in Brixton, where he moved in 1826, became a meeting place for the Ancients. They ‘unceremoniously dropped in as impulse or convenience prompted’, his son remembered, ‘reading . . . or comparing notes, aflame with earnest spiritual faith’.9 William Blake particularly liked him, Palmer said, for he had, ‘in no small degree’ that ‘innocence and humility of heart’10 which Blake most loved to find. But purity of heart, as Calvert’s family came to understand only too well, does not lead necessarily to fiscal profit and, for all that he was possessed of a modest private income, they often found themselves suffering for his art. ‘Oh Edward, you will never do anything to make yourself famous,’ his frustrated wife had once cried after he had turned down an offer from the precociously successful animal painter Edwin Landseer to complete one of his equestrian portraits. Calvert’s belief was that: ‘Painting must be a resource not a profession.’11
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bsp; Palmer, Richmond and Calvert formed the core of the Ancients; but four other artist members were also involved. Francis Oliver Finch (1802–62), Palmer’s earliest friend, had been brought up in severely straitened circumstances by a widowed mother. He had been a sickly boy until, handed into the care of a grandmother who lived in Aylesbury, he had begun to thrive on such rural pastimes as swimming and rowing. Finch had a natural love of learning and by the time he was in his teens his imagination was steeped in the great works of literature, in Paradise Lost and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Ovid and Virgil, Bunyan and Shakespeare. He had also started painting despite the advice of a neighbour who had confidently informed him: ‘There’s no good in making pictures little Finchy, you’d better be a parson and make sermons instead.’12
By the time Palmer met Finch, by then a student of Varley, he was a principled young man possessed of the highest religious standards which, though he found them difficult to capture in poetry or painting, he did his best to express in everyday life. He made a calm, kindly and most loveable companion who played an influential part in guiding Palmer towards a way of working that could integrate his faith and his art. They shared a love of music, Finch being a pianist and a singer with a fine contralto voice and a taste for old English songs: anything from Stilly Night to Handel’s Messiah would ring out round their rooms. They also shared their affection for cats and many a hungry stray would find safe harbour in Finch’s home.
By the time the Ancients were founded, Finch had had some success with Romantic pictures inspired by the Poems of Ossian. He had first exhibited at the Academy in 1817 and been elected an associate of the Old Watercolour Society at the age of nineteen, becoming a full member in 1827. ‘He had imagination,’ Palmer said, ‘that inner sense which receives impressions of beauty as simply and surely as we smell the sweetness of rose and woodbine.’13 He particularly loved the Keatsian image of ‘embalmed darkness’ which, appearing in Ode to a Nightingale, had been composed in 1819 in the garden of the Spaniard’s Inn in Hampstead, a stone’s throw from where Linnell would rent a rural home. Finch, of all the Ancients, was the one who at that time believed most passionately in Blake’s spiritual course. In the late 1820s he was to convert to Swedenborgianism, a bizarre visionary cult developed from the writings of its eponymous eighteenth-century founder, a theologian who claimed to have had visions in which scriptural truths were revealed. It was a cult with which Blake for some years had also been fascinated, though he had eventually rejected it in favour of the even more radical doctrines of Paracelsus, the late fifteenth-century physician whose fundamental premise was that ‘the imagination is like the sun’,14 and Jacob Boehme, a cobbler who, born a century later, famously pronounced that ‘he to whom time is the same as eternity, and eternity the same as time, is free of all adversity’.15
The other artist members of the Ancients have been all but overlooked by history. Henry Walter (c.1799–1847), whose sketch of the fourteen-year-old Palmer embarking fresh-faced upon his new profession is the earliest known portrait of the artist, appears to have been included among the Ancients purely on the strength of old friendship because his pictures – watercolour portraits and paintings of animals – have nothing to do with the spiritual aesthetic of the group. He added gaiety to their gatherings, however, was a witty caricaturist and, as far as the artists’ children were concerned, put his skills as an animal painter to most impressive use, making a wolf mask for a Christmas party which they would always remember for its bright glass eyes, jagged teeth and lolling tongue of red cloth.
Welby Sherman, a draughtsman and engraver, was to prove an untrustworthy addition to the group – not that the other-worldly Palmer noticed. He continued to offer him every encouragement, trying to drum up support for him when his prospects were poor, stubbornly disregarding the warnings of his more far-sighted friends.
Next there was Frederick Tatham (1805–78), an indifferent sculptor and miniaturist whose stiff early portraits produced under the auspices of the Ancients soon gave way to a more conventional, if utterly unremarkable, style. He was, however, a generous-hearted man; sympathetic, tolerant and attentive with a caring disposition as his frequent acts of charity to the villagers among whom he would live showed.
Tatham was the son of Charles Heathcote Tatham, the architect who had done so much to help Linnell by introducing him into society, and the brother of Arthur Tatham, one of the pair of non-artist members of the group. Arthur, when he joined the Ancients, was still a Cambridge undergraduate, but he was soon to take holy orders becoming, as Palmer who was with him on the eve of his ordination would inimically put it, a servant at ‘that glorious altar, that Holy of Holies within the rent veil’. May he ‘long live to minister oblations of acceptable praise to God and good gifts to men’, Palmer wrote, hoping that in ‘the fiery trial’ which he believed to be coming to purify the Church, he would stand undaunted or die a martyr.16 Tatham went on to become Prebendary of Exeter.
Last in this list of members, though most certainly not the least for it may well have been he who first brought the Ancients together, was Palmer’s first cousin, John Giles. He was the youngest of the gathering and embarking upon the career as a stockbroker in which he would remain for the rest of his life. Yet, despite his prosaic profession, he was steeped in poetry and would long remain a lynchpin of the group. Giles was one of the very few to whom Palmer would dare show his more idiosyncratic pieces. He is ‘a great favourite both with Richmond and me’, he later told Linnell, for besides his ‘unflexible and unblemished integrity’, he ‘has so much knowledge of books and general information – with such sincerity, good humour and real kindness of heart that I have passed no hours of relaxation with more pleasure than in his society’.17 Giles and Palmer regarded it a ‘sacred custom’18 to spend Christmas day in each other’s company, talking about literature, leafing through manuscripts and communing with their favourite ‘feathered friend’19 – one of the fat greasy geese upon which Palmer loved to feast. Giles exercised ‘a great influence . . . of love hardly to be exaggerated’,20 Richmond’s son would say.
The burly Giles would have cut a substantial figure among the diminutive Ancients on the grounds of his stature alone; but he was also a man of powerful conviction who, having come from an austere Nonconformist background and converted later to the Anglican faith, nurtured a profound reverence for the superior wisdom and spiritual purity of the medieval age. In the simplicity of ancient man had lain a grandeur and a glory to be emulated, he believed, and, deploring the brash innovations of modernity, he imparted his vision to his companions whenever he could: a vision which, as Calvert was wistfully to describe it, felt ‘so remote, so near, simple, peaceful, settled in golden innocence, secured in the recesses of its blessedness’.21 Giles was so enamoured of this lost age that he affected to speak in what he thought was an archaic way, putting an accent on the final syllable of such words as furrēd or averrēd. At their Christmas gatherings, he and Palmer would eat mincēd pies.
Giles was an unquestioning patron of the poet whom he called ‘the divine Blake’ and whom he stoutly believed to have ‘seen God, sir, and talked with angels’.22 On one memorable occasion, he discovered and secured for a bargain price the original engraving plate for his Canterbury Pilgrims. He was a lifelong friend to Richmond to one of whose sons (Harry Inglis) he taught Latin, drumming in the grammar with great shouts rather than blows. A mistake was a cause for a roar which would have staggered a stranger; correct repetitions were rewarded with gifts of oranges.
Giles never married. A lifelong and increasingly eccentric bachelor, he would lighten the monotonous piety of Sundays at the Richmonds by calling round and reading to the children (one of whom, Willie, was a godson) from his beloved John Bunyan. He must have relished the company. Living all his life on Albion Street, working on the stock exchange (where he was nicknamed John Bull), spending his free time browsing through bookshops, he must often have felt lonely. Not that he would have complained; there w
ere others far worse off. ‘Think of the martyrs who boiled in hot oil,’ he once boomed at his godson when the boy complained that he was being bullied at school.
At first, this motley brotherhood would meet under the auspices of John and Mary Linnell. Over brimming mugs of home-brewed beer, they would discuss books and art, argue over religion and test out new philosophies, play music and sing until late, sometimes too late, into the evening, as a note from the Tathams’ father suggests. ‘While fully confident and very grateful to you for your friendship and kind offices to my dear Frederick,’ he wrote to Linnell, ‘I was last night kept up till half past 11 o’clock in anxious suspense’ awaiting his return. He asked his friend to try to prevent this happening in future. ‘As I grow older I am not less nervous,’ he explained in a letter which serves as a reminder of quite how young these Ancients actually were when they met.
It was Blake, however, who provided the focal point of the group. As far as its members were concerned, heaven beat in the blood of this pale old man. Where the uninitiated saw only a shabby engraver in the grip of wild fantasies, they saw a prophet crying out in the wilderness. ‘Centuries could not separate him in spirit from the artists who went about our land, pitching their tents by the morass or the forest side, to build those sanctuaries that now lie ruined amidst the fertility which they called into being,’23 Palmer said. They called him ‘The Interpreter’ after the character in Pilgrim’s Progress who explains spiritual enigmas to Christian, and his Fountain Court flat became the goal of their pilgrimages. As they approached, Calvert said, they would ‘gaze up at that divine window where the blessed man did his work’ and, like acolytes attendant on some High Church altar, they would kiss the bell-pull, perhaps giggling a little self-consciously at the action for they were often playful, although at the same time profoundly serious in their intent.
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