Among themselves they referred to Blake affectionately as ‘dear old William’ or ‘Michelangelo Blake’, but to his face he was always respectfully addressed as ‘Mr Blake’. After years of neglect and mockery and scorn, the old man must have relished such esteem. He would rise from his table with a smile of welcome and the Ancients would spend long hours in his rooms, sharing a simple mutton dinner, perhaps, or sending out for pots of foaming porter before settling down to long hours of discussion, of dogmatic assertion and contradiction and counter-argument. It must have been rare for Blake to feel that his listeners were not remotely sceptical. The Ancients encouraged him to unfurl his vision in full and when Palmer asked him if he would like to paint his design of The Sons of God Shouting for Joy on the great West Window of Westminster Abbey his imagination was kindled to new excitement by the very thought. His illustrations to The Book of Job, commissioned by Linnell and finally published in 1826, might barely have broken even financially, but at least the ‘man of righteousness’ had found some earthly reward.
The Ancients determined to follow Blake’s artistic path, regardless of the fact that in so doing they were cutting themselves off from current artistic fashions and hence commercial success. As young men they were not worried by what the world thought of them; they had their brothers to reassure them, to understand and support them, and to defend them in the face of ridicule. They established a regular monthly meeting – a gathering of ‘The Blessed in Council’ – to be held in each other’s homes, though most often at Calvert’s, where his long-suffering wife would attend to their every want as the evenings lengthened and their visionary fervour gradually gave way to ridiculous jokes, moral intensity to merciless teasing, and prayerful solemnity to an irreverent sense of fun. Blake, when he was feeling well enough, would occasionally come along. He understood the importance of a shared sense of purpose for he liked to imagine the great Renaissance artists as being like the Holy Apostles: working together ‘engaged without jealousy . . . in the carrying out of one great common object’. But it was Palmer, more than any of them, who cherished the idea of community. He devoted a great amount of energy to trying to corral his scattered friends. ‘It is wonderful,’ he said, ‘what good things may be suggested where nothing offers at first by the laying together of two or three heads.’24
11
Shoreham
The beautiful was loved for itself
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
As a boy, Palmer had lived only a short walk away from the tollgate which crossed Kent Street Road (now the Old Kent Road) between the Old Dun Cow and the Green Man, levying the traffic which passed in and out of the city from the south. The smart post-chaises dashing in from the provinces, the lumbering farm wagons piled high with produce, the packhorses floundering under unbalancing burdens, the slow plodding cattle and the flocks of panting sheep: all passed along this crowded route. And, as a child, Samuel must sometimes have stood there gazing, wondering about the world from whence all these things arrived. Young George Richmond certainly did. One of his earliest memories, he recalled, was of watching the great horse carts coming in from the country with harnesses chinking and bright flanges fluttering, while the little gypsy children, too exhausted to walk any further, lay rocking in great nets slung underneath. To him, he remembered, these vehicles had seemed like the harbingers of some charming rural land.
As a young artist Palmer had dreamt of turning rambles and sketching trips into something more lasting. London was a vast, polluted mire of men. The ‘Great Wen’ was how the pamphleteer and champion of rural England William Cobbett had described it in 1820. To a bewildered Thomas Carlyle, arriving in 1824, it was like paying a visit to Bedlam. ‘Of this enormous Babel of a place I can give you no account,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘The flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appalls one’s very sense . . . and with the black vapour brooding over it, absolutely like fluid ink; and coaches and wains and sheep and oxen and wild people rushing on with bellowings and shriekings and thundering din,’ it was, he said, ‘as if the earth . . . were gone distracted’.1 ‘Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be,’2 declared Jane Austen’s valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse. And little wonder: there was not a man or woman who lived there, announced a writer in the Quarterly Review, whose skin, clothes and nostrils were not loaded with a compound of powdered granite, soot, and still more nauseous substances. Even the city’s spiders were said to be so befuddled by pollution that they could not spin their webs straight.
To Palmer, suffering so persistently from respiratory complaints, the idea of rural escape was especially enticing. Increasingly he began to look towards Shoreham for his dreams of ‘that genuine village’ where, as he was later to put it, he ‘mused away’ some of the best years of his life.3
The village of Shoreham lies less than thirty miles to the south-east of London in the county of Kent. Nowadays, crawling out from the capital through an all but unbroken suburbia, it only takes about an hour to get there by car. Alternatively there is a train from Victoria which, crossing the Thames, rattles out past the back yards of Clapham towards Bromley beyond which patches of woodland begin to line the track. Soon, the traveller is moving through opening landscapes, past paddocks of muddy ponies and steepening fields as the railway curves round to enter the Darent Valley, running the length of a line of green pastures that rise up towards hills with wooded horizons. But when Palmer first started visiting the village, the suburbs had only just begun their inexorable creep. There was no train to startle the hares from their nibbling or put up the herons from their patient watch. Even the toll road, that unspooling precursor of ribbon development, did not pass through the village, and Palmer and his fellow Ancients, if leaving on foot from London at dawn, would have arrived in the village by the light of the moon.
It was a difficult journey. The soil, ‘being wholly chalk and very stony’ rendered the road ‘not very pleasant to travel at any time’, recorded Edward Hasted in his 1797 History of Kent. Palmer and his friends must have felt a little like Chaucer’s fellowship as they passed the Tabard Inn in Southwark from which the medieval pilgrims had five hundred years earlier set out and, leaving the city behind them, adjusted their stride to the long journey ahead. They could seldom afford the stagecoach, although there was one which, leaving at twenty past nine in the morning, would drop travellers three hours later at the top of Morant’s Court Hill from which it was a gentle half-hour walk (or cart ride) down into the Darent Valley. At other times they would hitch a lift with a local carrier, riding on one of the fruit carts or hop wagons which plied a regular trade with the capital, or clamber on to the back of some lumbering wain.
On his first visit, Richmond liked to remember, he had been accosted by a gentleman farmer on horseback who, scanning him closely, had politely inquired if he knew any lad of his age in need of employment. Dressed in a nankeen jacket and white trousers, he had looked like a serving boy, the artist supposed. But dressing more in accordance with his social station could lead to other difficulties. One summer evening, weary from walking, he had flagged down a driver and, scrambling up gratefully into the roomy wagon, had soon found himself rocked off to sleep. It was only when the driver roused him at the parting of their ways that he had noticed the stains on his light flannel suit. ‘What were you carting before you took me?’ asked Richmond. ‘Sile,’ was the driver’s laconic response. Clearly, the city-dwelling Ancients encountered a few problems on the path to their pastoral idyll; but once they arrived there they found the village of their dreams.
Shoreham, taking its name from the Saxon words scor for slope and ham for village, shelters in the seam of the fertile Darent Valley which has been pretty much continuously settled since prehistoric times. In ancient days the whole area would have been thickly forested. Woods of oak, beech and chestnut still cover inclines that are too steep to plough. But farmers had started their clearing long before the Ancients arrived there and, as th
e young Palmer first crested the lip of the valley, it would have been a richly agricultural view that he found himself gazing upon, with crops of wheat and barley turning gold in the sunshine, with orchards laden with apples and fields of twining hops. Sleek cattle would have browsed among lush water meadows and sheep grazed the rough heath lands of the High Weald beyond.
The River Darent loops its sparkling course through the valley, threading its way through ancient demesnes and verdant pastures, down narrow passageways that run between cottages, round pollard willows and under dappling oaks. ‘The still Darent, in whose waters cleane/ Ten thousand fishes play and decke his pleasant streame,’ wrote the Elizabethan Edmund Spenser,4 a product of Palmer’s old school Merchant Taylors’ and a poet whose taste for archaic traditions he would share. Shoals of minnows still flicker, faint as pencil sketches in the pools of the river that, for Palmer, would have offered that lovely glint of water without which no landscape could to him look right.
Flowing over a shallow bed of speckled stones, the Darent was once a much broader, faster river than it is today: in Roman times it was navigable to boats which came upriver from the Thames. And before large-scale extractions diminished it so drastically that, in the 1970s, a weasel was spotted darting across its dry course, its current was strong enough to keep the wheels of several corn mills rumbling as well as powering a paper mill which, not closing until well into the twentieth century, provided a valuable source of employment in the region, especially for the women who shredded the rags. Palmer might have disliked the growing industrialisation of the countryside that such factories represented but he must have found it most useful to have a supply of thick, high-quality paper on hand; nor was he averse to hitching a ride with the rag carts that brought old clothes down to Shoreham from the East End.
A straggling village street flanked by cottages, many of them dating back to medieval times, crosses the river by a three-arched stone bridge which, though now much restored and remodelled, was designed in the thirteenth century to allow donkeys with a bale strapped to each side to pass. Palmer, who sketched it, was as charmed by its antiquity as he was by the picturesque houses which clustered around it: humble low-beamed dwellings with roofs of mossy thatch, their vegetable plots, fruit trees and flower gardens all carefully protected from winds and stray livestock by woven fences of willow. And yet, even in those days, Shoreham was changing. It had flourished in the century before Palmer arrived and, alongside the modest cottages, a handful of rather grander dwellings had grown up and now included Riverside House, an imposing edifice constructed in grand Georgian style by a successful eighteenth-century saddler, and Waterhouse, the spacious residence in which Palmer’s father was to live.
Palmer’s introduction to Shoreham came most probably through his father. One of his cousins, Charles Wake, had been the vicar of the parish from 1775 to 1796. More importantly to the elder Palmer, it was known as a stronghold of Nonconformist belief, although some fifty years earlier when John Wesley had first visited he had provoked a riot, setting an outraged congregation of Anglicans storming and cursing and clanging at the church bells. Dissenting sects had subsequently put down roots in the region and flourished and Palmer’s father was invited to become a lay preacher in the chapel at Otford, about a mile downstream from Shoreham village.
Sam, accompanying his father on trips to attend his new flock, had visited the area with some regularity after 1824. Several of the drawings in his surviving sketchbook – the views of clustered villages amid undulating landscapes, of distant spires and sloping meadows, of cloaked shepherds presiding over quietly grazing flocks – were probably done in the Darent Valley; a large bristle-backed pig, which he sketched as she watched warily over her litter, may well be the ‘huge Kemsing Sow’ that he mentions in an 1824 letter in which he uses Shoreham as his address for the first time.
Palmer was enchanted by the village. His works of 1825, including his glowing sepias, evoke the natural fecundity of its rural views. In the freshness of spring the following year he and his fellow Ancient, Arthur Tatham, travelled down to Shoreham for a more protracted stay. Renting rooms in the ramshackle timber and weatherboard house of a local farmer, Arthur Tooth, (a house which is now known as Ivy Cottage and which, though much done up, still stands on the road that leads up out of Shoreham towards the church) they pooled their meagre resources and by dint of frugal management survived on a sum total of eight shillings a week – an allowance which was later cut to five shillings, two pence.
It was around this time, however, that the fiscal circumstances of the Palmer brothers suddenly improved. In 1825, William Giles died leaving both his grandsons a legacy which, when all the paperwork had eventually been completed, amounted to a far from insignificant £3,000 apiece. William decided on the strength of it that he wanted to become a sculptor. Samuel, no longer bound to London by the need to attract paying clients, was free to pursue his ambitions in remote rural peace. Towards the end of 1826 he bought a dilapidated cottage, small and dark and overrun by rodents. The Ancients nicknamed it Rat Abbey. But the determinedly parsimonious Palmer was unperturbed: ‘I will not infringe a penny of the money God has sent me, beyond the interest, but live and study in patience and hope,’5 he told Richmond. This cottage would remain his home for well over a year.
Meanwhile, Palmer’s father had started muttering about taking a new wife, a prospect which did not please his prosperous brother Nathanial who, already irritated at having to support a sibling who persisted in dabbling so degradingly in trade, did not want to have to deal with any potentially embarrassing and financially cumbersome dalliances on top. He issued an ultimatum: either his brother would live the life of a gentleman of leisure, and live it as a widower to boot, or he would have to forfeit his annual allowance. The path ahead, for the time being at least, was plain. Palmer’s father loved his books but his Baptist convictions were equally firm. He decided to accept his brother’s terms, to relinquish his unremunerative business, leave his dingy London house and retire to Shoreham to pursue a leisured existence, with his own private library and Mary Ward as a housekeeper, and a local congregation to whom he could expound his ideas of salvation, hustling their souls heavenward, as his grandson was later to put it, ‘with much sweating and thumping of cushions’6 to expedite them on their way.
In March 1827, Palmer’s father sold up his stock in a sale which, taking place over the course of three days, brought him £133.6s. Not long afterwards, packing up his books and domestic accoutrements, he carted his entire household to Shoreham. By the end of 1828 he was ensconced at Waterhouse, a pretty Queen Anne building which he rented at the bottom of the village, overlooking the pack bridge. It was not as ostentatious then as it looks now, for a Georgian façade has since been added giving it an air of contrived grandeur; but to the locals it would certainly have seemed a gentleman’s residence with its six spacious rooms and its servants’ attics, its little walled garden sloping down to the river and its expansive aspects of far-off tree-crowned slopes.
Shoreham felt like a secret haven to the Ancients: ‘a valley so hidden’, as Calvert was to put it, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out’.7 Palmer would often paint it protected by a foreground of sheltering hills. It was his sanctum. Away from ‘horrid smoky London with all its begrimed finery and sooty shows’,8 he could search for that simplicity of purpose which he so admired in Blake, a man who managed to live ‘without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few’ so that he could be ‘free, noble, and happy’.9
Palmer had some time since abandoned his dandified pretensions. He had caught sight of his full-length reflection in a London shop window and, after a long pause for self-critical consideration, declared: ‘No more finery for a gentleman as short as you!’10 From then on his dress would be humble, if decidedly eccentric, as a caricature scribbled by Richmond in 1825 makes clear. The painter is depicted from the back, a dishevelled figure with voluminous overcoat, furled
umbrella, clumpy boots and broad-brimmed hat. ‘Learn thou the goodness of thy clothes to prize/ By their own use and not another’s eyes,’11 Palmer would chant aphoristically. He came increasingly to detest the affectations of fashion, preferring clothes made with a more rigorously practical regard for comfort, hard wear and, of course, pocket capacity.
In Shoreham he began to adopt the sort of biblical look which the Nazarenes had favoured and, in both a chalk sketch and a miniature done by Richmond in 1829, an idealised ‘Ancient’ emerges who, with his clipped beard and shoulder-brushing locks, serene downcast gaze and long antique robes, looks pronouncedly Christ-like – an association further affirmed by Richmond’s first attempt at a portrait of Jesus. The robed and bearded figure who sits by the well in his 1828 painting of Christ and the Woman of Samaria bears a strong resemblance to Palmer who quite possibly posed.
To the locals, Palmer would have appeared outlandish. Beards were not much worn at that time, except by soldiers, and were considered positively suspect in Establishment circles. Even as late as 1840, when the radical Mr George Frederick Muntz appeared in Parliament with a flourishing growth of facial hair, there were many who felt that he was issuing his own peculiar hirsute insult to English parliamentary institutions. In more bohemian company, however, the beard was coming back and the once pink-cheeked Palmer was proud to be sporting his cutting-edge credentials. ‘The artists have at last an opportunity of wearing the beard unmolested,’ he informed Linnell that summer. ‘I understand from the papers that it is become the height of fashion.’12
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