Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Richmond encouraged him to follow his natural inclinations. ‘Mr Linnell is an extraordinary man, but he is not a Mr Blake,’5 he warned Palmer. But Sam, deeply reluctant to give any offence, found it increasingly awkward to extricate himself from Linnell’s grasp. ‘I beg to be understood as not so much positively asserting anything in this half-studied scribble on a very difficult subject, which is beyond me,’ he wrote in an 1828 letter, his point soon getting lost in a thicket of circumlocutions: ‘as, for the increase of my knowledge, putting forth a thesis by way of query, that where it is rotten it may be batter’d, thus avoiding to choak the throat of every sentence with “I humbly conceive I submit with deference” which had made those lines, if possible, more tedious than you will find them.’6 Even when he did turn to landscapes, his tenacious teacher was there to instruct, repeatedly telling him to rein back his imagination, to stick more rigorously to the facts in front of him. Palmer, though underwhelmed at the prospect of studying the ‘clover and beans and parsley and mushrooms and cow dung and other innumerable etceteras of a foreground’,7 once again knuckled under and obeyed. ‘I have been drawing the Natural Fact till I am cold in my extremities,’8 he informed his mentor in November 1828. ‘I am desperately resolved to try what can be got by drawing from nature.’9

  Linnell believed that naturalistic landscapes of Shoreham would be saleable, able to earn his pupil as much as £1,000 a year, but Palmer was not yet prepared to succumb to commercial tastes, to become one of the ubiquitous ‘housepainters and sky sloppers and bush blotters’10 who followed the precedents of Girtin or Cox. His talent, he believed, was a gift from God. It was not to be compromised for money or fame. ‘Tho’ I am making studies for Mr Linnell, I will, God help me, never be a naturalist by profession,’11 he told Richmond in 1828. He still longed to set a visionary imagination free.

  ‘I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it,’ Blake had said.12 Palmer sought this same ferocity of focus. Placing his subject in the middle of the paper, he fixed upon it with an intensity that must have made his eyes water. Even a functional hop bin could become the subject of fascinated scrutiny. He drew one from several explanatory angles and made extensive notes on the leaves in the fields: ‘The younger (& smaller) hop leaves are of a lighter & yellower green than the elder some of which are dark & cool and take very gray lights from the sky & sometimes a pole clothed entirely with the younger leaves is among the others quite a light yellow green & not only differs by colour from the rest but by being quite tender in its reliefs and shadows – from being thinner of leaves (more slender and regular in shape) without overhanging masses & deep shades under them.’ His images began to take on an almost hallucinatory quality: details grew bigger; colours glowed brighter; forms became amplified.

  In a series of studies of barn roofs and cow byres, done in around 1828, Palmer observed the patterns, tones and textures of the clustering moss: its deep greens and their olive-tinted contrasts; the pale primrose yellows and the richer tawny glows; the glowing ambers and ruddy browns; the roseate touches and rubescent blushes; the flaking crumbliness and the pillowing softness; the mottling dampness and the patches that had dried and peeled. His pigments built up a thick paste embossing the paper, mimicking the velvety growth that spreads over the thatch.

  Palmer’s paintings of trees were done with a particular sensitivity. He approached them as individuals to be understood as characters, appreciated for their histories and admired for their quirks. The mighty oaks of Lullingstone Park – noble descendants of the valley’s ancient Celtic forests (the name of Shoreham’s River Darent may derive from the Celtic word ‘deruentio’ which means ‘oak river’) – were as much a part of his rural community as the aristocrats who had once gazed at them from their castle windows or the peasants who had taken shelter beneath their vast knobbly boughs. Anchored by their great, knotted roots to the very life of the Weald, he saw them as majestic giants. ‘Milton, by one epithet, draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw,’ he wrote: ‘Pine and Monumental Oak.’ Palmer yearned to present them in the same way, but though he had spent all afternoon trying, ‘the Poet’s tree is huger than any in the park’, he wrote.13

  Palmer set out not simply to capture the tree’s outward appearance, to describe its ‘moss and rifts and barky furrows’, but also to evoke a sense of its inner life: ‘the grasp and grapple of the roots, the muscular belly and shoulders; the twisted sinews’.14 To him ‘the arms of an old rotten trunk’ could appear ‘more curious’ than the brawny arms of the figure of Moses which Michelangelo sculpted for Pope Julius II’s marble tomb. His trees come alive, possessed by their spirits as the woods in Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno were haunted by the suicides whose bodies were trapped writhing within their twisted trunks. And though Gilpin, the high priest of the picturesque, had dismissed the horse chestnut as ‘a glaring object’,15 Palmer, perhaps enjoying the visual pun that its palmate foliage played upon his name, frequently made them a subject. He was the first to offer this familiar feature of his native landscape a place in the history of British art.

  Like Turner who is said to have made as many as 10,000 studies of skies in his life, Palmer early got into the habit of making rapid pencil sketches of clouds. In later life he would often paint the vaporous ripples of formations that he called ‘Margate-Mottle’, so-named because it was in this seaside town that he would typically see their low fleecy reefs set on fire by the last rays of the sun. He greatly admired Linnell’s aerial works: ‘Those glorious round clouds which you paint,’ he enthused in 1828, ‘are alone an example of how the elements of nature may be transmitted into the pure gold of art.’16 And yet for Linnell, as for Constable who would famously go out ‘skying’, such sketches were in large part a scientific pursuit. In March 1812, when a comet had become visible in the night skies, Linnell paid several visits to Cornelius Varley who was developing an instrument that he called the graphic telescope which, when pointed at a subject, projected its magnified image onto paper. Linnell had begun studying the solar system, mapping the planets in relation to the earth. That autumn he made the first of two records of the comet’s position from the window of his house. Perhaps he interpreted its appearance as a heavenly sign for it was at this time, after much discussion with Varley, that he finally made his conversion to the Baptist faith.

  And yet, where Linnell was fascinated by the facts of astronomy, Palmer was entranced simply by the sky’s starry wonder. Though he did paint a double-tailed meteorite at Shoreham and later, towards the end of the 1850s, Donati’s Comet (named after the Florentine astronomer credited with its first sighting) as it streamed over Dartmoor, he did not need such rare manifestations to inspire him. (The only other reference he made to a specific astronomical occasion was a mention, in 1856, of being summoned outdoors to witness a lunar eclipse.) The heavens in their everyday guise were quite magical enough. The celestial beauties to which his paintings bore testimony – ‘the mottley clouding, the fine meshes, the aerial tissues that dapple the skies of spring . . . the rolling volumes and piled mountains of light . . . the purple sunset blazoned with gold . . . the translucent amber’17 – seemed to him a manifestation of divine presence in the world. He sought out those moments – the flushed dawns and glowing twilights – in which he sensed its special benediction. He tried to capture the mysterious transformative effects of the night. The moon was, to him, the planet of poetry. Inside the covers of his pocket Milton he made a list of every lunar reference and, in the series of small Shoreham monochromes which he called his ‘blacks’ or ‘moonshines’, he picked out its silvery shining as it sprinkled the landscape with ethereal brightness, glimmering like fish-scales upon winding streams. In these little dark paintings, shadow becomes far more than a mere absence of light. It becomes a soft, breathing presence that transforms the world’s mundane mass.

  ‘I overspend that time in talking which should find me doing,’18 Palmer wrote in 1828. ‘Every day convinces me
with wise and good Dr Johnson that this life is a state in which “much is to be done and little is to be known”,’ he told Richmond in a fit of industrious fervour. ‘What is done at leisure is done wrong and whatever is done best, is done when there is hardly time given to do it in.’19 Throughout his Kentish sojourn, Palmer applied himself to his work in sudden vigorous bouts. ‘Talk of putting thistles under donkeys’ tails to make them go!’20 Determined to conquer the constitutional indolence of the daydreamer, he learnt always (as he would later tell anyone who would listen) to tackle any job that he felt disinclined to do first. He could be stubbornly persistent. In winter, huddled up in his cloak against the cold, he would work at a drawing until his finger bones ached. In summer, he would haul his artist’s equipment uphill under a broiling sun. Often he would stay up drawing long into the night, sitting alone at his table, working up sketches by candlelight or later, when money ran short, eking out the single penny dip that he allowed himself daily for as long as he could.

  He worked in a wide range of materials, using anything from the rough, thick papers produced in the local mill, to smooth, commercially prepared boards. Occasionally he would paint on a wooden panel and at one point he asked Richmond to bring him some slivers of polished ivory. It would seem that, following the lead of both Linnell and Richmond who briefly during the 1820s restored the art of the portrait miniature to a delicacy it had not enjoyed since the Elizabethan era, he was planning also to turn his hand to such dainty pieces but, if he did ever paint any miniatures, they have never been traced. For sketching, Palmer liked a strong grey-brown paper with a well-sized finish so that watercolour washes would not soak in too deeply, though for more detailed work he preferred a glazed pasteboard (called Bristol board) made of high-quality woven paper with a smooth surface.

  Technically, Palmer was at his most experimental during his Shoreham period. Blake was his role model in this as in so much else. Preferring the precision of medieval painting to the blurry fluidity of the oils which had been prevalent since the high Renaissance, the old visionary had consulted Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte, the famous ‘how to’ manual of the fifteenth-century craftsmen. He was looking to revive outmoded dry fresco techniques in which designs, mapped out on a rigid surface, were coloured with tempera – a fast-drying mix of pure pigment bound into a viscous emulsion with some water-soluble substance, usually egg yolk, but often glue or gum. This medium, drying in hard, translucent films, kept the crispness of outline and clarity of colour that Blake most admired. Linnell too was an inveterate meddler. As students, he and Cornelius Varley had indulged in a variety of experiments, eager to ascertain just how far a painter’s materials could be pushed. Most commonly, an artist would thin heavy oil pigments with turpentine or linseed, but Cornelius tried adding gum copal to the mix, a natural resin which, though it would not evaporate as quickly as turpentine, added body to the colour and a heightened gloss. Linnell, who had witnessed the experiment, was later to put it to practical use. By the late 1840s, with characteristic self-sufficiency, he had all but stopped buying commercially produced colours and, building two iron furnaces at the bottom of his garden, was producing pigments and varnishes himself.

  Palmer, too, persisted in testing new approaches and materials: abandoning precisely rendered details for a bolder handling, trying out richer colours and a more vigorous line, letting realism melt away into an atmospheric sense of mood. Sometimes he would build up thick areas of underpaint; often he would ink in dark outlines at the end; occasionally he would add pigments in big, bright, unmodulated blobs; more frequently he would mix them with other colours, keeping the density but playing down the glare. Sometimes paintings which had begun as water-based temperas ended up as oils. Palmer would stick the sheets of paper onto wood panels and continue to work, applying his pigment in thicker and thicker layers, adding more and more glue, mixing in dollops of ultra-glossy cherry gum and then adding sugar to try to bind it all together. Often his experiments led to unforeseen consequences. The Ancients particularly enjoyed telling the story of the time that he had manufactured an egg-yolk emulsion which, poured into a tightly stoppered bottle, he had deposited in one of his pockets in the hope that his constant movements would mix it up well. Not for the first or last time, however, something had got lost in the capacious compartments of his coat. The concoction was completely forgotten. The coat was worn daily until suddenly one afternoon as a detachment of Ancients was strolling through London, their senses were assaulted by an explosion so loud and a stench so unspeakably foul that all bar one of them were completely befuddled. Fortunately, this one (most likely Calvert, the most practical among them) had the presence of mind to pull out his knife and, ripping Palmer’s pocket from its lining, hurl it complete with its sulphurous contents away into the gutter. The Ancients moved hastily off, but when they looked back they saw an old-clothes dealer darting to recover the discarded item who, no sooner had he grasped it, than he flung it away with such a dramatic gesture of disgust that they could never recall the event without laughing.

  Other experiments, however, caused less amusing problems. The addition of too much gum would lead in time to cracking and Palmer, trying to achieve ever glossier effects to capture quite literally the glowing spirit of divinity, used a serious excess in his later tempera pictures. The thickly embossed surfaces of some of his finest paintings have deteriorated severely with time.

  Palmer worked away ‘with the patience of an ox’.21 Year after year he submitted his annual quota of eight pictures to the Royal Academy. He was attentive to every detail of their making, from the first preparation of the surfaces down to the frames which Linnell’s father would construct for him. Palmer may have chosen a life of eccentric seclusion, but he wanted professional recognition. And yet his early successes proved hard to follow. In 1825 he attracted the attention of the critics with two intensely bright landscapes. They possessed ‘a clear and brilliant light and a vivid style of colouring which it would be vain for any other artist to hope to equal’, declared the popular weekly periodical John Bull. It recommended visitors ‘to seek out these gems’.22 But to another journalist, the very same works seemed less eccentrically commendable than downright peculiar. ‘There are two pictures by a Mr Palmer so amazing that we feel the most intense curiosity to see what manner of man it was who produced such performances,’ the European Magazine mocked. ‘We think if he would show himself with a label round his neck “The Painter of a View in Kent” he would make something of it at a shilling a head.’23

  The next year an understated monochrome was not even noticed. In 1827 and 1828 all of Palmer’s submissions were turned down. In 1829 two drawings were accepted, although even the artist found the committee’s choice of his brawny Ruth striding home from the gleaning fields unaccountable. It was shown in the Antique Gallery where the hang was so bad that, in the opinion of one reviewer, the pictures might as well have been turned with their faces to the wall. In 1830 and 1831 Palmer again had no success and even though in 1832 seven of his eight submissions were selected they were consigned once again to the Antique Gallery, likened by the same reviewer to ‘purgatory, if not a worse place’.24

  The young painter returned the next year to submitting oil paintings, among them a rich autumnal depiction of gleaners at eventide and a picture of bustling harvesters amid profusions of glowing corn. The moon hangs low as a lantern in the surrounding elm trees; stars shine like spotlights from a transparent sky. Both panels were hung in the Great Room where the majority of visitors would have had a chance to view them, but, put into competition with Turner’s first oil painting of Venice and his view of a storm-swept Seine, the little rural landscapes were all but overlooked. In 1834 a reviewer for the Athenaeum mourned the lack of ‘that rare quality, imagination’25 amid the general mass of domestic landscapes. But Palmer was growing disheartened by this time. He had chosen a tangled and long disused path and he was beginning to despair of it ever being opened again.

&nb
sp; The viewer has to look back with modern eyes to understand the greatest painterly achievement of Palmer. The finest – and now most famous – of the works that he did while in Shoreham were paintings that he never in his lifetime showed. He kept them hidden away in the folder of his ‘Curiosity Portfolio’.

  ‘There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion,’ Francis Bacon had said. It was one of Palmer’s favourite quotes. ‘I believe in my very heart,’ he told Richmond in 1834, ‘that all the very finest original pictures . . . have a certain quaintness by which they partly affect us – not the quaintness of bungling – the queer doing of a common thought – but a curiousness in their beauty – a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them while the sublime eagles and the big birds of the French academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections.’26 It is this strange beauty that may be discovered in his late Shoreham works. His In a Shoreham Garden and his Magic Apple Tree are works of mad splendour. Nature runs riot. Close observation combines with abstracted daring to capture and celebrate the exuberant fecundity of the world.