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The End of the Dream
Pinched by a most unpoetical and unpastoral kind of poverty
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
‘If my aspirations are very high, my depressions are very deep,’1 Palmer told Richmond in 1828. Though Shoreham was the place where he felt most ecstatic, it was also the setting of his most anguished despairs: ‘Great hopes mount high above the shelter of the probable . . . know many a disastrous cross wind and cloud; and are sometimes dazzled and overwhelmed as they approach the sun; sometimes vext and baffled, they beat about under a swooping pall of confounding darkness; and sometimes struggle in the meshes, or grope under the doleful wings of temptation or despair’.2 He learnt to accept, even welcome, these abrupt mood swings. ‘My pinions never loved the middle air,’3 he wrote. ‘Better to cry and shriek and howl every morning and get a cosey oily hour out of the night, than to mix up joy and grief in the mortar of moderation till they neutralise and to smear the nasty mixture over the day.’4 And yet, he would find himself increasingly suffering ‘jaded halts of intellect’, floundering through terrifying ‘eclipses of thought’: a ‘living inhumement . . . equal to the dread throes of suffocation, turning this valley of vision into a fen of scorpions and stripes and agonies’.5
Such vividly felt despairs were not helped by his financial situation. By 1828 he was already overspending his budget and, by the early 1830s, struggling to live on the few shillings that his cottage rentals brought in, he cut back his expenditure to five shillings and two pence a week. An inability to pay for materials was beginning to curtail his ambitions. He feared he would have to hire frames for the Royal Academy exhibition. ‘It is a very trying situation in which I am at present placed,’6 he complained. If once he had dismissed financial worries as ‘terrific phantoms’,7 he now reconsidered such glib pronouncements. ‘Really a handsome income and personal influence do enable a man by his savings and his authority in society to do a very great deal for those two great interests . . . the Poor and the Church,’ he informed Richmond. ‘I do not think,’ he continued, ‘that Christianity is meant to damp the spirit of enterprise or the desire of success.’8
Palmer was only too aware of the professional gap that was widening between Richmond and himself, for his friend, while still enjoying the occasional Shoreham foray, was by then established as a society portraitist who could count William Wilberforce, Lord Sidmouth and the Bishop of Chester among his sitters. The young man who had once had to record every frugal expense, from the purchase of a gaiter strap to the repair of a shoe, would soon be earning £1,000 a year. ‘As you are now become a great man I will address you on a sheet of my best writing paper not gilt edged and delicate like yours but rather too extravagant for me,’9 Palmer began a letter to Richmond in October 1834. ‘I am in solitude and poverty,’ he lamented. If he could ‘but get a twenty-guinea commission even if it were to take a view of Mr Stratton’s conventicler or to draw the anatomy of a pair of stays,’ he wrote, he should be ‘as happy as the day is long’.10 He ended up accepting a commission to clean a picture by the historical painter John Opie to make financial ends meet.
Prospects did not improve. ‘Poetic vapours have subsided and the sad realities of life blot the field of vision,’ he wrote in August 1835. ‘O miserable poverty! How it wipes off the bloom from everything around me,’11 he mourned as he touched Richmond for a loan of £3. His friend was quick to oblige. ‘How sad to think that at 30 my dearest friend should be struggling to earn a few pounds a year unsuccessfully,’ he scribbled on the margin of the letter he received. But if he pitied Palmer, it could hardly have been more than Palmer pitied himself. ‘I am all in the dumps . . . and feel as if I alone of all mankind were fated to get no bread by the sweat of my brow . . . If you’ve a mangy cat to drown christen it “Palmer”,’12 he wailed. Financial matters had finally come to a head. The unworldly dreamer had to earn a living. He now determined to take any teaching job he could find and, until such time as he began to earn that wage, he would have to sell his pianoforte and a few of his beloved books. The prayer that had once seemed enough to support him felt no longer sufficient: ‘Is daily bread promised to those who overspend their income?’13 he asked.
Loneliness also began to weigh on Palmer’s spirits. His once-treasured isolation had now come to feel more like abandonment. ‘You shall see my body as soon as I come to town,’ he wrote to Richmond in 1834, having given up hope of Richmond coming to him; ‘but as to my poor mind I have been vegetating so long in solitude that I hardly know whether I’ve any left.’14 Linnell seldom visited Shoreham by this stage. He had settled in his new house; his health had improved; he was travelling the country executing portrait commissions and selling engravings of his most successful works. The Ancients were drifting apart. Richmond was caught up with his burgeoning career and his family. Calvert and Finch remained mostly in London. Arthur Tatham was ordained and John Giles was kept busily employed as a stockbroker. Only Sherman and Walter, the least committed members of the group, were free to come and stay. Meanwhile, Palmer’s father was preoccupied with his son, William, who, having decided that he did not like the life of a sculptor had taken up engraving instead, only to find that that did not much suit him either. Soon he was to cause the family even graver concerns.
Welby Sherman was a suspect character and, as early as 1828, Palmer was begging for help on his behalf. He had got into a ‘most critical situation’,15 he wrote, which, though the nature of the problem was never specified, most likely had something to do with having borrowed money which he couldn’t repay. Palmer tried repeatedly to put things right, allowing Sherman to make an engraving – a mezzotint, Evening – after one of his own pictures, trying to find him a market for his prints and begging Richmond to give him some encouragement. If Sherman could not find a way of making more than the piecemeal living he threatened to give up on art and go to sea, Palmer explained. In Richmond’s opinion, this would have been the best thing for him: ‘Mr Walter has gone to his nest,/ Mr Tatham is now in Edgeware,/ While Sherman in Hackney doth rest/ And Hackney’d he is I dare swear’. The loyal Palmer, however, was more sympathetic and continued to trust in Sherman’s talent until finally this so-called friend let his true colours be seen. Having relieved William Palmer of a large sum of money, he fled with his ill-gotten gains to France. John Giles explained the whole sad story in a letter of 1836. A series of bets had been laid upon billiard games in which Sherman, winning again and again, had eventually managed to secure some £500, none of which could be recovered. Giles and Richmond, with typical solicitude, were the first to go and see what they could do to help William who, by then married and expecting a child, had been left all but destitute. The whole affair must have been a terrible shock to the ingenuous Palmer. How wryly he would have looked back on sentiments expressed just a few years before when, firmly believing that the Lord would provide, he had written: ‘Mr Sherman will not suffer the devil to make him doubt and waver and falter any more about money for if there were no other right way of getting it we should find it dropp’d for us in the street.’16
By the 1830s, Palmer’s rural dreams were fading fast. When in 1832 he was left another bequest he invested part of it in two cottages in Shoreham and with the rest purchased a house in London. Number 4, Grove Street, was a substantial ten-room building in what was then still viewed as a respectable spot, though its reputation was already on the decline. It was conveniently close to the homes of Palmer’s friends: Frederick Tatham lived round the corner in Lisson Grove North and Calvert and Richmond were both to be found a brief walk away in Park Place, Paddington and Beaumont Street, New Road, St Marylebone respectively. The Ancients, even in urban exile, could meet once a month. And, just as importantly, Palmer was only a pleasant evening stroll from the home of Linnell and his family in Porchester Terrace.
Palmer had bought this new house as a teaching base. He found pupils without much trouble, for watercolour sketching was considered
as much a part of a genteel education as reading or writing or playing the pianoforte, and by the early 1830s he had begun to travel back and forth frequently between the capital and Kent. But, even as he was encouraging his amateur clients, he was losing faith in himself. Analysing his work with a ruthless eye he discovered many faults and mercilessly listed them: ‘Feebleness of first conception . . . consequent timidity of execution. No rich, flat body of local colours as a ground. No first-conceived foreground or figures,’17 he recorded in a notebook. He was ready to clip the wings of his vision for the sake of public recognition. He wanted, he wrote in the autumn of 1834, ‘as soon as possible to struggle up into repute’.18 When, in 1835, Linnell set about touching up one of his paintings prior to its exhibition, Palmer acceded, allowing – not for the last time – his mentor to make such thorough adaptations that when many years later the work, for a period lost, came once more to light they accepted it to have been a joint effort whereupon Linnell began busily to meddle with it again.
Palmer’s criticisms of his own pieces were unduly harsh, but as far as he was concerned such severity prepared the ground for the changes that he knew he had to make. By the mid-1830s he was in the mood to begin again. He engaged in endless elaborate experiments with materials and pigments. ‘My cranium is stuffed with gallipots and varnishes,’19 he wrote. It was around this time too that he began painting in oil out of doors. Inspired by a picture of Watermouth Bay which he had spotted in a shop window, he set off for Devon on the first of a series of sketching expeditions to the West Country and Wales. He intended to search out the sort of dramatic views – the craggy mountains and gushing waterfalls, the crumbling ruins and soaring cliffs – which Girtin and Turner had made so popular and which, at that time, could be sold for considerable sums.
Striding along Devon’s windblown coastlines, Palmer must have felt an awfully long way from his fertile Kentish valleys, from the huddled farmsteads and fruitful orchards of his familiar Shoreham views. Occasionally, to look at one of his West Country sketches, at some hulking promontory or deep plunging combe, is to sense the excitement of new discovery, to feel an infusion of energy as fresh as a lungful of blustery sea air. The following summer, 1835, he set off again, this time in the company of first Calvert and then Walter to Wales where they followed the course of the stream of fashionable watercolourists who would lug their easels along a well-worn route from the northern wilds of Snowdonia to the gentler Wye Valley in the south. Palmer was in search of ‘Ossian sublimities’,20 but the trip was not the success he had hoped. The weather was too good. He saw too little ‘of McPherson’s mist and vapour’;21 Romantic topographers needed atmospheric vapours and thundery vistas, glimpses of distant peaks through chasms of rolling cloud. But the deeper problem for Palmer was that he would never truly share the topographer’s commercial tastes. He would happily have swapped all Snowdon’s precipitous dramas for the peaceful nook of Tintern Abbey. ‘Such an Abbey!’ he wrote: ‘the lightest Gothic – trellised with ivy and rising from a wilderness of orchards – and set like a gem amongst the folding of woody hills.’22
Palmer returned home broke. He had to ask Richmond to send money to pay his fare home. Had he known in advance how much he would spend, his muse would have ‘donkeyfied’ upon thistles upon Hampstead Heath with a log round her leg, he complained, referring to the way in which grazing equines were hobbled to prevent them from straying. Worse, he discovered that his sketches were useless: despite careful annotations and passages of focused detail, they were too undeveloped and, back in the studio, could not be worked up into saleable views.
Undeterred, Palmer returned to Wales the next summer, this time with Calvert as his companion. It was, once again, a hard-working, low-budget trip. ‘I am walked and scorched to death,’ he informed the Richmonds; he lived on ‘eggs and horny ham’,23 and did without shirts and socks, but his enthusiasm was undimmed. This was the trip, he hoped, which would lead to improved prospects, help him to make some useful connections and, even more importantly, lay the foundations of ‘solid attainments’.24 He did meet one potentially valuable acquaintance. He encountered the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson, who, taken by Palmer’s ‘eye of deep feeling and very capacious forehead’25 invited him on a daytrip to some nearby falls. The outing, for both of them, must have been pleasurable. Perching on rocky outcrops that projected high above the torrent, they might have discussed Goethe, with whom Crabb Robinson was acquainted, or talked of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge or gossiped about their mutual acquaintance, Blake. Later (though the whereabouts of the picture is no longer known) Robinson purchased the scene that Palmer had sketched as a souvenir of the day.
In a letter to Richmond, Palmer told the story of his meeting with a beautiful Welsh child in a dell. She had a beetle tethered on the end of a thread and offered to sell it to Palmer, assuming that he would then kill it. Collections of pinned insects were popular at that time. Palmer handed over his money but, to the seller’s astonishment, he immediately let the iridescent creature go. It must have been an affectingly symbolic moment to Palmer who himself dreamt of such freedom. He was certainly working determinedly to attain it and spent his tour diligently visiting all the requisite beauty spots including the falls of Betws-y-Coed which, by the middle of the century, had become one of Britain’s most frequented artists’ roosts. Flocks of daubers would descend daily with their sketchbooks, huddling like birds on the surrounding rocks.
But what could Palmer add? He worked studiously, filling his sketchbooks with pictures, cramming their margins with notes: scribbled records of colours and shadows and textures, reminders of details that he did not have time to draw. He wanted to convey the atmosphere of the moment; to distil a mood as much as offer a description. Sometimes he would achieve his aim, capturing the wind as it bustled about among bushes or the flicker of light as it glanced over a pool. And yet Wales was already a cliché. All he could contribute was a minor footnote. If he continued simply multiplying pictures in the Welsh manner he would be miserable, he concluded. As for his connections, Robinson had turned out to have a journalist’s fickle attention span and, just as he had eventually come to find Blake fairly tiresome, he also lost interest in the ardent little enthusiast with whom he had once passed such an entertaining day. Palmer’s paintings at this time are only interesting in so far as they record his changing ambitions as, moving away from the Gothic, he nurtured a more conventional, classically inclined taste. The artist who had once described colour as a ‘sugared spoon’ to persuade the reluctant ‘to swallow the ideal or severe’,26 now turned his talents to garish topographies inspired by the palette of Titian, whose voluptuous Ariadne he had recently taken a steamboat trip to Plymouth to see, investing a precious five shillings on the fare. ‘Let everything be colour and not sullied by blackness,’ was his new resolve.27
This feels like an abrupt volte-face, but it was not an arbitrary decision. Palmer was intellectually caught up in a Greek versus Gothic debate which, at that moment, was once more being evaluated. The publication of Augustus Pugin’s Contrasts in 1836 was a landmark of the Gothic Revival. Classical architecture, Pugin posited, was quintessentially pagan and as such unsuited to speak of the values of a Christian society. Britain, he believed, should look back to the Gothic instead: to a style which had served a world of medieval faith. Palmer would have been in full-hearted concurrence had not Pugin, following his love of medieval religion through to its logical conclusion, converted to join the Roman Catholic faith. Soon Gothic architecture was widely associated with the inscrutable squabblings of the Oxford Movement and its convoluted arguments about ecclesiastical continuities. It put Palmer in a quandary. How could he, a staunch Anglican, now turn to its style as symbol of traditional values? The Gothic had turned into a piece of hotly contested ground. How could the Ancients still meet under its soaring arches? Palmer’s Shoreham aesthetic, a bit like Tintern Abbey, had been left in ruins: it looked best when glimpsed nostalgically from afar.
But then the meeting of the ‘blessed in council’ would break up and it would be time for tea drinking and chatting and stories. The graceful Mrs Richmond, their ‘fair Hebe’, would deal out bowl after bowl of the ‘oriental nectar’ (green tea) while the children would crowd in excitedly to admire the Ancients’ latest works. ‘How solemn and how beautiful those freshly painted pictures appeared to us,’ Calvert’s son remembered, ‘displayed in the light of candles . . . which were built up on books and pedestals in ecclesiastical fashion.’29 They would gaze in reverence. But there was also much laughter amid the discussion. Sometimes the wet paint on one of the pictures, despite careful measures, would get smudged: it would lead to ‘Turneresque subtleties’, Palmer liked to joke. He was one of the merriest for, although Calvert’s son commented on the amiability of Richmond, the modest reserve of Walter or Finch, the conscious twinkle in his father’s eye, it was ‘the oddity and humour of Palmer’ that struck him most pleasantly. He ‘interested and amused everybody’ he said, especially at supper when he would find that the goose was too savoury or that the beer had too much froth.30
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