These gatherings would go on late into the night as the Ancients shared reminiscences about their Shoreham days, sipping drinks in between pinches from their snuff boxes. Finch would play the piano or Palmer his fiddle, while the rest would gather around to sing until at last, weaving a little, they would wend their way homewards, gazing up nostalgically at the stars and recalling the times they had wandered through the velvet Shoreham nights. ‘We seem individually to be the odd volumes, and when together we form the complete set,’31 Finch remarked.
And yet, for all that each of them dearly valued the company of his fellows, as artists their courses were diverging. Richmond was socialising doggedly to consolidate his portraitist’s career. He was a charming addition to any polite gathering, not least when his attentive wife Julia was beside him, and although like Palmer he was a terrible hypochondriac – his diaries are peppered with records of indispositions and sniffles, cancelled appointments and suspended sittings – he still managed to complete several dozen portraits a year. He was never to be persuaded from his course again and though he was later to enjoy a friendship with John Ruskin who, for a brief while took quite an interest in the Ancients’ lost dream, when Ruskin tried to lure him away from the comforts of commerce – ‘Give my love to George Richmond,’ he wrote in a letter from Italy, ‘and ask him what the d he means by living in a fine house . . . painting English red-nosed puppets with black shoes and blue sashes when he ought to be over here living on grapes and copying everything properly’ – Richmond was not to be convinced.
Richmond does not belong in the first rank of portraitists, but what his pictures lack in psychological acuity, they make up for with careful observation. He had a sharp eye. Once, spotting some frescos in a blacksmith’s shop, he popped in to buy them, only discovering later that they came from Ovid’s family tomb; while a small crayon sketch that he did of Charlotte Brontë captured her so vividly that she burst into tears when she saw it for it reminded her so nearly of her recently deceased sister Anne. It is now seen as the definitive image of the author.
Richmond must often have missed his more carefree Shoreham days. In 1845 he took a holiday in Kent with his family, revisiting many of the Ancients’ favourite haunts. But he remained contentedly living in London, a good but strict father to a growing family who, for all that he would deliver many sound thrashings, remembered him with as much affection as respect. Many years later his eldest son Willie would tell the story of how, as a child, he had sneaked off to the zoo without telling his parents. It had been a Sunday and so, to punish him, his father had given him the biblical text of the day to read. It was a passage in which St Peter compares the devil to a lion. Willie, summoned before his father to be tested, had started to repeat the story but when it came to the part about the leonine devil he had piped up: ‘Papa, I have seen him today.’ Richmond, unable to maintain his stern façade any longer, burst into laughter and his happy son was let off the hook. Richmond remained all his life a loyal supporter of Palmer. ‘Among the many mercies of my now long life,’ he later wrote, ‘the friendship of Samuel Palmer was to my poor seeming . . . one of the greatest things that ever were given to me.’32 Palmer valued him equally in return. ‘You are fixed in my heart and it would want a very rough jerk to tumble you out,’33 he declared.
Calvert, with his independent means, could have continued clearing the tangles from the Ancients’ archaic track. The spirited woodcuts that he made during Shoreham days are still considered his liveliest and most inspirational works. But the boldness of Calvert’s vision soon faded, along with its pervasive erotic energy, as increasingly he succumbed to the mores of Victorian society. He built a studio in his garden and retiring through a secret door behind a bookcase to this refuge would while away long hours, formulating complicated colour theories or rearranging his extensive library of classical texts, withdrawing further and further from the dreams of his fellows.
Finch pursued his painting career quietly for the rest of his life. He had a modest reserve which served him well in the society circles into which he ventured after being commissioned to paint views of Lord Northwick’s mansion. He was a kind and sensitive companion. ‘Whether grave or gay, he was always equal to the occasion endeavouring to understand and adapt himself to the feelings of those present,’ it was later recorded; ‘where dancing was the order of the evening, he seldom sought, as partners, the most attractive of the fair ones within his reach, but rather those whom others of his own sex might feel disposed to pass over.’34 In 1837 he married Eliza, a fellow singer whom he had met through the Hatton Garden church choir, and from then on, undiscouraged by neglect or diverted by fashion, he continued to supply the annual exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society with a steady quota of poetic landscapes which, as one critic noted in 1835, never varied from year to year. Yet why should they when they were perfect of their kind, this critic asked? Finch supplemented his income by teaching and became a lecturer in later years. ‘Art, like a mountain, must rise from a broad base of general knowledge and acute observation, but it rises heavenward and should ever culminate in the “beauty of holiness”,’35 he informed his students. He believed that he could disprove atheism by logic. Blake, who detested such rationality, would no doubt have found matter for argument but by then Finch had lost faith with the ideals of this mentor. ‘He was not mad,’ he would tell Blake’s biographer, ‘but perverse and wilful; he reasoned correctly from arbitrary and often false premises.’36 The lives of the Finches and the Palmers diverged, yet Palmer was always to remember this calm, kindly creature with affection and respect.
Henry Walter had never really subscribed to the ideals of the Ancients, though his watercolour caricatures provide lively mementos of the group. Relatively little is recorded of his life after Shoreham except that he got married and moved to Torquay. Returning to the village one day with his wife, he didn’t pause to chat as formerly with the simpleton who liked to loiter on the bridge. ‘He had a woman with him,’ the mournful fellow sobbed.
The Tathams, too, went their own ways. As a movement the Ancients had manifestly failed. They had attracted no followers, found no patrons, received no critical acclaim or provoked much new thought. In fact, about the only published response to their project had been an expression of mild bemusement. They may not have been remembered by posterity at all had it not been for the rise of the Pre-Raphaelites later in the century. This band of brothers, with the help of Ruskin as a patron, would revive British interest in a medieval aesthetic and rediscover the until-then-forgotten figure of Blake. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter at the heart of this group, who encouraged Alexander Gilchrist to embark on a biography of the great visionary, thus providing the Ancients with an opportunity to recount their own part in his tale. But by the time this biography was published the erstwhile Ancients had all but abandoned their Shoreham beliefs. ‘We all wanted thumping when we thought in a dream of idealism that we were learning art,’37 declared Richmond. Palmer was more nostalgic. As a young man he had annotated his copy of Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste with high-minded comments. Years later he added a far sadder note: ‘I knew the positive and eccentric young man who wrote the notes in these pages,’ he penned. ‘He believed in art (however foolishly); he believed in men (as he read them in books). He spent years in hard study and reading and wished to do good with his knowledge . . . He has now lived to find out his mistake.’38
By the end of 1836, Palmer’s father was also growing restless. Finding his gentlemanly existence increasingly unsatisfactory, he wanted to open an educational establishment in which he would be able to employ the now penurious William and, in January 1837, he signed a document agreeing for the annual sum of £30 to take premises in Speldhurst Street. For a further £18, he purchased the goodwill, the desks, forms and academy boards of a school. Palmer, concurring with an irate uncle Nathanial, thought it a ‘ruinous step’.39 To add to their worries Palmer’s father once more pr
ofessed a desire to remarry. ‘O! for a wife – the joy of my life,’ he would sing, taunting his domineering brother who immediately threatened to withdraw all financial support. A spat ensued which Palmer, with effusive professions of gratitude to his uncle, tried desperately to soothe. Like most of his father’s ‘sudden fancies’, this one too, if left alone, would ‘die a natural death’, he suggested.40 He was proved right. Before a year had passed the school had been abandoned, the second marriage had not materialised, and Palmer’s father and Nathanial had been reconciled. But if once the father had been the provider of a home for the son, from now on it was the child who was going to have to take care of his parent.
Then, on 18 January 1837 – the nineteenth anniversary of Palmer’s mother’s death – Mary Ward died. For more than thirty years she had been a constant presence in Sam’s life, accompanying the family wherever they moved, cooking and keeping house, mending clothes and admiring pictures. Palmer had used to play the piano to her in the evenings while she listened attentively through her battered ear-trumpet. Now, she was gone. Kissing her on her cold shrunken cheek, Palmer cut a lock of her hair and wrapped it in a slip of paper. He would keep it along with the treasured edition of Milton that she bequeathed him on her deathbed and a few other mementoes, including a pair of spectacles. Her loss was a final break with his youth.
16
Honeymoon in Italy
You are going to tread a holy ground, where
St Peter and St Paul have walked
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
On Saturday 30 September 1837, after a courtship that had lasted for more than four years, Palmer finally married Hannah Linnell. She was nineteen and he was thirty-two when they signed their names in the register. And though Palmer would have liked to have professed his vows in church, in taking the hand of Hannah he was also taking her father ever more nearly into his life and Linnell, who, when he had married twenty years earlier had been prepared to travel as far as Scotland to avoid the priest, had insisted on a civil ceremony. The young couple, under a law which had only two months earlier come into effect, were conjoined in a ceremony solemnised by a registrar. ‘S. P. was married at the Courthouse, Marylebone’, noted Palmer several years later in his commonplace book: and ‘he, a churchman!’1
For their honeymoon, the young couple planned to join the throngs of British travellers who, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, had returned to traipsing the Grand Tour trail. They would visit Italy. For Palmer it would be the fulfilment of a long-held desire. ‘You are going to tread a holy ground, where St Peter and St Paul have walked before you,’2 he had written to Richmond almost a decade earlier when his friend had first visited this land of artistic wonders. He had long dreamt of the luminous vistas of Claudean pastorals, of Donatello’s divinities and Michelangelo’s giants; he had imagined the heavenly music that would be played in churches, the medieval reverence of the peasants who prayed. Now he and Hannah were to join Richmond, his heavily pregnant wife Julia and their four-year-old son Thomas Knyvett (the sole survivor of the four children to whom she had so far given birth) on a voyage for which they all held great expectations, but none higher than Palmer’s. Reputations could be made overseas. ‘I hope to produce much saleable matter – and to make the “pot boil” with fuel “kindled at the muses’ flame”,’3 he declared. Richmond, quick to reciprocate the favour that Palmer had done him upon his own marriage, lent his friend £139 for the journey. A contract was drawn up, setting the interest at 3.5 per cent, though specifically stating that the money should never be demanded back at a time when its borrower would be inconvenienced.
Money, however, was not the couple’s main problem. Hannah’s mother presented a far less easily surmountable obstacle to their plans. A woman who could discover multifarious dangers in even the most ordinary course of London life, regarded the Italian venture as a dice with death in a land of perilous fevers and volcanic catastrophes, ferocious bandits and predatory priests and, perhaps worst of all, indigestible foodstuffs. For a while it had seemed as if Palmer would be travelling alone. It took all the persuasive tact of a conciliating Julia and all the logical pressure of a reasonable Linnell, to coax the neurotic matriarch into changing her mind. To prevent any last-minute backpedalling she was made to put her name to a written declaration of assent. Meanwhile Linnell, although initially he too had had his reservations, commissioned his daughter to paint a series of small-scale copies of the Raphael frescoes in the Vatican, as well as to colour a set of prints he had made after Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. These tasks would provide her, he thought, with a project to occupy her as well as a source of much-needed income for he had given his daughter no dowry and she would be embarking for Italy with barely £10 in her purse.
In the weeks before leaving, Palmer set busily about his preparations: painting materials were gathered, packing attended to with militaristic rigour, a pistol complete with ammunition purchased (it was confiscated by the French authorities even before they got to Paris) and some ‘curious modifications’4 introduced to his bachelor wardrobe. Though these were not specifically described, they would no doubt have involved increased pocket capacity for, several months into his journey, remembering that he had not returned a borrowed book, Palmer wrote and asked his father to do so only to discover the said volume several weeks later bumping around at the bottom of his coat.
Palmer intended to make money by letting out his Grove Street house and, until such time as a tenant could be found, he left his brother to live there and take care of it with the help of his wife. It had seemed a convenient arrangement at the time. The feckless William had at last secured a job and was working as an assistant keeper at the British Museum.
Four days after the wedding, the Linnells and their children – Lizzy, Johnny, Jemmy, Willy, Mary, Sarah, Polly and Sally – gathered in their front garden to wave Palmer and their eldest sister Anny off.
Having enjoyed a smooth crossing by paddle steamer from Dover, the travellers arrived in Calais, the foreign cries of the French sailors echoing all about them as they dragged the boat shorewards, earrings winking in the light. It was here that Palmer paid his first visit to a Roman Catholic church (though, unsurprisingly, he did not tell Linnell); its richly furnished chapels and ‘picturesque poor people . . . kneeling about the doors’,5 delighted his visitor’s eye quite as much as the old-fashioned markets with their gay rustic costumes and profusions of bright fruit. From Calais, the Richmonds and Palmers shared a bumpy diligence to Paris, only getting out twice on the way for a quick stretch of the legs. Despite a few passages of ‘pretty tolerable’ scenery, the villages were mostly ‘desolate and deserted . . . with not a gleam of cottage comfort . . . and instead of ruddy ploughmen, ragged, sallow, blue-coated monsieurs’, the firmly anti-Republican Palmer recorded. The whole country, he observed, looked as if it had been ‘purged, not purified’ by its violent history.6
In the past, Palmer had referred to Paris as ‘that metropolis of Apes’.7 But now, passing a few days there, he spent every hour he could spare from wrangling with French officials over problems with their papers, admiring the antique statuary in the Louvre where, though three-quarters of the paintings he dismissed as ‘of little interest’,8 Veronese’s massive canvas The Wedding at Cana seized his eye. It would be worth travelling to Paris to see this one extraordinary picture alone, he concluded, though it was but the first of many pictures which he would complain could hardly be seen because they were hung in such gloom.
Leaving Paris, the two couples headed south-eastwards for the Swiss frontier; rattling along from five in the morning until six at night with only a brief stop for lunch they made their way upwards into the mountains, through steepening valleys and past plunging waterfalls, by cream-coloured oxen and tumbrels of purple grapes, before winding down into Lausanne and on round its lake. They were delighted by the precipitous drama of the Alpine landscape, which, as Hannah informed her parents with somewhat unwise relish, was scatte
red with crosses to mark the places where previous travellers had been killed. They crossed into Italy by darkness over the perilous Simplon Pass. From the balcony of a flower-trellised inn above Lake Maggiore, the honeymooners watched their first dawn breaking over Italy. Beyond them stretched the landscapes of the Romantic imagination. They were setting out together into their new life.
While the horses were rested for three days in Milan, the travellers went sightseeing. They were entranced by the cathedral’s poetic gloom: ‘a wonder of holy, Gothic’, declared Palmer: ‘its dim religious light gilds the very recesses of the soul’.9 He admired a few drawings in the city library but was appalled by Leonardo’s Last Supper which, hanging in ‘the most dismal hall I ever saw’, looked like ‘a complete wreck’.10 Then, leaving Milan, they headed south on an ever-more-glorious route which took them via Bologna, where they wandered through moonlit arcades, across Apennine landscapes and on down to Florence. ‘Quaint, antique, stately, and gorgeous, and full of the gems of those divine and divinely inspired arts,’11 this city with its dusky semi-barbarous cathedral, its sumptuous baptistery, its turreted palace and colossal statues seemed to Palmer like some old-fashioned yet richly wrought cabinet, containing in its caskets and curious recesses specimens of all that is sublime. But Rome, that ‘wilderness of wonders’,12 was their ultimate destination. It was mid-November 1837 when the companion couples arrived and started sorting out lodgings for the duration of the winter.
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