Richmond did his utmost to help, introducing the couple to Joseph Severn, a pivotal figure in Roman society, and securing for Palmer a commission from John Baring to paint a panorama of Rome. But even the Richmonds’ young son could spot Palmer’s social failings. ‘Tommy sends his love . . . and says that you must not eat the backs of the sticks that we have for dinner,’ wrote Julia: ‘meaning that you began to eat the asparagus at the wrong end.’48 Palmer became increasingly troubled. ‘All who know us by sight, know us as nobody, and as creatures whom nobody knows,’ he lamented.49 How galling it must have been for him to meet a young artist who (in his opinion) could not draw and, even more unforgivably, had been heard dismissing Michelangelo’s Last Judgement as ‘a mass of rubbish’50 get two fifty-guinea commissions from the Russian ambassador and an introduction to the Duke of Sutherland. ‘There seems to be a great chasm between me and gentility,’ he mourned: ‘that gentility which I despise, but of which I should like to suck the sweetness.’51
Linnell was not worried. ‘I think it of far more consequence that you bring home plenty of fine studies rather than fine connections,’52 he reassured his son-in-law. But success remained elusive. Though Baring was interested in a pendant piece for his Roman panorama and Palmer spent weeks grappling with possible compositions, the banker employed another artist in the end. Nor did Hannah’s commission from her father go well. The colouring in of his Sistine engravings may have been anticipated as a pleasant enough pastime, but it turned out to be a strenuous, time-consuming, neck-cricking feat.
As Palmer’s time in Italy progressed his relationship with Linnell grew increasingly strained. Hannah’s parents missed their daughter. They worried about her health, especially when the country was struck by an outbreak of cholera, and although at first the young couple sent back constant reassurances – bowels are reported on, diets assiduously monitored and an account of sudden hair loss by Anny meticulously proffered along with the benefits of Veritable Moelle de Boeuf oil, the application of which brings back her curly auburn mop – no profusion of reassurances could ever be quite enough. Palmer entreated his mother-in-law with ever-growing exasperation to dismiss her excessive anxiety. She must get over her ‘dread of boats and drownings and moving accidents by flood or field’, he admonished; he felt provoked to intemperance by what he described as an ‘unjustifiable and distrustful anxiety’ which ‘embitters and falsifies’.53 ‘Your daughter is well and unhurt,’ he insisted towards the end of his trip ‘and has spent nearly two years acquiring intellectual and moral power, and experience which will . . . lead her safely through the mazes of life.’54
Linnell, though more sanguine than his spouse, was not much easier to deal with. His very first letter to his daughter reproached her for not writing sooner and suggested a strict routine whereby missives – which he would pay for – would be dispatched once a month. When this did not happen as planned he grew more insistent and blamed his son-in-law. ‘Why did not that Bartholomew Pig write?’ he demanded. ‘Was he so tired going halfway up the hill that he has not yet got over it?’55 he asked, alluding to the portly Palmer’s failure to climb a steep slope to the hill-top statue of Santo Carlo Borromeo.
The balance of an already unequal relationship had finally tipped. Palmer’s letters were increasingly stuffed with professions of gratitude, persistently proffered compliments and ingratiating requests for advice – should he draw entire scenes or only details; should he concentrate on foregrounds or backgrounds; should he draw figures on the spot or in the studio? – while his father-in-law ever more firmly took the upper hand. By the time the young couple had been away a year, Linnell was instructing them as to when they should don their warm stockings and flannel drawers. Where once he had had faith in Palmer’s artistic future – admiring his lack of compromise much as he had admired Blake’s, describing his own practice, in comparison, as an inferior ‘pettifogging’56 path in which success had been sacrificed for the sake of a family – over the course of the honeymoon he progressively lost confidence in the son-in-law for whom he had once fostered such hopes.
Religion, predictably, became a point of contention. Though Hannah went to some lengths to explain how much Roman Catholicism disgusted her – not least a ceremony in which two lambs were blessed and their skins used to make monks’ cowls – Linnell’s festering suspicions that Palmer harboured Romish tendencies eventually found expression. There was no disguising his tone of voice when Palmer anticipated the pleasure of paying family visits when they got back home. ‘It is all very nice what you say about home at Grove Street and your visits to Bayswater with only the wooden bridge to get over etc. – but it appears to me there is another Bridge which you have assisted in building and keeping in repair for some years and which is rather a barricade than a means of communication. I mean that Asses Bridge of Superstition built with nothing but the rubbish of human tradition – obscene, false and fraudulent.’57
Money turned into another source of friction. Palmer’s financial affairs were not running smoothly. Grove Street remained untenanted, in large part because the next-door house had been rented by a pair of prostitutes who advertised their services by throwing up the sashes and shouting out of the window. Palmer’s father had by then left, moving to Aylesbury to become the pastor of a congregation of only nine people, and leaving Palmer’s home to the improvident William to take care of. But William, having adopted a foundling from the workhouse, was using the Grove Street front parlour as a bedroom, which was hardly conducive to paying lodgers.
Palmer badly needed the money that the letting of Grove Street would bring. He politely but firmly pressed his brother for rent, but though William had plans to follow his father into the country and set up a school, for the time being he could not pay. He even hatched a shady plan to sell Palmer’s Shoreham cottages – a scheme to which Linnell, efficiently, put paid. Meanwhile a strange and never-quite-explained affair occurred whereby charges were brought against William for the barbarous treatment of his adopted daughter. The child was removed. The rumours were eventually proved unsubstantiated but by the time that William was asked to take the child back, his wife was expecting a baby of her own.
Without any rental income, any sales of his work in Rome exhibitions or any private commissions coming in, Palmer found himself falling into dire financial straits. ‘Pray tell me what you mean Samuel, by the gloomy picture you draw of your funds, tell me how much money you have spent?’58 Linnell asked him in June 1838. The news which Palmer sent back was not good; though Linnell laughed off his wife’s worries that their daughter was starving – Palmer would eat the geese from the Capitol before he starved, Linnell joked – matters grew more pressing. Palmer, for all his penny-pinching, bargaining and making-do, was barely able to manage and, reduced to delineating his expenditure in humiliating detail, he handed over all financial responsibility to his father-in-law who, in return for providing regular funds, took the fiscal control that he would keep for the rest of his life.
Linnell’s commission was also becoming a source of friction. A project that had initially been greeted as a ‘joyful business’59 was beset with problems, not least among them Hannah’s frail constitution. At first, walking across the city every morning to set herself up in the Sistine on a folding camp stool, she had enjoyed the feeling of being a professional artist, but after a while the long hours spent amid chill damp stone, craning up into the lofty gloom, scanning the ceiling with the help of small mirrors or squinting against the glare of the light, had started to take a toll on her eyesight and health. A job which – after Palmer’s long and timidly circumloquacious negotiations – would bring in only six shillings and nine pence per drawing was not worth so much effort. And yet Linnell was implacable. It had to be done, he insisted, and in the end Palmer (helped by Albin Martin, a pupil of Linnell’s who had been dispatched to join them as much as a parental spy as travelling companion) had to waste precious time that should have been devoted to his own portfolio, revising
and correcting every one of his wife’s works. By the time the Palmers finally left Rome after a second winter, he had spent more than a third of his stay completing what, in the long run, amounted to little more than a colouring book.
For much of his time in Italy, Palmer had found himself working feverishly against the clock. The honeymoon would have been far more fulfilling had he had the leisure to venture off the beaten track, to discover landscapes other than the tourist’s hackneyed spots. But there was no question of prolonging a sojourn which had already lasted so much longer than the year that had originally been planned. The Linnells were outraged when the idea was even mooted. And so, as the summer of 1839 progressed, the Palmers’ thoughts turned more and more to home. Hannah grew effusively excited at the prospect of seeing her family and though the thought of London’s ‘filthy smoke and black chimney pots’60 sickened Palmer, he was at the same time eager to begin proper work. ‘When I left England my mind was like a house full of furniture and utensils some good and some bad. I think the bad are now thrown out of the window and the good put into tolerable order so that I know pretty well what I want,’61 he wrote a few months before returning. ‘I long to leave study making,’ he added a while later. ‘I have had a glut of roaming.’62
By August 1839 the Palmers were on their long homeward trek. They would have taken a boat from Marseilles, but they dared not trust their precious cargo of pictures to a long sea voyage and so, by the end of October, they were trundling steadily northwards at the rate of thirty or forty miles a day. Hannah could not resist telling her mother one more bloodcurdling story, recounting in detail the crossing of rapids on the flooded River Po. Palmer was more concerned to make completely sure that his brother would not be in the house when he finally got back, but added a little pencil note to the end of a letter from Hannah. It is scribbled from the very top of Mount Cenis: ‘We have crossed the Alp and left Italy!! “Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwelleth. Hail railroads! hail!’63
News of Hannah’s return had sent her siblings capering like savages around the frosty London garden. They were thrilled when the Palmers at long last arrived back; when they saw the sister who had left them two years earlier now turned into a well-travelled woman who could speak Italian and had learnt to fire a pistol in an olive grove. But for Palmer the homecoming was tinged with sadness. He would never forget the contrast between the brilliant skies and the marble buildings of Italy and the filthy Thames warehouses that greeted him on his return. He was often to dream of one day returning. But he never did. Only sometimes, when the sunburnt Italian organ-grinders stopped outside his London house, Palmer would speak to them in their native language and, where most people considered them to be public menaces, he would pay them a shilling to go on playing for a while.
17
Back in England
Real life began
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
‘Real life began’, noted Palmer many years later, as he looked back at that moment in the autumn of 1839 when he and his wife had returned from their two-year honeymoon. They had been eager to embark on the next phase of their life, but Hannah’s parents had had other plans. They wanted their daughter to live with them at their home. She ‘must be ours again for a time’,1 Linnell insisted in a letter. He went into a sulk when his son-in-law took a rare stand. ‘I do not like the word “must”,’ Palmer replied; Hannah’s ‘filial affection and veneration’ would always remain with her father, but ‘her obedience is transferred to me’.2 In the end, Hannah spent only a few days in Bayswater while her husband busied himself with other tasks: retrieving his portfolios from the snares of customs officials, addressing various financial muddles and making the Grove Street house feel more habitable.
Lisson Grove had first started developing in about 1720 when, with the sudden expansion of London, the village of Lisson Green had provided labour and service to the capital. But the construction of New Road (later called Marylebone Road) in 1756 had made it much more accessible. Its leafy byways had attracted several well-to-do residents including the historical painter Benjamin Haydon and the sculptor Charles Felix Rossi who carved the classical caryatids that can still be found ranked along the front of the nearby St Pancras Church. But Palmer was a latecomer and although the locality was still just about presentable, it had already entered a period of decline. The itinerant Irish labourers who had first arrived there in the 1830s to build the canal which cuts through dank alleyways and tunnels under roads, had made it their home and, as their shoddy dwellings multiplied, it would soon be little better than a slum.
The street in which Palmer lived no longer remains but a few surviving Georgian houses – two-bay red-brick buildings – still give an idea of what it must have been like. It was modest, and though the Palmers in the long-term hoped to find somewhere less cramped, for the time being they were happy. Their house, with its ten little rooms and its field out at the back, felt palatial, Hannah said, when compared to Italian lodgings and so, with the outside repainted, with old furniture and kitchen utensils borrowed from Palmer’s father and a brand new mattress purchased for their bed, the couple set about constructing a shared domestic life. Neither of them was particularly suited to the task. Palmer had always had Mary Ward to rely on and had not fared well when, after her death, he had been forced to live under the hired administration of a Mrs Hurst who had left his damp clothes draped along the passageways and heaps of dirty saucepans piled up in the sink. With Hannah as his wife, domestic arrangements were hardly set to improve. She knew little about housekeeping. She certainly couldn’t cook. A maid called Peacock was employed: a slovenly dogsbody whose methods were slipshod. The Palmers were, for the time being, unconcerned. They were set on a loftier artistic course. Their work would be their haven. ‘Whatever I do,’ Palmer wrote, ‘I wish our painting room to be the cleanest in the house – that however I be kicked about in the world I may be able to retreat thither with Anny as to a little pleasant mountain in the desert – and there try once and for all to do something which may rescue me from neglect and contempt.’3
Palmer had set off to Italy full of optimism for his professional future. He had put in long hours on his honeymoon trip, watching for his subjects like a tiger watching for its prey: seizing upon landscapes and monuments and old master paintings, figures and foregrounds and poetic effects. Buildings and costumes, cascades and mountains, distances and outlines, tonal juxtapositions and atmospheric skies had all been assiduously added to his artistic stock. Little could distract him from his task: not even the swarm of wasps which, attracted by the honey with which he kept his colours moist, had besieged him in Subiaco, crawling about his face and spectacles and ‘eating little clean, round holes into the oil paint’. ‘But never having, on any consideration, left off a sketch from external annoyances,’ he later told a friend, ‘I persevered to the end; only moving my arm and hand very gently, as I knew they were insects full (as the novelists say) “of just pride and proper spirit”; and by respecting their heroic instincts, I came off unstung.’4 Sometimes his fingers had grown stiff and painful from clenching his pencil; sometimes, hauling his heavy sketching apparatus uphill, he had rubbed his hip bones raw. For a while he had complained that he had hardly been able to squeeze his brushes, though this, it had turned out, had been caused not by hard work but by an attack of gout.
Palmer had tried to learn whatever Italy and its old masters could teach him: he had noted how tenderly Michelangelo depicted the strongest muscles or the way in which Titian would deepen his celestial blues so that subjects could glow more brightly when set against them. His Baring commission, a View of Modern Rome, had been of a size and complexity he had never before ventured but it had had a striking clarity, learnt at least in part from the Veronese which, painted in the ‘highest key of light’ and with the ‘purest brilliancy of colour’,5 he had seen and admired in the Louvre. Later, struggling to compose a classical counterpart to his modern panorama, he had faced such fru
strations that after a while he had turned quite yellow and grown so thin that he could pull out his waistcoat three inches from his stomach; but determined to do it or die, he had done it in the end.
‘I now see my way and think I am no longer a mere maker of sketches, but an artist,’6 Palmer had written a year into his trip. He had felt a sense of ‘enlargement’7 he said – and not just as a result of too many good dinners. He had discovered the dangers of yellows, found out how far to venture ‘a good deep green’ or which passage of a picture needed particular attention and which might be skimmed over with a rapid touch of the pen. Though only one known work survives from this particular period (a coloured study of the hermitage at Vocatella), it demonstrates how much he had learnt since discovering back in the studio that his plein air Welsh sketches were unworkable, for this delicate architectural piece is a finished drawing of the sort that he had long aimed for, ‘with effect, foreground and figures quite settled’.8 It was this type of drawing, he believed, that would be most useful to him on his return. The ‘good deep greens’9 also played a part, most notably in his studies of an ancient cypress avenue in the gardens of the Villa d’Este. As Palmer had wandered the grounds of this extravagant villa with their nymphs and their fountains, their grottoes and lakes, he had bitterly regretted not having known of them earlier. ‘I have seen nothing like or second to it,’10 he had said. In his sketches he had endowed the cypresses, towering sentinels of bygone Baroque splendours, with a grandeur quite lacking in more conventional treatments; not least that done by Linnell’s acquaintance William Collins who, having met the Palmers in Rome (and passed on troublemaking gossip to the Linnells) had probably recommended the villa as a picturesque site.
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