Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Palmer had regretted the long hours wasted on helping his wife with her father’s commission. ‘I try only to choose in each place what seem to be the very essence and what I think it probable we may never see again in our travels,’11 he had written as he had all but dashed along, desperately concerned to make the most of each moment. Towards the end of his trip he had been convinced that he had found a new way forward. His habits had undergone ‘a complete renovation’,12 he said. And though he would still long in his heart to make one last ‘humble effort after deep sentiment and deep tone’,13 he had vowed to ‘make a steady effort to turn all to account’.14 And so, at the beginning of 1840, banishing poetic dreams to a single private hour every morning, he began dedicating the rest of his working day to whatever drudgery was required to adapt old visionary tastes to the demands of the new Victorian era which had dawned with the 1838 coronation during his time away.

  The Palmers had returned home with over-stuffed portfolios. ‘They are twins,’ Palmer had joked; ‘Mrs Palmer’s drawings and my own. Dear little creatures! They will I hope, support us instead of our having to keep them.’15 Now he and Hannah, putting up a smart little brass nameplate on their door, mounted a selection of the best of these pictures before setting about grinding palettes of fresh pigments and embarking on new work.

  Palmer decided to establish his reputation with a series of large, elaborately detailed, brightly coloured watercolours, which he hoped would lead on to oil commissions. Thoughtfully composed and competently executed, they are appealing enough, but they lack the atmosphere of his Shoreham pieces. Palmer was trying too hard to emulate the sort of ‘light and pleasing construction’ which he thought people would ‘like to have on their walls’.16 Trying too hard to please had always been one of his problems. The small yet poetic works that he had dreamt of producing in Italy, seeing how grand Titian and Domenichino could make the tiniest landscapes, never materialised. Instead his images became increasingly conventional, garishly tinted and lacking in life, as can clearly be seen in an 1845 watercolour of the Villa d’Este cypresses. The replica loses the spirit of the vivid sketch. The public was unimpressed. Nobody came to call at the Lisson Grove house. Nobody was interested in the paintings of the bright-eyed young couple who sat forgotten in their pokey studio, the pictures from their wedding trip stacked unwanted against the walls.

  One of Palmer’s watercolours was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 but after that pretty much everything he sent in was rejected. The fashion for Italian views had passed: ‘Italy has been painted out and out and we are weary of its splendid scenes and contemptible people,’17 the Athenaeum had declared in 1833. Artists such as David Wilkie, John Frederick Lewis and David Roberts were tempting the public with more exotic scenes. The wonders of the Orient – its biblical landscapes and archaeological monuments, its Islamic domes and its vast sandy deserts, its camels and date palms and peacocks and gazelles – were now preferred. These were the marvels for which Venice had seemed only a preparation – and Palmer had not even got as far as that.

  At first, the couple earned something from the sale of Linnell’s engravings after their Sistine Chapel images: work by Hannah’s father always fetched a good price. But Hannah’s plans to make a series of ten etchings after her husband’s views of Rome came to nothing and though she occasionally sold one of her copies from old master paintings, her drawings from Raphael, hung in pride of place in the Linnell family drawing room, were not so appreciated by more dispassionate observers. Sir Augustus Calcott declared them a ‘very inferior and exaggerated version’18 of their fine originals – though he probably would not have been so dismissive if he had known how much youthful energy they had cost.

  Palmer’s hopes fluttered briefly when his work caught the eye of Ruskin whose Modern Painters, first published in 1843, had made him the most famous cultural theorist of his day. He had probably been pointed in Palmer’s direction by Richmond who had painted his portrait in 1842. Ruskin, who criticised the old masters for inventing their landscapes rather than studying from life, appreciated the sensitivity of Palmer’s perceptions and he was probably referring to his sketches of the Villa d’Este cypresses when in an 1846 edition of Modern Painters he described him as ‘deserving of the very highest place among the faithful followers of nature’, praising in particular the fullness of his studies of ‘foreign foliage’. ‘His feeling is as pure and grand as his fidelity is exemplary,’19 Ruskin wrote. But this moment of appreciation never flourished into widespread acclaim for, in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was founded, a gathering of fervent young painters and poets who set out to reform art by rejecting the academic formulas of such practitioners as Sir Joshua Reynolds (whom they called Sir Sloshua) who, as they saw it, simply parodied Renaissance models. The Pre-Raphaelites advocated a return to the sort of direct observation that Palmer too admired. Their heartfelt appreciation for the early Italian and Flemish masters was not far from that which the Ancients had expressed. But the brightly coloured canvases of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais or William Holman Hunt, in which every minute detail – every petal of a meadow flower or hair of an animal, every wrinkle on the skin or embroidered stitch on a costume – is attentively picked out, far more nearly accorded with Ruskin’s liking of scrupulous observation than Palmer’s conceptions of poetic landscape. Palmer did not feature in Ruskin’s disquisitions again.

  Nothing concrete came of Palmer’s time in Italy except when in March 1846, well over six years after he had returned, Charles Dickens, needing illustrations for his forthcoming travelogue Pictures from Italy, approached him, a planned liaison with another artist having failed. For a while the excitable Palmer must have thought that his prospects were improving. He was offered the commission. He was to receive twenty guineas – a sum agreed upon only after a flustered consultation with Linnell – to do four wood engravings similar to those used as vignette illustrations for a comparable volume: Samuel Rogers’s by-then enormously popular blank verse poem Italy which had been illustrated by Turner and Stothard. And though an initial hitch at the publishers sent his spirits into a tailspin – ‘I am weak as a rat and a spectacle to the little boys in the street as I totter along’20 – the transaction eventually was carried through. Dickens was detached but affable. ‘I beg to assure you that I would on no account dream of allowing the book to go to Press, without the insertion of your name in the title page. I placed it there, myself, two days ago,’ he told Palmer who was worried that he would be sidelined. ‘I have not seen the designs, but I have no doubt whatever (remembering your sketches) that they are very good.’21

  Dickens might have been confident, but Palmer was not. Unaccustomed to working to a deadline, he soon found himself in difficulties. He couldn’t make it clear to the block-cutters exactly what he wanted. His proofs were an impenetrable mess of scribbled suggestions and appeals. An awful lot of trouble was taken for the sake of four small illustrations – they show the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, the Colosseum in Rome, Pompeii’s street of tombs and a vineyard scene in which the plants clamber up tree trunks like twining hop stems – and when the travelogue was republished some fifteen years later another artist was commissioned to add further images. Palmer’s collaboration with Dickens came to nothing. It was one of the great non-encounters of the nineteenth century.

  Outside his work, however, Palmer found times of contentment, especially in those moments spent with old friends. With relations patched up with the Linnells, there was much shuttling back and forth between the two households, many pleasant evenings passed around the fire and, in the summer of 1840, Palmer and Hannah took off for Shoreham with all the Linnell children in tow. Taking rooms in a rambling old mansion, they reacquainted themselves with the pleasures of village life, enjoying long walks and feasting on mulberries, stuffing themselves with poultry and filberts and figs. ‘John nearly turn’d over a rock which would have done credit to Ajax. Willy’s mouth is elongated into a perpetual smile – and Lizzy
is getting as fat as a butcher’s wife,’22 Palmer wrote to Linnell who, striking a characteristically thrifty bargain with the driver of a two-horse fly (whom they forced to take a detour to avoid paying the toll), soon travelled down to join them with his wife. On the return journey Linnell tried to make similarly economical arrangements, negotiating with the owner of a furniture wagon that was returning empty to London, but his wife, perhaps thinking of the gossip that such a mode of transport might arouse amid neighbours, put her foot down and firmly refused.

  Palmer was delighted to be back amid his circle of fellow Ancients. Richmond by this time was living in Beaufort Street, an artistically fashionable area of the Thames embankment at Chelsea. He was never to mention or make application for the honeymoon loan and seemed surprised when, in 1844 and with Linnell’s help, Palmer finally paid him back – though without the interest that had been mentioned in the initial agreement. ‘He asked me if I had sold all my drawings,’23 Palmer said. But financial disparities could not alter the warmth of the relationship between the two old friends and when Palmer sent him a note one day inviting him to come over and join him and Giles for a dinner of goose but asking him to excuse ‘the roughness of things’,24 Richmond promptly replied: ‘I will excuse all things but your asking me to excuse anything. Do you remember who lent me £40 to get married, who gave me and mine a hearty welcome and a house at Shoreham, when such a welcome and a house were most needed, and think you my dear Palmer that the kind friend who has done all this and much more is the one to ask me to excuse “the roughness of things”.’25 Over the next few years, Richmond and Palmer could be found sharing feelings on pretty much anything from the development of their painting through thoughts on new publications or passages from scripture to the progress of children. They would keep each other constantly up to date, inquiring attentively after health, congratulating each other on any successes, sympathising with losses, and consulting on everything from the purchase of a pianoforte to the colour of wallpaper.

  Palmer’s relationship with Richmond’s wife, Julia, was particularly tender – she inviting him and Hannah to holiday with her in the country or to celebrate a wedding anniversary or share in their happiness at a daughter’s betrothal. Palmer, in return, wrote attentive letters, recommending books, indulging in the sort of detailed medical discussions which would have delighted a caring mother or recounting his latest joke: ‘Why is an oyster the most anomalous of animals? – Because he has a beard without a chin, and is obliged to be taken out of his bed to be tucked in.’26 There was something almost feminine about Palmer’s gentle character and Julia was the first of several women with whom he was to go on to foster warm relationships.

  Palmer and his cousin Giles returned enthusiastically to their ‘theological bickerings’27 and annual Christmas reunions. Calvert, too, despite a slight frostiness caused by the fact that he had never once bothered to write to Palmer in Italy (and when confronted with this had claimed that the letter had been lost), was back in the fold. When Palmer later made a trip to the Devon haunts of Calvert’s youth he was reminded of his friend every turn of the way. ‘How great and important an addition to the happiness of my little life [has] been your united friendship,’ he wrote to Calvert and his wife.28 The core of the little circle of Ancients had been re-established and, though in circumstances very different from old Shoreham days – they had wives and children, ‘dear young friends shooting up and spreading now like poplars and cedars’29 – a fundamental affection remained, a source of deep happiness to the still struggling Palmer as well as more practical help whenever Richmond passed a client along.

  The greatest joy of the Palmers at this period was the arrival of their first child – Thomas More Walter George – who, born in 1842 on the same date as Palmer (27 January), was named after that English Reformation martyr and ‘model of Christian laymen’30 whose image his father had once hung on his Shoreham study wall. Thomas More had been a staunch Roman Catholic but Palmer had admired him nonetheless, believing that he and his fellow saint, the blessed John Fisher, whose portrait he had also nailed up, would ‘frown vice and levity’31 out of his home. George Richmond, whose name was also encompassed in the infant’s moniker, was his godfather.

  Palmer, as a young man in Shoreham, had talked of the carrier’s wife dropping her baby like ‘a kitten into the basket’, but there could be nothing so casual about Hannah’s pregnancy, especially not with the neurotic Mrs Linnell about. Retiring to Thatcham in Berkshire in the summer before she gave birth, Hannah had nursed her swelling stomach in healthy rural surroundings. The peace had been as beneficial to her husband as to his still unborn son and Palmer, perhaps finding a new confidence in his coming fatherhood, had painted what at the time were considered among his better works, two of the watercolours being selected for exhibition and another, presented to Linnell in lieu of an earlier £5 loan, becoming the only one of his pictures which his father-in-law would ever deem worthy of keeping – though it may have been desired more as a memento of the period that had given him his first grandson than of the talent of the man who had painted it.

  Thomas More, a tiny lace-swaddled creature, would become the repository of a hundred ardent hopes. And yet, for all the happiness that he brought, he added to his parents’ already significant financial concerns. ‘It is more difficult at present to get than to save,’32 Palmer had noted in his first year back from Italy and, hoping to tide things over until trade picked up, he had sedulously set about making personal savings, giving up snuff and sugar in his tea, rationing butter and soap and limiting himself – and the ‘great reads’ of which he had spoken so longingly in Italy – to two candles a night. But still, the money would not stretch. The Palmers were pushed into making embarrassing economies when, after Palmer’s father had taken back the furniture which he had lent them, they were forced to trawl through the then famously shoddy Wardour Street stores. Hannah wrote to her father afterwards asking him not to mention this little spree to one of their cousins who knew the Richmonds. ‘To Mr Richmond it is not well to confess yourself obliged to be economical,’ she explained.33

  Meanwhile, Richmond consulted Palmer about whether or not he should move his practice to grander London premises. His friend offered his customarily frank advice. ‘A large house in the central part of the West End would leave you not a moment to yourself,’ he discouraged; ‘it would become the resort of a host of acquaintance – and you – however unwittingly – would go the round of fashionable visiting and late hours.’34 Palmer did not crave the society artist’s life – which was just as well for it was not within his reach. His domestic circumstances only worsened when his father decided that he wanted to move back in with them. The Palmers, in Italy, had envisioned this happening and had considered it a bonus in so far as it would have meant that they could share the cost of a servant. What they had not foreseen was that, by the time the old man eventually decided to come, he would have been stripped of his annual stipend. The long-suffering Nathanial had at last had enough and Palmer’s father had been reduced to selling his piano and books to pay his bills. For a while, Palmer tried to persuade his parent to lodge with a sister in Margate, but accused by this sister of neglecting his filial duties, he had been forced to capitulate. His father moved into Grove Street which meant that the couple not only had to start paying for extra domestic help but give up their long-planned painting studio to provide him with a room.

  Palmer, as usual, turned to Linnell asking him for help in securing his father a situation first in the newly founded London Library and afterwards in the British Museum where, he felt sure, there would be posts to suit. His reprobate brother William might at this point have helped. He had worked there himself. But he was not around, having indeed, as Palmer had requested, cleared out by the time that the honeymooners had returned – though not before pawning all the paintings that Palmer had entrusted to his care. Palmer had got back to Grove Street to find that all of the works which he had asked to be so car
efully stored were in hock, owing, a pathetic letter from his brother informed him, to ‘illness and other unlooked for exigencies’ that had placed him in ‘circumstances of perplexity and distress’.35 It may have been at this time that William also purloined one of Blake’s notebooks from his brother. He was to sell it to Rossetti in 1847 for the sum of half a guinea telling the buyer that it had been a gift from Blake although, given his devious inclinations, it seems more likely that he had stolen it from Palmer. And though William had promised ardently to redeem his brother’s pawned works (he had hoped to do so before Palmer’s return, he said) it had been left to Palmer to pay the nine pounds one shilling and eight pence while William, who by then had been contemplating an emigration to New Zealand, had kept his profile low.

  Just when Palmer’s family situation was beginning to look impos­sible, he received a letter from his father informing him that he had wed. The bride was a Mrs Mary Cutter, a forty-eight-year-old silk weaver who owned her own business and was, according to one report, good-looking, refined and intelligent to boot. She had a clergyman brother who, as a prolific author, would have shared the literary interests of old Palmer and, even more importantly, she had her own home: a large top floor which she shared with a great, bulky loom. ‘The access to it is uninviting and the whole is mean, but she is a prize,’36 records a scribbled memorandum found among Palmer’s papers. The stubborn and unpredictable old man might, once again, have abased the family reputation by associating with trade, but the news came as a relief to his son. ‘I can only declare that I ever have desired and do most heartily desire your welfare and happiness,’37 he wrote in a dumbfounded letter, having just been appraised of this development.

  Watercolour pigment has been used as a medium for sketching for hundreds of years but it was only during the last decades of the eighteenth century that artists started to explore its possibilities more fully. They discovered that by using washes of colour rather than line alone, by creating texture and depth through scraping and sponging and rubbing with breadcrumbs, they could turn a tinted drawing into the sort of complex work considered worthy of appreciation in its own right. It would be a long time, however, before such pictures gained proper recognition. As far as the Royal Academy was concerned, oil was the only medium to work in and when some luminous little watercolour landscape slipped into the summer show, it would more often than not be occluded by a flashy oil drama or hung to least advantage in some dingy anteroom.