To stand there today – if the clutter of houses that have subsequently clambered up what used to be furze-covered slopes is disregarded – is still to appreciate the potential of this spot. Over the tops of the trees, panoramic views stretch across a wide valley to the distant South Downs in one direction, or along the gently undulating horizons of the sandy Kentish Hills.
Furze Hill, built in 1858 by a man called James Fisher whose initials along with the date still adorn a quatrefoil on one of the three bays that form the house front, is constructed of local Reigate stone. It is a curious not to say somewhat fantastical place. Its steep pointed gables and central arched door echo the architecture of the chapel which reputedly once stood on the site. A little bell tower and gargoyles add to the ecclesiastical effect though the further adornments of decorative ridge tiles, of carved wooden finials and fancy bargeboards, make it look as much like a gingerbread house. The visitor, entering through a neo-Gothic arch, finds himself standing in a dolls-house version of a medieval hall, its high roof open to the rafters, a big open grate inviting a fire. The three main reception rooms lead off from this hall, for the house was first built for an immobile old lady who wouldn’t have been able to negotiate the stairs which lead down to the basement where the kitchen, scullery and servants’ quarters would formerly have been found. These basement rooms, though small and low-ceilinged, do not feel too dingy or cramped as the house is built into a hillside and they open out airily onto sloping lawns at the back.
Hannah was delighted with this quaint if somewhat inconveniently organised home and even Palmer, for all that he would mock its gentility, endowing each of the rooms with a pretentious nickname (he called the drawing room ‘the saloon’; one bedroom ‘the boudoir’; another, which was damp, ‘bronchitis bower’; and a little downstairs closet where some of his old books had to be stored away ‘the butler’s pantry’), could be persuaded to acknowledge its merits. ‘I sometimes think what a pretty little box it might be,’3 he admitted. Hannah set busily about making it so: arranging various ornaments on a heavy oak sideboard; placing a statue of Hercules on the marble mantelpiece; hanging the prized copy of the Titian that she had painted on her honeymoon; putting her husband’s drawings in the dining room; piling Blake’s engravings from Job and Dante on a grand piano, finding another spot for his Virgilian woodcuts and choosing only the gilded and leather-bound books for the stack on the table to create an elegant but learned effect. Palmer’s less presentable treasures – the skull of a man said to have been killed in the Battle of Hastings, his shabbier volumes, or the parcel which, wrapped in grubby brown paper and found (after Palmer’s death) to have contained the manuscript of an unpublished poem by Blake – were stuffed out of sight into closets and cupboards.
Palmer for the most part left his wife to arrange things as she liked. He had only ever known of three domestic establishments in his life in which Sarah obeyed Abraham, he said. She was the ‘Head of House’ and ‘Tail wags placably’, he declared.4 And so a man who considered a fine cat to be the only ‘really beautiful ornament of a living room’5 bent to his wife’s bourgeois will. Life in what Palmer called ‘Filigree Folly’ dictated that a nosegay should be placed right in the middle of the table and the books arranged in ‘solemn parallelism’6 to its sides; that geegaws should be arrayed on empty mantels and druggets laid down to indicate routes between doors. And though when Hannah was away Palmer would replace the gilded ‘fal-lals’ on the dining table with a ‘mighty mass of Virgils’7 – ‘then indeed,’ he told Herbert, ‘I felt that things looked “respectable” in the true sense of the word, and not in the sense of “keeping a gig”’8 – for most of the time he let his wife hold sway. His only caveat was that he should be allocated his own inviolate retreat, a place to which he could withdraw to work, read and sleep. A little fifteen foot square bedroom just off the main hall is the one that he chose. This room, shut away from the remainder of the house by a wood and ironwork door, became his den. It fell far short of the perfect painting room which he had long imagined he might one day work in – one which would have ‘glass at top and windows all round – closeable by shutters’9 – but at least he could make his own, even if sometimes it felt more like a trap. There being only one entrance, when visitors called round whom he did not want to meet, he would have to hole up there until they had finally left.
Palmer made the place snug – which to him meant happily disorganised. He crammed it with the hoarded treasures that he had only just managed to rescue, his wife having instructed the removal men to leave most of them behind. The furniture, from the rough-hewn shelves through the primitive palette racks to the decrepit armchair, was decidedly shabby and the house-proud Hannah, poking her head round the door from time to time but only rarely daring to make a domestic raid, deplored their very presence in her home. But Palmer stood stubbornly against her social pretensions. It was not that he could not afford better – his paintings were beginning to fetch higher prices and commissions were arriving in a more predictable flow – but he wanted his study to stand as a last protest against ‘cursed gentility’.10 Almost everything in that room was makeshift, his son remembered, and there was little that did not bear evidence of his father’s clumsy tinkering.
Lodged in the depths of his dilapidated armchair, Palmer would preside over his hoarded clutter. Behind him, along one length of wall, were row upon row of curtained shelves laden with plaster portrait busts, wax sculptures, boxes of pigments, brushes and books (with at least four dictionaries among them) as well as his private gallery of little antique casts which he kept safe in a series of specially adapted cedarwood boxes. Here too, lying about gathering nostalgia and dust, were his precious relics of happier times: an old-fashioned smock of the sort that would once have been worn by farm labourers; the battered tin ear-trumpet that had belonged to his nurse; the violin, now unstrung, which would once have struck up its tunes on the banks of the Darent and on which his son had first tried to learn. Palmer himself would never play it again for the music only reminded him of how much he had lost. Running down another side of the room were wider shelves bulging with homemade millboard and canvas folders and box portfolios into which artworks of all sizes and subjects, differing media and degrees of finish were sorted. Nearby stood a chest of drawers, holding anything from the cherished mementoes of his dead children to a little box labelled ‘brights’ in which, carefully wrapped in white paper, he kept his most luminous cakes of colour. And on top of the chest balanced an old packing case which Palmer had turned into a cupboard and in which he stored his etching materials and kept a small collection of miniature classical busts, each carefully wrapped in a protective calico bag. This was his favourite corner of the room. It may well have been here that he hung the tiny glowing rectangle of Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth; this little gold-tinted tempera – now in Tate Britain – was owned by Palmer until his death.
There was not much room for manoeuvre. The painting table – a rickety wooden washstand – creaked under a hoard of piled china palettes; brushes of all sizes from the broadest fresco painter’s hog bristle to the miniaturist’s hair-point sable; mugs of water, saucers of pigments and mixers’ gallipots, most of them stained with the rich colours in which Palmer delighted and whose succulent recipes he was constantly reinventing. A further table was laden with heavy folios and quartos and a bed was pushed up against another wall leaving only one place where the easel – a student’s simple construction of plain deal wood – could be set. Palmer barely had room to back away from it to assess what he had done.
Palmer fitted Venetian blinds on the windows which had to be lowered at noon, but still the sun would come slicing through the slats, sending reflections from the garden shimmering round the room. Eventually he painted the glass with whitewash.
For the first months at Furze Hill, Palmer continued to live the life of a recluse, his painting the only refuge from despairing thoughts. ‘I am obliged to work, for I dare not
leave leisure,’ he wrote. ‘There is a time for prayer and a time for sleep; but every other moment I am obliged to snatch from the monopoly of grief.’11 Even a couple of vacant minutes could be the ‘leak through which the black waters gush’.12 He would often have to struggle to see his work through his tears. Frequently, unable to sleep, he would sit up late into the night, writing letters, or rise in the lonely darkness that preceded the dawn. He felt listless and dull, as if his skull was full of sawdust, he said. He could find no inspiration. Each new day felt like a burden to which he had painfully to stoop. By the end of that first summer at Furze Hill, he had lost his appetite. He took comfort only in contemplating the fewness of the years he had yet to live.
His relationship with Hannah remained distant, and though in the evenings they would still sit together perusing volumes of sermons or reading aloud passages from their respective books, their intellectual ways had wandered along different paths. Palmer must have felt a wince of envy when he heard from a former pupil that she was learning to engrave so that she could illustrate her husband’s forthcoming book on human bones. Once, he and Hannah had had shared ambitions too.
With Redstone less than two miles away, Hannah saw her family more than ever. It must often have been awkward for Palmer who, in moving there for her benefit, had lost his teaching income and so, for all that he was doing a little better as an artist, still depended heavily for financial help on his father-in-law. But Linnell, delighted to have his daughter back, made their situation easier when, two years after the Palmers had taken the tenancy of Furze Hill, he bought the house from the local builder who let it and gave it as a present to one of his sons, John. Palmer was no longer directly beholden to Linnell and John proved a kindly and considerate landlord who, leasing the property at a much-reduced rent to the Palmers, eventually bequeathed it to their son Herbert in his will.
Linnell and Palmer never re-established the close friendship they had lost. The former’s beliefs grew even fiercer with age and in 1864 he published a tract, Burnt Offering not in the Hebrew Bible, a discussion of his views on the mistranslation of the Bible. Visitors to Redstone were invariably handed a copy. Palmer, in his turn, could still be tactless and awkward and though Linnell would still occasionally come to visit his daughter, these calls became less and less frequent, all but ceasing after 1862 when his wife fell ill. In September 1865, Mary Linnell died and was buried the next week in the Reigate churchyard. Linnell was glad to have a Nonconformist minister to read the service. Thirty years earlier, when he had buried his father, he had had to perform the ceremony himself.
The next year, 1866, Linnell started regularly seeing an old friend of his wife’s. Mary Ann Budden – or Marion as she was called – had known Mary Linnell for more than twenty years, but now the widower discovered that he had much in common with her, most importantly fervent Nonconformism and a fascination for Greek. In July that year, at the age of seventy-four, Linnell proposed, and Marion accepted; but although he wanted to be wed as soon as possible, she persuaded him to wait until after the first anniversary of his wife’s death. That September they were married in the local registry office. Linnell had been told that it was not customary for the bride to come to the groom but he had disregarded the convention. ‘There is full authority for it,’ he declared. ‘Rebecca came to Isaac. Why should not Mary Ann Budden come to John Linnell. The only difference I see is that Rebecca brought all her wordly goods on a camel, whereas my bride’s belongings came by Pickford’s van.’13
As the months passed into years, Palmer slowly grew reconciled to his grief. In society he appeared so cheerful, so animated in conversation and so ready to join in a hearty laugh, that a guest remarked that he seemed a bon vivant. His immediate neighbours might not have agreed. Palmer would hide himself away when Hannah’s acquaintances called. He hated the pretensions of the local ‘villarians’ as he dubbed them, far preferring ‘good stay-at-home sensible Christian people’ to these ‘pleasure-taking ninnies and jackadandies with their “aesthetics” and exhibitions and Soirees and concerts and quizzing glasses’.14 Herbert always remembered how one of them, convinced that an etching had been done with pen and ink, set out to elucidate the matter by scratching at one of his father’s finest proofs with a knife.
Palmer, however, was unsuited to solitude. He had barely been at Furze Hill for a month before he began recommending its merits to his former London neighbour Charles West Cope, trying to persuade him to buy a nearby plot. It was a pleasant enough place, he encouraged: far enough from ‘the dismal sentiment’ of Redhill not to be tainted and with ‘pastoral crofts’ and ‘overhanging orchards’ and a two-mile run along the hill tops for his children to enjoy. He held out the added temptation of blooming sunburnt country girls as models to work from. ‘How is it that the very artists who live to embody ideal beauty can confine themselves to London skins?’15 A couple of months later he tried to tempt Richmond and then Giles with other plots and a short while after that wrote to Richmond’s daughter wondering if any of her friends would like to rent a nearby house. Palmer may have felt that any happiness could only be momentary, ‘like tinsel and spangles on a black ground’, but still he missed company. ‘Seeing the face of a friend does us much good; and we seem for the moment cheerful and merry,’16 he wrote. If a man has lost his last earthly hope, he said, one last crumb of comfort can be found in his speaking of his misery to a kind friend.
He was cut to the quick when, in the summer of 1862, after suffering a succession of strokes that had left him largely paralysed, the companion of his childhood and fellow Ancient, ‘that good man Mr Finch’,17 died. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Palmer penned a little ‘In Memoriam’ that would appear in a first edition of Gilchrist’s biography of Blake. He encouraged Finch’s widow to gather her own thoughts, which she did, publishing her Memorials of the Late Francis Oliver Finch in 1865, a book which included among other testimonials Palmer’s own recollections of his erstwhile companion. ‘In Finch we lost the last representative of the Old school of watercolour landscape painting,’ he wrote. ‘If among Blake’s deceased friends we were suddenly asked to point to one without passion or prejudice, with the calmest judgement, with the most equable balance of faculties and those of a very refined order, Finch would probably have been the man . . . among Blake’s friends he was one of the MOST REMARKABLE – remarkable for such moral symmetry and beauty, such active kindliness and benevolence.’18
Meanwhile, the genial Richmond continued to move from success to success. In 1860 he had been elected a member of The Club, an exclusive gathering founded by, among others, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. In 1866 he was made a Royal Academician. The letters that passed back and forth between him and Palmer, though less frequent than formerly, were just as impassioned. ‘Almost tomorrow morning’, Palmer dated an 1869 missive in which he decided to disburden himself of intemperate attitudes to atheism. Rationalism, he raged: ‘it is only infidelity with a fraudulent label’. His excitable arguments flew vigorously on before, pausing for breath, he drew his rant to an end ‘with many apologies for my garrulity’.19 Richmond would occasionally come down to spend a few days at Furze Hill, or Palmer would see him in London when, staying in the home of Giles, they would all three meet up.
Giles continued to spend Christmas with his cousin. From the time of his arrival, Herbert remembered, he and Palmer would retreat to the study where, secure of all interruption, they would converse of old days, ‘deploring modern innovations, and extolling antiquity’. The ‘plethoric “Shoreham Portfolio” was invariably in requisition’, recalled Herbert,20 its dusty colony of pictures carefully leafed through, placed image by image on the easel for eager discussion. There was not one of these works that was without its story, or that failed to call up a host of associations, which, even at second hand, had a charm of their own. ‘To hear those two old men talking together over that portfolio was to live through the seven years of secluded happiness over again,’ said H
erbert: ‘to abandon oneself to the same enthusiasms, to see the same “visions”, and to creep with awe or shake with laughter at the stories and adventures’.21 Year after year, Giles’s admiration for these pictures augmented and, one by one, he would buy them until he was the owner of several of the very best. And each purchase, Herbert remembered, would lead to some refreshing paint touches for which it was necessary to re-open the ancient oil-colour box. Its smell of copal and spike-lavender would stir more memories up.
An occasional letter to Calvert also survives, although Calvert by now had become something of a recluse. He had lost his visionary spirit and, befriending the fashionable artist William Etty, had sacrificed his integrity so far as to become little more than a mimic of this then applauded painter’s style. His work was so derivative that when, in 1850, at a sale of Etty’s work, Calvert had seen a painting of his own being sold he had shouted out to the auctioneer: ‘That is not Etty’s,’ to which the auctioneer had replied: ‘A gentleman present has declared that the study is not genuine, but buyers would do well to bear in mind that the same gentleman was bidding for it.’ Calvert dissipated his talent on pointless projects, among them the development of an impenetrable musical theory of colour: it climbed from the ‘golden earth’ of the chryseic, he suggested, ascending through the rubiate to the celestial saphirrine. Even Palmer thought he was wasting his time. Deputed by friends to express his misgivings, he wrote Calvert a letter which, thankfully, his old friend decided to take in good heart. ‘You have been friendly enough, under the delicacy of suggestion, to caution me in regard to my protracted study of colour,’ he wrote in 1868. ‘You will be glad to hear that the past summer saw the chase . . . at an end, though not abandoned.’22
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