They would hardly have appealed to the tastes of his times. The mid-Victorian preference was for big, polished pictures that told colourful stories; that conveyed moral messages or captured the densely packed drama of contemporary life. William Powell Frith’s panorama The Derby Day, with its crowds of top-hatted race-goers, its fashionable carriages and barefooted gypsies, its picnickers, yokels and acrobats, had stolen the show at the Royal Academy in 1858. A rail had had to be erected to hold back the gawping crush. Hubert Von Herkomer had found enormous popularity with his conscience-stirring depictions of the lives of the poor and Ford Madox Brown had been admired for such sentimental scenarios as The Last of England in which a pair of anxious emigrants are shown huddled on the deck of an Antipodean-bound ship, or his richly symbolic Work which, taking him twelve years to complete, set out to show labour as it affects all strata of society. Landseer, too, had become a great favourite with his anthropomorphised portraits of pets and his proud cervine monarchs, which, presiding over their wild Scottish glens, had done much to popularise the Highland dream which the Queen and her consort had first made fashionable by decamping for Balmoral. Royal holidays in Deeside set a new trend for country life. But sporting pleasures amid heather-clad rocks could hardly have been further from Palmer’s pastoral ideal.
Palmer was only too aware that in accepting Valpy’s commission much would have to be sacrificed, but he was prepared to make the commitment and finally, in April 1865, after months of contemplation and planning, it had been settled that there would be eight, small watercolours, four from L’Allegro and four from Il Penseroso. He initially intended them to be twinned, demonstrating oppositions of mood and varieties of effects to their best advantage and though in the end he did not achieve this, doing three from the first poem and five from the next, echoes of the planned pairing can still be spotted. The optimistic promise of a rising sun, for instance, may be compared to the quiet solemnity of a gathering dusk.
Palmer embarked on his Milton project with a spring in his step. ‘Without aiming at anything beyond or outside my tether,’ he ventured, ‘I hope, if it be not presumption, to produce a few things that may justly be called a work of art.’24 These works of art – though the final one was never quite finished to his satisfaction – were to become his obsession for the last seventeen years of his life.
Palmer ransacked his portfolios, perusing his sketches, bringing together the best of them, combining ‘mappy Buckinghamshire treatment’25 with ‘southern Dartmoor sentiment’,26 to evoke that imaginative realm in which he had wandered since boyhood. It must have been a delight – most of all when he drifted back through memories of Shoreham: ‘It is a breaking out of village fever long after contact,’ he said.27 The commission was never far from his thoughts and, although beset by other duties, he managed to work away ‘heart and soul’28 in whatever time he could spare, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes last thing at night. ‘Milton’s nuts are worth the trouble of cracking,’ he told Valpy, ‘for each has a kernel in it. Monkeys and illustrators are apt to make faces when they crack and find nothing.’29 Confined to his chair by an asthma attack, Palmer made the most of his indisposition, leafing through his portfolios and, one evening, while chatting to John Preston Wright, he paused suddenly in mid-flow, asking his friend to remain in position because he wanted to sketch the way his coat was falling for one of the works.
The Milton series spent a great deal of time packed safely away in a special bone box. But Palmer had always been a slow worker. ‘When our work is on the easel, I wish we were obliged to sit a quarter of an hour with our hands tied, to have time for forethought,’30 he had once told a pupil. He did not want to add one touch without proper consideration, he said. Often he would pause, just at that moment when he was about to apply the paint and, quite unconsciously, lay his palette and brushes aside to sit there instead, gazing for hours at a time. He had to wait for the right moment for, as he told Valpy, there are ‘gossamer films and tendernesses . . . which are not always done at the proper time, but come strangely when one cannot account for it’.31 His inching progress was the result of a minutely calibrated balance between technical knowledge and poetic inspiration, between judgement and impulse, thinking and feeling, fear and joy.
Valpy was initially very much involved in the process. Palmer informed him of every development, from the breaking up of a crimson tone which he thought would depress a saffron to the improvements that might be effected by a few faint touches of grey. Though Valpy was rather too literal-minded for an artist who sought out the spirit not the letter of a text, Palmer hoped to persuade him along a more imaginative path. As he exulted in the ‘unutterable going-in-itiveness’32 of his project, he failed to heed warning signs. Palmer had been put into artistic harness, Herbert observed, with the interfering Valpy holding the reins. Before long, he feared, Valpy would be riding roughshod over his father’s sensibilities. The Wrights felt a similar distrust, Howard at one point becoming so incensed by the lawyer’s pomposity and the dull drone of his talk that he withdrew to Herbert’s bedroom to unburden himself of his contempt. The judgement of the youths was, unfortunately, to prove only too right.
Valpy grew increasingly impatient at the long delay. Soon a taut courtesy took the place of enthusiastic optimism; the correspondence thinned until, in 1875, Palmer, whose letters had once poured out in an excitable gabble, found himself struggling to put his emotions into words. No amount of explanation could stand in for feeling, he said, citing the story of Lord Stafford’s housemaid who had stood leaning on her broom before a wondrous Claude not because it excited her curiosity, he explained, but because ‘she thought she was in Heaven’.33 Claude and Poussin, he said, ‘did not attempt to satisfy that curiosity of the eye which an intelligent tourist ever feeds and never sates’. They were not attempting merely to reproduce a scene: ‘They knew that every hedgerow contains more matter than could be crowded into a picture gallery; and that supposing they could deceive the eye, the real impression could not be completed but by touch and hearing – the gushing of air and the singing of birds. They addressed not the perception chiefly, but the IMAGINATION, and there is the hinge and essence of the whole matter.’34
It was pretty much the whole matter as far as Palmer and Valpy were concerned. An acquaintanceship which would probably have continued on a remote but equable level came to an abrupt end when Valpy, in 1879, almost fifteen years after he had first commissioned Palmer, decided that the artist should reduce his fee. Palmer was deeply wounded. ‘I loved the subjects, and was willing to be a loser in all but the higher matters of Art and Friendship,’ he wrote. ‘I do not in the least complain that I have lost a thousand pounds by them . . . but I considered your taste and feeling so much above the ordinary standards that, in order fully to satisfy them, I have lavished time without limit or measure, even after I myself considered the works complete.’35 But, having given up so much time – ‘such a ridiculous amount some would say’36 – he decided to continue as he started and keep on doing his very utmost to the last.
Palmer had begun work on his Milton series at a time when it was becoming fashionable for artists to show their sketches: a rapid – and hence highly profitable – form of expression that could summon from its viewers an immediate response. But Palmer thought this practice superficial, a symptom of urban society’s more general malaise. He sought instead a more profound form of perception, a spiritual revelation that would come only through long contemplation and meditative prayer. The eight Milton pictures ripened slowly to fruition, A Towered City, The Lonely Tower and The Dripping Eaves being completed in 1868, The Curfew in 1870, The Waters Murmuring in 1877 and then The Prospect and The Open Gate eleven years later in 1888, while the last image, The Bellman, he never considered to be fully completed. Together they represent the summation of his watercolour career: Palmer, sinking slowly down through the sediments of his memory, brought his imagination to rest on a bedrock of undisturbed myth. As his mind wan
dered amid the lands of his literary visions, amid Arcadian dreams and Virgilian stories, medieval fantasies and Spenserian pastorals, he drew together the images that had informed and shaped his own life: the sleeping shepherd that he had first admired as a student; the ‘monumental oak’ which Milton had inspired him to draw, the pastoral beauties of the Ancients’ Kentish valleys, the tall craggy skylines of his Welsh sketching trips; the luminous seascapes of tramps around Devon; the thick-moted sunlight of an Italian honeymoon. He remembered the classical aesthetic of Poussin; the tranquil poetry of Claude Lorrain, the crepuscular mystery of a Gothic aesthetic, the vaporous atmospheres of Dutch landscape.
Palmer was by then an old man. His eyes were dimming, but his memories glowed all the brighter for that. He was becoming like the bellman of his final painting, a lone figure walking through huddled village streets, tolling the passing of a day at its close. As the horned cattle clustered in the lee of the hedgerows, as the labourers sat to their suppers by shining lamplight, as the church tower reflected the last glories of sunset and the chimney smoke rose into a gathering dark, he marked the passing of an era of pastoral peace.
22
The Lonely Tower
A mysterious wisdom won by toil
William Butler Yeats, The Phases of the Moon
The Lonely Tower is the most evocative of Palmer’s late works. It shows a ruined turret standing on the edge of a cliff, a proud remnant of something once greater keeping solitary watch over the quiet of the night. Far below, a crescent moon drifts from a cloud-streaked horizon; above, the sky’s violet spaces are twinkling with stars. A late traveller guides his ox-cart along a track that winds through one corner. Two shepherds gaze upwards from the grassy foreground. They are contemplating the lantern which glows from the tower’s upper window: a bright ember burning on the edge of the world. A barn owl skims pale as a ghost along a shadowy stream bed. It feels almost as if it could fly free of the picture: the spirit of this twilit vision released.
When the first version of this watercolour was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1868 it was accompanied by the quotation from Il Penseroso that had inspired it:
Or let my lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes.
As he sat up late at night, alone in his studio, Palmer must have empathised with Milton’s solitary thinker. Through his studio windows he could see as far as Leith Hill. It was probably the fortified folly that still stands upon its summit that he painted. To Palmer this monument would have been freighted with significance: it stood near High Ashes farm where More had suffered his last illness and beyond it lay his son’s never-to-be-visited burial place. Palmer painted a picture laden with coded references to his lost boy. The position of the stars – he painted Ursa Major (the Great Bear) in accordance with Milton’s poem – is that which would have been observed on the day of More’s death. In the bewildered agony of that grief-stricken moment, the bright patterns of this constellation had been branded onto his memory.
The other major project that obsessed Palmer throughout the last years of his life also developed out of his relationship with his son. Palmer had always loved Virgil’s Eclogues and for decades had dreamt of making his own English translation. After More’s death this project became to him a precious ‘resource in the deepest distress of mind’,1 he told Calvert whom he frequently consulted on the more puzzling Latin phrases. Palmer explored everything from the history of the poems’ scholarly exegesis, to their possible relevance to the modern political world. His texts were never far from his side and, in 1863, required to have his photographic portrait taken for the Old Watercolour Society, he posed with a copy of the Eclogues in his hand. ‘You can cut out [the Virgil] and throw the old man who holds it in the fire,’2 he wrote as he sent Calvert one of the prints.
If a visitor to Furze Hill had examined the pile of books that lay on Palmer’s table they would have found among them one in manuscript form: ‘a manuscript so interlined, erased, and cut about for the insertion of new slips of matter, that but little of the original volume remained’,3 Herbert said. But no one ever caught him perusing this because a knock at the door was a sign for it to be hastily slipped away. Herbert alone was party to this project and he was highly sceptical. ‘I think the idea of having his name associated within the covers of a real, published book, with the work of an immortal poet, betrayed him into unwonted castle building,’4 he wrote. Certainly, to the modern reader who stumbles across the volume that was only finally published after Palmer’s death, the heavy-handed rhymes, ornate language and coy bowdlerisation feel more ludicrous than evocative: Palmer turned the second eclogue, a hymn to pederastic love, into a decorous heterosexual poem.
When, in 1872, he had all but completed his translation, he took Hamerton into his confidence who managed with some difficulty to persuade him that the Eclogues should not be published without accompanying illustrations. And so, in May of that year, fleeing the annual spring-cleaning, Palmer took refuge in Margate where he embarked on the second phase of his Virgil project. By the time he came home he had decided upon the ten subjects he would draw and one or two of the designs were already in a fairly advanced state. He imagined, Herbert recalled, that there existed some wonderful new photomechanical process which would make perfect facsimiles of his work; but there was not and so eventually, after long and unfruitful discussion, Hamerton suggested that he might start etching instead. He can’t have known what this would mean, said Herbert, to a man who was ‘incapable by nature and training of doing anything whatever by halves’, who had ‘throughout the whole of his life been mountaineering among the mental Alps that were always overtopped by some still more inaccessible peak’.5
A vision of an exquisite little headpiece at the start of each eclogue began to develop in Palmer’s head. He would aim for ‘poetic compression’ rather than ‘landscape diffuseness’6 and so the works would be small. But this was not an undertaking that could be measured in terms of size. Laying in a dozen tremendously solid copperplates and a stock of the fiercest nitrous acid, Palmer was embarking on a project which, though calculated to occupy only 240 square inches, would take up the rest of his life.
‘Once more . . . the doors of the little Etching cupboard stood open, the acid fumed and needles were diligently sharpened . . . the conversation ran on half a hundred delightful technicalities,’ Herbert wrote, his own interest flaring as the etching began. ‘The “Vs” became a by-word between us,’ he recalled; ‘a portfolio full of the most carefully selected material was promoted to a chair of its own; an old cigar box was made into a rack for ten plates’ as a ‘sole remaining hobby’ took the bit between its teeth.7
Progress was predictably protracted. ‘It is my misfortune to work slowly,’ Palmer had once told his friend Hamerton, ‘not from any wish to niggle, but because I cannot otherwise get certain shimmerings of light and mysteries of shadow.’8 This was an artist who ‘would sooner die that put a pinch of incense on the great golden altar of Mediocrity,’ his son said, and his ‘ten poor little Vs’,9 of which not a line could be put down without premeditation, were more deeply thought out than anything else he had ever done. His father crept painstakingly into the ‘mystic maze’10 of his work. ‘Copper bites into time as greedily as acid into copper,’11 he lamented. But with one of his ‘dear teazing, tickling’12 plates before him and a beloved needle, sharpened three-quarter-wise like a bayonet, in his hand, he did not miss the bright tinctures of his watercolour palette at all. Outline, he had always believed, was the one ‘great difficulty; the only first step and great accomplishment of art’. Once that had been attained, the ‘prey’ was caught and the rest was merely ‘cooking and garnishing it’.13 Having lost sight of this purity for so long amid the colourful palettes of Victorian fashion, he returned to his ideal: the ‘aerial gloom’14 of the etcher. He would become so utterly absorbed, he
once told Howard Wright, that time and place would vanish. He would step into the world of the picture he was making: into ‘that land never to be reached but always to be striven for’.15 ‘Those who have seen him sitting, sable in hand, hour after hour behind the tissue paper, pencilling in varnish silver cloudlets round a moon; or have seen him revelling in the ferocity of the seething mordant with which he sometimes loved to excavate an emphatic passage will not wonder that he achieved only thirteen etchings in his life,’ his son said.16
How different his life had become from that of his old mentor. Linnell was by then a fêted Victorian figure. Sitting in his grand library at Redstone, bringing fine brandies and clarets up from his extensive cellar (when the doctors advised him to give up drinking he abandoned the former but stubbornly continued to drink wine into extreme old age), he would entertain the many dealers who came to call. Offered both his ale and theology at table, they preferred the former, he observed, his penetrating stare magnified by the two pairs of spectacles which he wore, one on top of the other, for close work. He was under no illusions. He called these middlemen the ‘DDs’, which stood for ‘Dodgy Dealers’, and always insisted on taking a deposit even when negotiating with the most reputable of firms. Linnell seldom worked for more than two hours consecutively on any one picture before changing it for another canvas or alternative pastime. He had always considered himself to be above all else a craftsman and he churned out his landscapes like he churned out his batches of bread. At their best they were as muscular as ever: loudly proclaiming the majesty of nature, they appealed to the bold tastes of the era’s self-made men.
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