Mysterious Wisdom (10 page)

 

Palmer was not tempted by the ‘flashy distracted present'.
4
‘The modern English art is all bustle – surprise – excitement,' he said, which did not seem to him a ‘legitimate aim'.
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‘How superior is Mr Linnell's style and colouring to that of any other modern landscape painter,' he observed, even if ‘not half so captivating to an ignorant eye'.
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He confidently placed his career under the auspices of the older man who set him to concentrating on the rigours of line: to discovering its strength and its subtlety, its gentleness and severity, its pliability and its discipline. He encouraged Palmer to look anew at his artistic heritage, to study the crisp detail of early Flemish masters, to admire the fluid tenacity of Dürer's designs.

Linnell, as a student, would have spent hour upon hour in the Academy's cast room where plaster replicas of the world's most famous sculptures posed and sprawled and reared and pranced. The Uffizi Mercury, the Callipygian Venus or the Furietti centaurs would be rolled on castors across ample spaces to catch the changing light, while shelves of busts, racks of limbs and whole libraries of frieze-fragments lined the walls. Palmer, however, had to rely upon the nearby British Museum. There, under the watchful eye of an old German warder, he joined a body of students – among them a young man, George Richmond, who was to become one of his closest friends – drawing from the antiquities in the Elgin and Townley Galleries.

‘The time of trifling . . . is passed forever,'
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declared Palmer. He set fervently to work, but with no one to instruct him he found himself floundering. His ‘sedulous efforts to render the marbles exactly, even to their granulation', led him, he said, ‘too much aside from the study of organisation and structure'.
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He could not see the wood for the trees. Linnell's great friend Mulready was encouraging. A painter could not take a step without anatomy, he said, but having learnt that he had then to go on to ‘investigate its most subtle inflections and textures, for if he has not learnt to perceive all that is before him, how can he select?' All the best artists had begun with ‘niggling', he explained.
9

The freshly heartened Palmer would return to the fray. ‘I shall not be easy,' he noted in one of his sketchbooks, ‘until I have drawn one Antique statue
most severely
.'
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Hunched over his pad, he would pass entire days in the galleries, only finally uprooted from his little wooden sketching stool when the patrolling warder called out that it was time to close.

Occasionally Palmer could delight in moments of ‘delicious vision',
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and it was in the museum's Townley Gallery that he encountered one of his earliest loves: a recumbent Graeco-Roman shepherd lad carved in the late second century AD. Palmer was enchanted by this perfect slumberer, this Endymion ‘who ever sleeps but ever lives and ever dreams in marble'. He was always to remember him and his ‘hard-to-be-defined but most delicious quality of perfection',
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and thirty years later, picking him up as a parent might pick up a sleeping child, he would carry him from Mount Latmos to lay him down softly in a watercolour painting, in the sunlit doorway of a Kentish barn. This ‘peerless shepherd', an ageing but still ardent Palmer would write, evoked ‘the tenderest pastoral' and offered a ‘sure test of our imaginative faculties'. ‘Bend over it,' he enjoined his friend Leonard Rowe Valpy in 1864. ‘Look at those delicate eyelids; that mouth a little open. He is dreaming. Dream on, marble shepherd; few will disturb your slumber.'
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The words, tender as a lover's, are almost erotic in tone.

Linnell encouraged Palmer to try outdoor oil sketching and together they visited many old Dulwich haunts. Palmer, ingratiatingly attentive to his new teacher, took down long lists of ‘fine things to be seen', but he was no longer looking through the lens of the picturesque painter; he was seeking a more direct vision, an honesty of a sort that ‘would have pleased men in early ages when poetry was at its acme and yet men still lived in a simple pastoral way'.
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His progress, however, was far from straightforward. His vision had been so occluded by ‘slime from the pit', he declared, that it had taken him a year and a half just to clear enough away to see quite what a miserable state he had got himself into. ‘I feel ten minutes a day, the most ardent love of art, and spend the rest of my time in stupid apathy, negligence, ignorance, and restless despondency,'
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he noted. ‘The least bit of natural scenery reflected from one of my spectacle glasses laughs me to scorn, and hisses at me.'
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‘Sometimes for weeks and months together, a kindly severe spirit says to me on waking . . . the name of some great painter and distresses me with the fear of shortcoming,' he recorded in one sketchbook.

He persevered, encouraged on his way not only by Linnell but by the eccentric Mulready who, as well as instructing him in artistic technique, kept his ‘Mulreadian cabinet of anecdotes' well stocked. Almost sixty years later Palmer was still drawing from this store, enjoying his memories of the Irishman's gift for mimicry, recalling how he could send his friends into such convulsions of laughter that, rendered completely incapable, they would roll about helplessly on the floor. Palmer would willingly have been dragged about in a sack if it meant he would get a sight of one of Mulready's ‘wrought and polished gems', he said.
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He admired him enormously and for the rest of his life would quote his opinions on pretty much anything, from the complexities of flesh painting to the folly of imbibing too much liquid in a day. Certainly, as a young man, determining to ‘make my conversation with all clever men . . . a process of pumping – or sucking their brains', he resolved to ‘get as much knowledge out of him'
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as he could. Linnell, on at least one occasion, had his nose so put out of joint that Palmer had earnestly to reassure him: ‘I hope when I put those questions to Mr Mulready you did not think that it meant the least distrust of your own judgement,' he wrote in a postscript to an 1835 letter. ‘If I could have one man's opinion I would sincerely rather have your's than anybody's.'
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It was Mulready rather than Linnell, however, who gave Palmer the lesson that he counted among the most important of his life. Mulready had been looking through a portfolio of studies by young artists of great promise when a fellow Academician, also leafing through them, had cried: ‘Why can't we begin again?' Mulready's reply had been quick. ‘I
do
begin again!' he had said, with a sharp emphasis on the ‘do'.
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Palmer owned a book of aphorisms. ‘Who can act or perform as if each work or action were the first, the last, and only in his life, is great in his sphere,' was one he particularly remembered.
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He considered Mulready to be among the few who actually realised this piece of advice. For all his outward joviality he took his art very seriously. ‘I have drawn all my life as if I were drawing for a prize,'
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he would, as an old man, declare.

Palmer tried hard to follow his example. He would begin over and over again, struggling and failing and picking himself up, starting each new sketchbook with renewed hope and humility, a fresh resolution to find the language of feeling, to be a better artist, and a better person to boot. ‘Now it is twenty months since you began to draw,' he reminded himself in a scribbled memorandum. ‘Your second trial begins. Make a new experiment. Draw near to Christ and see what is to be done with him to back you. Your indolent moments rise up, each as a devil and as a thorn at the quick. Keep company the friends of publicans and sinners, and see if, in such society, you are not ashamed to be idle.'
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Palmer was not just pursuing an artistic training, he was also following a spiritual path.

 

 

The sketchbook of 1824 opens a window into a young man's mind. The conventional topographies of earlier works have been abandoned. Instead, searching for simplified shapes, trying out textural effects, exploring patterns and designs, Palmer feels his way towards a unique graphic style. Drawing with pencils, pen and ink and occasionally a fine brush, he experiments with anything from the flicks of a nib which can capture a form at a stroke, to that sharpness of focus which can pick out a chin's unshaven bristles or the individual hob nails in the sole of a boot.

His vision is far from mature. In a notebook which ranges from landscapes to portraits, from botanical studies to extravagant fantasies, from the fair copies of poems to a recipe for laxatives, his attention can drift from a single frail seed head to an entire heavenly vision. At one moment he may be planning an elaborate polyptych – ‘a grand subject for a series of pictures', he decides, would be ‘the springing of man from God & the fellowship of God & man in the patriarchal ages'
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– but on the very same page that he announces this monumental project he makes minutely detailed studies of an ash tree's pinnate fronds.

To flip through the pages is to embark on one of the journeys that the young painter would make with his pet bulldog, Trimmer, an ebullient creature which, when not whining and kicking in its sleep, wearing out the carpet with its convulsive friction, would bark at passing horses, chase sheep and even, one day, get run over by a goods van until, after five years, Palmer felt compelled to confess himself to be ‘so UnEnglish' as to prefer his pocket Milton as a walking companion to a dog.
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Palmer starts in the capital, looking back across the river towards Westminster Abbey, its tower luminous as mother-of-pearl in the ‘mild glimmering poetical light of eventide', before, in a progression that becomes typical, moving from close observation to a technical analysis of how appearances might be captured in line, shading and tint: ‘perhaps we should oppose a brilliant coloured warmth to a brilliant coloured cool (as ultramarine)', he suggests, ‘though an elaborate building with strongly marked shadows would through a neutral tint bear out against a flat mass of the most vivid colour'.
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But then Palmer leaves London behind him. By the next page of the sketchbook he is in the countryside, wandering through gently rounded hills and across newly ploughed fields, past slopes of ripe corn and girls picking apples, under shady chestnut boughs and along the edges of woods to pretty thatched villages that nestle in the shadow of churches. It is here, in ‘cottage gardens of sweet herbs and flowers', that the painter drowses, forgetting the ‘wretched moderns and their spiders webs and their feasts on empty wind'.
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His progress is fitful. He may start punctiliously enough with little framed landscapes and neatly penned notes, but before long he has been swept up by plans for grand cycles of paintings. He leaps enthusiastically forward in a sudden flurry of sketches before, abruptly confronted by his own limitations, he brings his attention back down to the facts. He practises figures, studying the anatomical masses of muscle, the patterns of drapery falling over a body, the classical stances of
contrapposto
– that asymmetrical counterpoise in which the weight of the body is shifted onto one leg. ‘To prevent meagreness of composition from single limbs might it not be useful sometimes where there are several figures to cluster together several limbs in one full mass?' he wonders.
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He brings his attention to bear on the ridge of a knuckle, the bend of a knee or a foreshortened foot. He tries out the expressive possibilities of line, his emblematic early pictures giving way increasingly to more impetuous sketches. He explores surface textures, learning to capture their various qualities with cross-hatching or stipples, with flicks, loops or spiralling coils. He experiments with perspectives and shifting viewpoints, sketching the approach to a village twice: once from a way off, and then again from up closer as he finds out what difference a few yards can make. He plays with scale. As he lies down among meadow grasses – the ‘sun shines through each blade making masses of the most splendid green; inimitably green and yet inimitably warm so warm that we can only liken it to yellow & yet most vivid green'
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– he enters a microscopic world in which fescues grow tall as the distant church steeple or the furthest horizon is formed by warped thistles and dandelion clocks. ‘These round ones go down to the utmost littleness,'
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he notes as he picks out each speck of a clover's tripartite leaf. But in other pictures he gazes as if through a telescope at some far-off landscape, rendering trees, houses and flocks with a precision that the foreground lacks.