Mysterious Wisdom (17 page)

 

 

Palmer, Richmond and Calvert formed the core of the Ancients; but four other artist members were also involved. Francis Oliver Finch (1802–62), Palmer's earliest friend, had been brought up in severely straitened circumstances by a widowed mother. He had been a sickly boy until, handed into the care of a grandmother who lived in Aylesbury, he had begun to thrive on such rural pastimes as swimming and rowing. Finch had a natural love of learning and by the time he was in his teens his imagination was steeped in the great works of literature, in
Paradise Lost
and Spenser's
Faerie Queene
, in Ovid and Virgil, Bunyan and Shakespeare. He had also started painting despite the advice of a neighbour who had confidently informed him: ‘There's no good in making pictures little Finchy, you'd better be a parson and make sermons instead.'
12

By the time Palmer met Finch, by then a student of Varley, he was a principled young man possessed of the highest religious standards which, though he found them difficult to capture in poetry or painting, he did his best to express in everyday life. He made a calm, kindly and most loveable companion who played an influential part in guiding Palmer towards a way of working that could integrate his faith and his art. They shared a love of music, Finch being a pianist and a singer with a fine contralto voice and a taste for old English songs: anything from
Stilly Night
to Handel's
Messiah
would ring out round their rooms. They also shared their affection for cats and many a hungry stray would find safe harbour in Finch's home.

By the time the Ancients were founded, Finch had had some success with Romantic pictures inspired by the
Poems of Ossian
. He had first exhibited at the Academy in 1817 and been elected an associate of the Old Watercolour Society at the age of nineteen, becoming a full member in 1827. ‘He had imagination,' Palmer said, ‘that inner sense which receives impressions of beauty as simply and surely as we smell the sweetness of rose and woodbine.'
13
He particularly loved the Keatsian image of ‘embalmed darkness' which, appearing in
Ode to a Nightingale
, had been composed in 1819 in the garden of the Spaniard's Inn in Hampstead, a stone's throw from where Linnell would rent a rural home. Finch, of all the Ancients, was the one who at that time believed most passionately in Blake's spiritual course. In the late 1820s he was to convert to Swedenborgianism, a bizarre visionary cult developed from the writings of its eponymous eighteenth-century founder, a theologian who claimed to have had visions in which scriptural truths were revealed. It was a cult with which Blake for some years had also been fascinated, though he had eventually rejected it in favour of the even more radical doctrines of Paracelsus, the late fifteenth-century physician whose fundamental premise was that ‘the imagination is like the sun',
14
and Jacob Boehme, a cobbler who, born a century later, famously pronounced that ‘he to whom time is the same as eternity, and eternity the same as time, is free of all adversity'.
15

The other artist members of the Ancients have been all but overlooked by history. Henry Walter (
c
.1799–1847), whose sketch of the fourteen-year-old Palmer embarking fresh-faced upon his new profession is the earliest known portrait of the artist, appears to have been included among the Ancients purely on the strength of old friendship because his pictures – watercolour portraits and paintings of animals – have nothing to do with the spiritual aesthetic of the group. He added gaiety to their gatherings, however, was a witty caricaturist and, as far as the artists' children were concerned, put his skills as an animal painter to most impressive use, making a wolf mask for a Christmas party which they would always remember for its bright glass eyes, jagged teeth and lolling tongue of red cloth.

Welby Sherman, a draughtsman and engraver, was to prove an untrustworthy addition to the group – not that the other-worldly Palmer noticed. He continued to offer him every encouragement, trying to drum up support for him when his prospects were poor, stubbornly disregarding the warnings of his more far-sighted friends.

Next there was Frederick Tatham (1805–78), an indifferent sculptor and miniaturist whose stiff early portraits produced under the auspices of the Ancients soon gave way to a more conventional, if utterly unremarkable, style. He was, however, a generous-hearted man; sympathetic, tolerant and attentive with a caring disposition as his frequent acts of charity to the villagers among whom he would live showed.

Tatham was the son of Charles Heathcote Tatham, the architect who had done so much to help Linnell by introducing him into society, and the brother of Arthur Tatham, one of the pair of non-artist members of the group. Arthur, when he joined the Ancients, was still a Cambridge undergraduate, but he was soon to take holy orders becoming, as Palmer who was with him on the eve of his ordination would inimically put it, a servant at ‘that glorious altar, that Holy of Holies within the rent veil'. May he ‘long live to minister oblations of acceptable praise to God and good gifts to men', Palmer wrote, hoping that in ‘the fiery trial' which he believed to be coming to purify the Church, he would stand undaunted or die a martyr.
16
Tatham went on to become Prebendary of Exeter.

Last in this list of members, though most certainly not the least for it may well have been he who first brought the Ancients together, was Palmer's first cousin, John Giles. He was the youngest of the gathering and embarking upon the career as a stockbroker in which he would remain for the rest of his life. Yet, despite his prosaic profession, he was steeped in poetry and would long remain a lynchpin of the group. Giles was one of the very few to whom Palmer would dare show his more idiosyncratic pieces. He is ‘a great favourite both with Richmond and me', he later told Linnell, for besides his ‘unflexible and unblemished integrity', he ‘has so much knowledge of books and general information – with such sincerity, good humour and real kindness of heart that I have passed no hours of relaxation with more pleasure than in his society'.
17
Giles and Palmer regarded it a ‘sacred custom'
18
to spend Christmas day in each other's company, talking about literature, leafing through manuscripts and communing with their favourite ‘feathered friend'
19
– one of the fat greasy geese upon which Palmer loved to feast. Giles exercised ‘a great influence . . . of love hardly to be exaggerated',
20
Richmond's son would say.

The burly Giles would have cut a substantial figure among the diminutive Ancients on the grounds of his stature alone; but he was also a man of powerful conviction who, having come from an austere Nonconformist background and converted later to the Anglican faith, nurtured a profound reverence for the superior wisdom and spiritual purity of the medieval age. In the simplicity of ancient man had lain a grandeur and a glory to be emulated, he believed, and, deploring the brash innovations of modernity, he imparted his vision to his companions whenever he could: a vision which, as Calvert was wistfully to describe it, felt ‘so remote, so near, simple, peaceful, settled in golden innocence, secured in the recesses of its blessedness'.
21
Giles was so enamoured of this lost age that he affected to speak in what he thought was an archaic way, putting an accent on the final syllable of such words as furrēd or averrēd. At their Christmas gatherings, he and Palmer would eat mincēd pies.

Giles was an unquestioning patron of the poet whom he called ‘the divine Blake' and whom he stoutly believed to have ‘seen God, sir, and talked with angels'.
22
On one memorable occasion, he discovered and secured for a bargain price the original engraving plate for his
Canterbury Pilgrims
. He was a lifelong friend to Richmond to one of whose sons (Harry Inglis) he taught Latin, drumming in the grammar with great shouts rather than blows. A mistake was a cause for a roar which would have staggered a stranger; correct repetitions were rewarded with gifts of oranges.

Giles never married. A lifelong and increasingly eccentric bachelor, he would lighten the monotonous piety of Sundays at the Richmonds by calling round and reading to the children (one of whom, Willie, was a godson) from his beloved John Bunyan. He must have relished the company. Living all his life on Albion Street, working on the stock exchange (where he was nicknamed John Bull), spending his free time browsing through bookshops, he must often have felt lonely. Not that he would have complained; there were others far worse off. ‘Think of the martyrs who boiled in hot oil,' he once boomed at his godson when the boy complained that he was being bullied at school.

 

 

At first, this motley brotherhood would meet under the auspices of John and Mary Linnell. Over brimming mugs of home-brewed beer, they would discuss books and art, argue over religion and test out new philosophies, play music and sing until late, sometimes too late, into the evening, as a note from the Tathams' father suggests. ‘While fully confident and very grateful to you for your friendship and kind offices to my dear Frederick,' he wrote to Linnell, ‘I was last night kept up till half past 11 o'clock in
anxious suspense
' awaiting his return. He asked his friend to try to prevent this happening in future. ‘As I grow older I am not less nervous,' he explained in a letter which serves as a reminder of quite how young these Ancients actually were when they met.

It was Blake, however, who provided the focal point of the group. As far as its members were concerned, heaven beat in the blood of this pale old man. Where the uninitiated saw only a shabby engraver in the grip of wild fantasies, they saw a prophet crying out in the wilderness. ‘Centuries could not separate him in spirit from the artists who went about our land, pitching their tents by the morass or the forest side, to build those sanctuaries that now lie ruined amidst the fertility which they called into being,'
23
Palmer said. They called him ‘The Interpreter' after the character in
Pilgrim's Progress
who explains spiritual enigmas to Christian, and his Fountain Court flat became the goal of their pilgrimages. As they approached, Calvert said, they would ‘gaze up at that divine window where the blessed man did his work' and, like acolytes attendant on some High Church altar, they would kiss the bell-pull, perhaps giggling a little self-consciously at the action for they were often playful, although at the same time profoundly serious in their intent.

Among themselves they referred to Blake affectionately as ‘dear old William' or ‘Michelangelo Blake', but to his face he was always respectfully addressed as ‘Mr Blake'. After years of neglect and mockery and scorn, the old man must have relished such esteem. He would rise from his table with a smile of welcome and the Ancients would spend long hours in his rooms, sharing a simple mutton dinner, perhaps, or sending out for pots of foaming porter before settling down to long hours of discussion, of dogmatic assertion and contradiction and counter-argument. It must have been rare for Blake to feel that his listeners were not remotely sceptical. The Ancients encouraged him to unfurl his vision in full and when Palmer asked him if he would like to paint his design of
The Sons of God Shouting for Joy
on the great West Window of Westminster Abbey his imagination was kindled to new excitement by the very thought. His illustrations to
The Book of Job
, commissioned by Linnell and finally published in 1826, might barely have broken even financially, but at least the ‘man of righteousness' had found some earthly reward.