Mysterious Wisdom (22 page)

Palmer in many ways found writing a more natural form of expression than painting. ‘It is very much easier to give vent to the romantic by speech than to get it all the way down from the brain to the fingers' ends, and then squeeze it out upon the canvas,'
61
he told Calvert in 1837. To consult the archives of the Victoria & Albert or the Fitzwilliam Museums, to read through page upon close-packed page of his sloping sepia-inked scripts, is to gain a vivid sense of his life and character. A barrister who had once met Blake over dinner, described him as having delivered an unmethodical rhapsody on art, poetry and religion throughout the meal. Palmer's letters have something of the same rambling flow. They encompass anything from the most solemn disquisition on artistic beliefs, to a boyish discussion of bowel movements; from a profound profession of faith, to a fussy itemisation of costs. They have a delightful freshness. The reader is introduced to a character unfurling in all its many aspects, from the heights of its idealism to the depths of its disappointments. A picture is offered of Palmer in his many moods: passionate, punctilious, pious, fun-poking, pompous, provocative, self-pitying, appeasing. One hears him haranguing or assuaging, whining or exulting; finds him madly excited or gloomily melancholy, ridiculously grandiloquent or just downright silly. Sometimes, Palmer pours out his thoughts in a stream of consciousness (‘autobabblery'
62
as he describes it), sometimes he flits from idea to idea as when he moves in a trice from discussing the ‘perpetual miracle of life'
63
to the price that he should pay a Mr Steggle for a picture frame. Sometimes, he writes with premeditated gravity in a neat legible script with barely a crossing out; sometimes his letters are ornamented with drawings in the margins, packed with afterthoughts and cross-scorings and strings of postscripted points.

Palmer tried to draw the brotherhood more tightly together through his letters, passing on news, offering words of encouragement or conveying frequent remembrances from one to the other. The Ancients would also use drawing in this way. Like the Nazarenes before them, they would sketch each other, studying the lineaments of each other's faces, becoming familiar with expressions and moods. Such likenesses could affirm a sense of shared purpose. When Richmond exhibited his 1829 miniature of Palmer under the title of
Portrait of an Artist
, it was an assertion of his faith in the future of his friend's profession.

More often, however, their sketches were less serious. The Ancients were little more than boys – and were even mistaken for schoolchildren as a tale, which Finch liked to tell, shows. One day, out for ramble, they had stripped to the waist to wash in a village well only to find themselves suddenly surrounded by locals who, thinking them truants, wanted to call the constable. It was only when a man ran a finger across one of their cheeks that, feeling the bristles, he realised: ‘No, these ain't schoolboys. This is an old file!'
64

The young men revelled in boyish teasing, in practical jokes and self-mockery. A caricature of Richmond catches him ‘in the full swing of his glory', his tail coat flapping as he twirls upon a pair of horizontal bars. And in a little self-portrait, Richmond presents himself as a dunce, smoking a pipe and wearing a fool's cap. There are pictures of Palmer in big round glasses and ridiculous hat, or singing with his mouth wide-agape as a frog's, or shambling absent-mindedly, his umbrella clutched upside down. ‘Sambo Palmer', Richmond inscribed this sketch. The Ancients liked nicknames. They called Blake ‘the Interpreter', Michelangelo ‘Mike', Linnell's children ‘the little Leonardos', and Richmond's newborn baby ‘the Chevalier', short for ‘Chevalier-New-Come'.

Beyond the solemn purpose and the religious piety of the brotherhood, lay the simple enjoyment of a gang of young men who loved laughter and jokes and bawdiness, ridiculous puns (‘I would rather have queer notions than queer
motions
'
65
Palmer declares as he returns yet again to the subject of costiveness) and ludicrous rhyming ditties. ‘I am in one of my fits, again,' Richmond wrote. Palmer would often be reduced to rolling incapable on the floor: ‘a kind of delightful hysterics', as he described it, when he would ‘yell and roar' like a wild beast.
66
They all relished teasing except the solemn Calvert who as a result became the butt of their jokes. A high-spirited Palmer once affronted him by singing
The British Grenadiers
at the top of his voice when he had been told not to. Calvert's consequent anger lasted for more than thirty-six hours. They were the only three days that they ever hated each other, an affectionate Palmer was later to recall.

12

At Work in the Valley of Vision

 

Nature . . . transmitted into the pure gold of art

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

To look at the pictures which Palmer painted in Shoreham is to see rural England through newly enraptured eyes. As he wandered the fields of the fertile Kentish valleys, along wooded ridges and down sloping pastures, among orchards and hop gardens, by hayricks and cattle sheds, he beheld a landscape transfigured as if by some miracle of divine grace. It was as if the whole world, ‘passed thro' the intense purifying separating transmuting heat of the soul's infabulous alchymy',
1
had been transubstantiated. ‘I really did not think there were those splendours in visible creation,'
2
he said.

Linnell, however, was keen that his protégé should return to academic basics and learn to master the figure and, for a while, Palmer knuckled down to anatomical studies. In 1824 he wrote dutifully to his mentor to assure him that had been working diligently on a drawing of a head. ‘Have I not been a good boy?' he asked. ‘I may safely boast that I have not entertain'd a single imaginative thought these six weeks.'
3
For many years he persisted, fitfully, in his attempts to represent properly the human form, even, every now and then, managing to make his newfound skills pay: in 1829, he complained of having ‘a bothering little job of a likeness'
4
to finish. And yet, for all that he still dreamt of conjuring grand biblical tableaux, the only works that survive to bear witness to such high-flown ambitions owe far more to the landscapes of Shoreham than to studies in the life room. His
The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
(
c
.1824) shows the Holy Family huddling among the valley's wooded hills.

Richmond encouraged him to follow his natural inclinations. ‘Mr Linnell is an extraordinary man, but he is not a Mr Blake,'
5
he warned Palmer. But Sam, deeply reluctant to give any offence, found it increasingly awkward to extricate himself from Linnell's grasp. ‘I beg to be understood as not so much positively asserting anything in this half-studied scribble on a very difficult subject, which is beyond me,' he wrote in an 1828 letter, his point soon getting lost in a thicket of circumlocutions: ‘as, for the increase of my knowledge, putting forth a thesis by way of query, that where it is rotten it may be batter'd, thus avoiding to choak the throat of every sentence with “I humbly conceive I submit with deference” which had made those lines, if possible, more tedious than you will find them.'
6
Even when he did turn to landscapes, his tenacious teacher was there to instruct, repeatedly telling him to rein back his imagination, to stick more rigorously to the facts in front of him. Palmer, though underwhelmed at the prospect of studying the ‘clover and beans and parsley and mushrooms and cow dung and other innumerable etceteras of a foreground',
7
once again knuckled under and obeyed. ‘I have been drawing the Natural Fact till I am cold in my extremities,'
8
he informed his mentor in November 1828. ‘I am desperately resolved to try what can be got by drawing from nature.'
9

Linnell believed that naturalistic landscapes of Shoreham would be saleable, able to earn his pupil as much as £1,000 a year, but Palmer was not yet prepared to succumb to commercial tastes, to become one of the ubiquitous ‘housepainters and sky sloppers and bush blotters'
10
who followed the precedents of Girtin or Cox. His talent, he believed, was a gift from God. It was not to be compromised for money or fame. ‘Tho' I am making studies for Mr Linnell, I will, God help me, never be a naturalist by profession,'
11
he told Richmond in 1828. He still longed to set a visionary imagination free.

‘I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it,' Blake had said.
12
Palmer sought this same ferocity of focus. Placing his subject in the middle of the paper, he fixed upon it with an intensity that must have made his eyes water. Even a functional hop bin could become the subject of fascinated scrutiny. He drew one from several explanatory angles and made extensive notes on the leaves in the fields: ‘The younger (& smaller) hop leaves are of a lighter & yellower green than the elder some of which are dark & cool and take very gray lights from the sky & sometimes a pole clothed entirely with the younger leaves is among the others quite a light yellow green & not only differs by colour from the rest but by being quite tender in its reliefs and shadows – from being thinner of leaves (more slender and regular in shape) without overhanging masses & deep shades under them.' His images began to take on an almost hallucinatory quality: details grew bigger; colours glowed brighter; forms became amplified.

In a series of studies of barn roofs and cow byres, done in around 1828, Palmer observed the patterns, tones and textures of the clustering moss: its deep greens and their olive-tinted contrasts; the pale primrose yellows and the richer tawny glows; the glowing ambers and ruddy browns; the roseate touches and rubescent blushes; the flaking crumbliness and the pillowing softness; the mottling dampness and the patches that had dried and peeled. His pigments built up a thick paste embossing the paper, mimicking the velvety growth that spreads over the thatch.

Palmer's paintings of trees were done with a particular sensitivity. He approached them as individuals to be understood as characters, appreciated for their histories and admired for their quirks. The mighty oaks of Lullingstone Park – noble descendants of the valley's ancient Celtic forests (the name of Shoreham's River Darent may derive from the Celtic word ‘
deruentio
' which means ‘oak river') – were as much a part of his rural community as the aristocrats who had once gazed at them from their castle windows or the peasants who had taken shelter beneath their vast knobbly boughs. Anchored by their great, knotted roots to the very life of the Weald, he saw them as majestic giants. ‘Milton, by one epithet, draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw,' he wrote: ‘Pine and
Monumental
Oak.' Palmer yearned to present them in the same way, but though he had spent all afternoon trying, ‘the Poet's tree is huger than any in the park', he wrote.
13

Palmer set out not simply to capture the tree's outward appearance, to describe its ‘moss and rifts and barky furrows', but also to evoke a sense of its inner life: ‘the grasp and grapple of the roots, the muscular belly and shoulders; the twisted sinews'.
14
To him ‘the arms of an old rotten trunk' could appear ‘more curious' than the brawny arms of the figure of Moses which Michelangelo sculpted for Pope Julius II's marble tomb. His trees come alive, possessed by their spirits as the woods in Blake's illustrations to Dante's
Inferno
were haunted by the suicides whose bodies were trapped writhing within their twisted trunks. And though Gilpin, the high priest of the picturesque, had dismissed the horse chestnut as ‘a glaring object',
15
Palmer, perhaps enjoying the visual pun that its palmate foliage played upon his name, frequently made them a subject. He was the first to offer this familiar feature of his native landscape a place in the history of British art.

Like Turner who is said to have made as many as 10,000 studies of skies in his life, Palmer early got into the habit of making rapid pencil sketches of clouds. In later life he would often paint the vaporous ripples of formations that he called ‘Margate-Mottle', so-named because it was in this seaside town that he would typically see their low fleecy reefs set on fire by the last rays of the sun. He greatly admired Linnell's aerial works: ‘Those glorious round clouds which you paint,' he enthused in 1828, ‘are alone an example of how the elements of nature may be transmitted into the pure gold of art.'
16
And yet for Linnell, as for Constable who would famously go out ‘skying', such sketches were in large part a scientific pursuit. In March 1812, when a comet had become visible in the night skies, Linnell paid several visits to Cornelius Varley who was developing an instrument that he called the graphic telescope which, when pointed at a subject, projected its magnified image onto paper. Linnell had begun studying the solar system, mapping the planets in relation to the earth. That autumn he made the first of two records of the comet's position from the window of his house. Perhaps he interpreted its appearance as a heavenly sign for it was at this time, after much discussion with Varley, that he finally made his conversion to the Baptist faith.