Mysterious Wisdom (35 page)

 

The Palmers had returned home with over-stuffed portfolios. ‘They are twins,' Palmer had joked; ‘Mrs Palmer's drawings and my own. Dear little creatures! They will I hope, support
us
instead of our having to keep
them.
'
15
Now he and Hannah, putting up a smart little brass nameplate on their door, mounted a selection of the best of these pictures before setting about grinding palettes of fresh pigments and embarking on new work.

Palmer decided to establish his reputation with a series of large, elaborately detailed, brightly coloured watercolours, which he hoped would lead on to oil commissions. Thoughtfully composed and competently executed, they are appealing enough, but they lack the atmosphere of his Shoreham pieces. Palmer was trying too hard to emulate the sort of ‘light and pleasing construction' which he thought people would ‘like to have on their walls'.
16
Trying too hard to please had always been one of his problems. The small yet poetic works that he had dreamt of producing in Italy, seeing how grand Titian and Domenichino could make the tiniest landscapes, never materialised. Instead his images became increasingly conventional, garishly tinted and lacking in life, as can clearly be seen in an 1845 watercolour of the Villa d'Este cypresses. The replica loses the spirit of the vivid sketch. The public was unimpressed. Nobody came to call at the Lisson Grove house. Nobody was interested in the paintings of the bright-eyed young couple who sat forgotten in their pokey studio, the pictures from their wedding trip stacked unwanted against the walls.

One of Palmer's watercolours was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 but after that pretty much everything he sent in was rejected. The fashion for Italian views had passed: ‘Italy has been painted out and out and we are weary of its splendid scenes and contemptible people,'
17
the
Athenaeum
had declared in 1833. Artists such as David Wilkie, John Frederick Lewis and David Roberts were tempting the public with more exotic scenes. The wonders of the Orient – its biblical landscapes and archaeological monuments, its Islamic domes and its vast sandy deserts, its camels and date palms and peacocks and gazelles – were now preferred. These were the marvels for which Venice had seemed only a preparation – and Palmer had not even got as far as that.

At first, the couple earned something from the sale of Linnell's engravings after their Sistine Chapel images: work by Hannah's father always fetched a good price. But Hannah's plans to make a series of ten etchings after her husband's views of Rome came to nothing and though she occasionally sold one of her copies from old master paintings, her drawings from Raphael, hung in pride of place in the Linnell family drawing room, were not so appreciated by more dispassionate observers. Sir Augustus Calcott declared them a ‘very inferior and exaggerated version'
18
of their fine originals – though he probably would not have been so dismissive if he had known how much youthful energy they had cost.

Palmer's hopes fluttered briefly when his work caught the eye of Ruskin whose
Modern Painters
, first published in 1843, had made him the most famous cultural theorist of his day. He had probably been pointed in Palmer's direction by Richmond who had painted his portrait in 1842. Ruskin, who criticised the old masters for inventing their landscapes rather than studying from life, appreciated the sensitivity of Palmer's perceptions and he was probably referring to his sketches of the Villa d'Este cypresses when in an 1846 edition of
Modern Painters
he described him as ‘deserving of the very highest place among the faithful followers of nature', praising in particular the fullness of his studies of ‘foreign foliage'. ‘His feeling is as pure and grand as his fidelity is exemplary,'
19
Ruskin wrote. But this moment of appreciation never flourished into widespread acclaim for, in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was founded, a gathering of fervent young painters and poets who set out to reform art by rejecting the academic formulas of such practitioners as Sir Joshua Reynolds (whom they called Sir Sloshua) who, as they saw it, simply parodied Renaissance models. The Pre-Raphaelites advocated a return to the sort of direct observation that Palmer too admired. Their heartfelt appreciation for the early Italian and Flemish masters was not far from that which the Ancients had expressed. But the brightly coloured canvases of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais or William Holman Hunt, in which every minute detail – every petal of a meadow flower or hair of an animal, every wrinkle on the skin or embroidered stitch on a costume – is attentively picked out, far more nearly accorded with Ruskin's liking of scrupulous observation than Palmer's conceptions of poetic landscape. Palmer did not feature in Ruskin's disquisitions again.

Nothing concrete came of Palmer's time in Italy except when in March 1846, well over six years after he had returned, Charles Dickens, needing illustrations for his forthcoming travelogue
Pictures from Italy
, approached him, a planned liaison with another artist having failed. For a while the excitable Palmer must have thought that his prospects were improving. He was offered the commission. He was to receive twenty guineas – a sum agreed upon only after a flustered consultation with Linnell – to do four wood engravings similar to those used as vignette illustrations for a comparable volume: Samuel Rogers's by-then enormously popular blank verse poem
Italy
which had been illustrated by Turner and Stothard. And though an initial hitch at the publishers sent his spirits into a tailspin – ‘I am weak as a rat and a spectacle to the little boys in the street as I totter along'
20
– the transaction eventually was carried through. Dickens was detached but affable. ‘I beg to assure you that I would on no account dream of allowing the book to go to Press, without the insertion of your name in the title page. I placed it there, myself, two days ago,' he told Palmer who was worried that he would be sidelined. ‘I have not seen the designs, but I have no doubt whatever (remembering your sketches) that they are very good.'
21

Dickens might have been confident, but Palmer was not. Unaccustomed to working to a deadline, he soon found himself in difficulties. He couldn't make it clear to the block-cutters exactly what he wanted. His proofs were an impenetrable mess of scribbled suggestions and appeals. An awful lot of trouble was taken for the sake of four small illustrations – they show the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, the Colosseum in Rome, Pompeii's street of tombs and a vineyard scene in which the plants clamber up tree trunks like twining hop stems – and when the travelogue was republished some fifteen years later another artist was commissioned to add further images. Palmer's collaboration with Dickens came to nothing. It was one of the great non-encounters of the nineteenth century.

 

 

Outside his work, however, Palmer found times of contentment, especially in those moments spent with old friends. With relations patched up with the Linnells, there was much shuttling back and forth between the two households, many pleasant evenings passed around the fire and, in the summer of 1840, Palmer and Hannah took off for Shoreham with all the Linnell children in tow. Taking rooms in a rambling old mansion, they reacquainted themselves with the pleasures of village life, enjoying long walks and feasting on mulberries, stuffing themselves with poultry and filberts and figs. ‘John nearly turn'd over a rock which would have done credit to Ajax. Willy's mouth is elongated into a perpetual smile – and Lizzy is getting as fat as a butcher's wife,'
22
Palmer wrote to Linnell who, striking a characteristically thrifty bargain with the driver of a two-horse fly (whom they forced to take a detour to avoid paying the toll), soon travelled down to join them with his wife. On the return journey Linnell tried to make similarly economical arrangements, negotiating with the owner of a furniture wagon that was returning empty to London, but his wife, perhaps thinking of the gossip that such a mode of transport might arouse amid neighbours, put her foot down and firmly refused.

Palmer was delighted to be back amid his circle of fellow Ancients. Richmond by this time was living in Beaufort Street, an artistically fashionable area of the Thames embankment at Chelsea. He was never to mention or make application for the honeymoon loan and seemed surprised when, in 1844 and with Linnell's help, Palmer finally paid him back – though without the interest that had been mentioned in the initial agreement. ‘He asked me if I had sold all my drawings,'
23
Palmer said. But financial disparities could not alter the warmth of the relationship between the two old friends and when Palmer sent him a note one day inviting him to come over and join him and Giles for a dinner of goose but asking him to excuse ‘the roughness of things',
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Richmond promptly replied: ‘I will excuse all things
but your
asking me to excuse anything. Do you remember who lent me £40 to get married, who gave me and mine a hearty welcome and a house at Shoreham, when such a welcome and a house were most needed, and think you my dear Palmer that the kind friend who has done all this and much more is the one to ask me to excuse “the roughness of things”.'
25
Over the next few years, Richmond and Palmer could be found sharing feelings on pretty much anything from the development of their painting through thoughts on new publications or passages from scripture to the progress of children. They would keep each other constantly up to date, inquiring attentively after health, congratulating each other on any successes, sympathising with losses, and consulting on everything from the purchase of a pianoforte to the colour of wallpaper.

Palmer's relationship with Richmond's wife, Julia, was particularly tender – she inviting him and Hannah to holiday with her in the country or to celebrate a wedding anniversary or share in their happiness at a daughter's betrothal. Palmer, in return, wrote attentive letters, recommending books, indulging in the sort of detailed medical discussions which would have delighted a caring mother or recounting his latest joke: ‘Why is an oyster the most anomalous of animals? – Because he has a beard without a chin, and is obliged to be taken out of his bed to be tucked in.'
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There was something almost feminine about Palmer's gentle character and Julia was the first of several women with whom he was to go on to foster warm relationships.

Palmer and his cousin Giles returned enthusiastically to their ‘theological bickerings'
27
and annual Christmas reunions. Calvert, too, despite a slight frostiness caused by the fact that he had never once bothered to write to Palmer in Italy (and when confronted with this had claimed that the letter had been lost), was back in the fold. When Palmer later made a trip to the Devon haunts of Calvert's youth he was reminded of his friend every turn of the way. ‘How great and important an addition to the happiness of my little life [has] been your united friendship,' he wrote to Calvert and his wife.
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The core of the little circle of Ancients had been re-established and, though in circumstances very different from old Shoreham days – they had wives and children, ‘dear young friends shooting up and spreading now like poplars and cedars'
29
– a fundamental affection remained, a source of deep happiness to the still struggling Palmer as well as more practical help whenever Richmond passed a client along.