Mysterious Wisdom (36 page)

The greatest joy of the Palmers at this period was the arrival of their first child – Thomas More Walter George – who, born in 1842 on the same date as Palmer (27 January), was named after that English Reformation martyr and ‘model of Christian laymen'
30
whose image his father had once hung on his Shoreham study wall. Thomas More had been a staunch Roman Catholic but Palmer had admired him nonetheless, believing that he and his fellow saint, the blessed John Fisher, whose portrait he had also nailed up, would ‘frown vice and levity'
31
out of his home. George Richmond, whose name was also encompassed in the infant's moniker, was his godfather.

Palmer, as a young man in Shoreham, had talked of the carrier's wife dropping her baby like ‘a kitten into the basket', but there could be nothing so casual about Hannah's pregnancy, especially not with the neurotic Mrs Linnell about. Retiring to Thatcham in Berkshire in the summer before she gave birth, Hannah had nursed her swelling stomach in healthy rural surroundings. The peace had been as beneficial to her husband as to his still unborn son and Palmer, perhaps finding a new confidence in his coming fatherhood, had painted what at the time were considered among his better works, two of the watercolours being selected for exhibition and another, presented to Linnell in lieu of an earlier £5 loan, becoming the only one of his pictures which his father-in-law would ever deem worthy of keeping – though it may have been desired more as a memento of the period that had given him his first grandson than of the talent of the man who had painted it.

Thomas More, a tiny lace-swaddled creature, would become the repository of a hundred ardent hopes. And yet, for all the happiness that he brought, he added to his parents' already significant financial concerns. ‘It is more difficult at present to get than to save,'
32
Palmer had noted in his first year back from Italy and, hoping to tide things over until trade picked up, he had sedulously set about making personal savings, giving up snuff and sugar in his tea, rationing butter and soap and limiting himself – and the ‘great reads' of which he had spoken so longingly in Italy – to two candles a night. But still, the money would not stretch. The Palmers were pushed into making embarrassing economies when, after Palmer's father had taken back the furniture which he had lent them, they were forced to trawl through the then famously shoddy Wardour Street stores. Hannah wrote to her father afterwards asking him not to mention this little spree to one of their cousins who knew the Richmonds. ‘To Mr Richmond it is not well to confess yourself obliged to be economical,' she explained.
33

Meanwhile, Richmond consulted Palmer about whether or not he should move his practice to grander London premises. His friend offered his customarily frank advice. ‘A large house in the central part of the West End would leave you not a moment to yourself,' he discouraged; ‘it would become the resort of a host of acquaintance – and you – however unwittingly – would go the round of fashionable visiting and late hours.'
34
Palmer did not crave the society artist's life – which was just as well for it was not within his reach. His domestic circumstances only worsened when his father decided that he wanted to move back in with them. The Palmers, in Italy, had envisioned this happening and had considered it a bonus in so far as it would have meant that they could share the cost of a servant. What they had not foreseen was that, by the time the old man eventually decided to come, he would have been stripped of his annual stipend. The long-suffering Nathanial had at last had enough and Palmer's father had been reduced to selling his piano and books to pay his bills. For a while, Palmer tried to persuade his parent to lodge with a sister in Margate, but accused by this sister of neglecting his filial duties, he had been forced to capitulate. His father moved into Grove Street which meant that the couple not only had to start paying for extra domestic help but give up their long-planned painting studio to provide him with a room.

Palmer, as usual, turned to Linnell asking him for help in securing his father a situation first in the newly founded London Library and afterwards in the British Museum where, he felt sure, there would be posts to suit. His reprobate brother William might at this point have helped. He had worked there himself. But he was not around, having indeed, as Palmer had requested, cleared out by the time that the honeymooners had returned – though not before pawning all the paintings that Palmer had entrusted to his care. Palmer had got back to Grove Street to find that all of the works which he had asked to be so carefully stored were in hock, owing, a pathetic letter from his brother informed him, to ‘illness and other unlooked for exigencies' that had placed him in ‘circumstances of perplexity and distress'.
35
It may have been at this time that William also purloined one of Blake's notebooks from his brother. He was to sell it to Rossetti in 1847 for the sum of half a guinea telling the buyer that it had been a gift from Blake although, given his devious inclinations, it seems more likely that he had stolen it from Palmer. And though William had promised ardently to redeem his brother's pawned works (he had hoped to do so before Palmer's return, he said) it had been left to Palmer to pay the nine pounds one shilling and eight pence while William, who by then had been contemplating an emigration to New Zealand, had kept his profile low.

Just when Palmer's family situation was beginning to look impos­sible, he received a letter from his father informing him that he had wed. The bride was a Mrs Mary Cutter, a forty-eight-year-old silk weaver who owned her own business and was, according to one report, good-looking, refined and intelligent to boot. She had a clergyman brother who, as a prolific author, would have shared the literary interests of old Palmer and, even more importantly, she had her own home: a large top floor which she shared with a great, bulky loom. ‘The access to it is uninviting and the whole is mean, but she is a prize,'
36
records a scribbled memorandum found among Palmer's papers. The stubborn and unpredictable old man might, once again, have abased the family reputation by associating with trade, but the news came as a relief to his son. ‘I can only declare that I ever have desired and do most heartily desire your welfare and happiness,'
37
he wrote in a dumbfounded letter, having just been appraised of this development.

 

 

Watercolour pigment has been used as a medium for sketching for hundreds of years but it was only during the last decades of the eighteenth century that artists started to explore its possibilities more fully. They discovered that by using washes of colour rather than line alone, by creating texture and depth through scraping and sponging and rubbing with breadcrumbs, they could turn a tinted drawing into the sort of complex work considered worthy of appreciation in its own right. It would be a long time, however, before such pictures gained proper recognition. As far as the Royal Academy was concerned, oil was the only medium to work in and when some luminous little watercolour landscape slipped into the summer show, it would more often than not be occluded by a flashy oil drama or hung to least advantage in some dingy anteroom.

In 1804 the Society of Painters in Watercolours had been founded to give watercolourists a higher professional standing and, in 1805, it had staged its first public show. By 1807, it had become known as the Old Watercolour Society after a rival organisation – the Associated Artists in Watercolour – had been set up. Both did much to establish a new respect for the medium and even though Turner, its most accomplished exponent, could not join for he, as an Academician, was precluded from becoming a member of other institutions, the balance of opinion was beginning to swing.

Palmer, as an ambitious young man, had dreamt of success as a painter in oils. In the early 1840s he began work on a glowing panel
The Rising of the Skylark
which, based on a sepia sketch of a much earlier date (and followed some time afterwards by an etching bearing the same title) was painted ‘
con amore
in the superlative degree'.
38
He infused the oil-painted image with his undiminished sense of nature's poetry. It is not hard to believe, as Palmer himself later did, that with a little help at this critical moment he might have been put on the path to being recognised. But neither this little panel nor his (now lost)
Job's Sacrifice,
also done at this time, met with any encouragement. It must have been galling – especially when his father-in-law was attracting high praise for his own biblical works.

Discouraged, Palmer turned more and more often to watercolour and, in 1843, his career as an artist in this medium was finally determined when he was made an associate of the Old Watercolour Society. Once he had envisaged such a membership as a mere fall-back position, but by the time that he was finally elected, he was overjoyed. He wrote to the secretary of his ‘deep sense of honour'.
39
At last, he had received some professional recognition. He would be joining the society of such admired forebears as David Cox and Peter DeWint, as well as that of his fellow Ancient, Finch.

The joy – and relief – of his election was further enhanced by a sale of a watercolour for £30 to the Art Union, an organisation which, founded in 1837 to foster an interest in the fine arts, required members to pay a guinea a year as a subscription fee in return for which they would receive an engraving. The funds which the Art Union accrued were spent on the purchase of art considered of merit. Palmer relished this mark of appreciation as much as the cash. But Linnell, revealing the cruel streak in his character that would glint ever more fiercely as time went on, dispatched a taunting message to his son-in-law. ‘S.P.U.R.I.C. to B P.S.P.W.C . . . U but and ME it is all fiddle DD; I.O.U. no N.V.' This is to be interpreted: ‘SP you are I see to be President of the Society of Painters in Watercolour. But between you and me it is all fiddle-de-dee. I owe you no envy.'
40

Unfortunately, Linnell was before long proved right. Palmer's election caused no more than a passing ripple in the proceedings of the society. The work of the members was too disparate. The intricate little birds' nests of William Henry Hunt, the prettified peasants of Miles Birket Foster, the exotic foreign landscapes of John Frederick Lewis, were all too different one from the other to launch any concerted assault on critical tastes. A reviewer in the
Spectator
suspended his verdict the first time he saw Palmer's work in the society's annual exhibition. The fiery sunsets were so crude, he said, that it would be better to wait until the following year to pass judgement. Palmer sold only three of his quota of eight paintings, and those to a neighbour of Linnell's. The next year when the critic returned he decided that though Palmer was ambitious and had an eye for colour, the sky with its radiant sunsets was the only good part of the picture. The artist, he concluded, was too unskilled to achieve the poetic effects at which he aimed. And although in succeeding years the works which Palmer exhibited were described as ‘dazzling' or ‘too clever and original-looking to be overlooked', overlooked is exactly what they were in the end. Palmer's initial burst of optimism slowly fizzled out, leaving only the dull ashes of a dogged determination that would carry him onwards through the decade that he would then have to wait before being elected a full member, rather than a mere associate, of the Society.