Mysterious Wisdom (41 page)

Lessons were not always plodding for More. His father knew how to kindle the imagination. As he lectured his son on the evils of cruelty, he reminded him of the biblical story of Jezebel. ‘I wonder what Jezebel was like when she was a little girl,' he wrote. ‘You may try to draw her'; and there followed the sort of imaginative contemplation that must have informed his own narrative works. ‘I should make her with proud-looking eyes – turning up her nose at everybody and in very fine clothes. She was fond of dress to the last – but while she was painting her cheeks and making herself so fine that morning – she little thought of the hungry dogs that would tangle their fangs among her laces and gimcracks.'
39

Palmer was prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his son's education. A landscapist could make a better living in the country, but he remained in the capital because it was the best place for schools. His efforts paid off. Having finished his preparatory education under the auspices of a Kensington clergyman, in 1858, at the age of sixteen, More went on to gain a place at Kensington Grammar School where he not only won several prizes but became a great favourite of the headmaster. He got into the highest class, Palmer told Miss Wilkinson proudly. It would still be some time before he looked back on this moment with the bitterest of regrets.

 

 

While Palmer had limped impecuniously on through the late 1840s and into the 1850s, Linnell had continued to take great strides as a painter. His 1848
Noah
:
The Eve of the Deluge
works like a powerful vortex, sweeping the eye inwards with its glowing force. Ruskin noticed it at the Royal Academy exhibition of that year and though he misread its subject, referring to it as
The Retreating Storm
, he nonetheless mentioned it in an updated edition of
Modern Painters
as ‘characterised by an observance of nature scrupulously and minutely patient . . . only to be understood by reference to the drawings of Michelangelo'.
40
By the early 1850s, Linnell was being hailed as one of Britain's most collectable landscapists. Dealers were buying up any work that they could. A picture of quoit players which Linnell had first sold to Sir Thomas Baring (the father of John Baring who had commissioned Palmer in Rome) in 1811 for seventy-five guineas was sold by Christie's in 1848 for a thousand. Problems with forgeries would soon arise and, before long, Linnell would find himself being asked to verify a work so often that he began to charge a £5 fee.

Soon, no longer tied to the capital by the financial necessities of portrait commissions, he was planning to leave Bayswater. In May 1849, on their way to Edenbridge to inspect a possible site for a new home, Linnell and his son James found themselves waiting at Redhill, in Surrey, to change trains. Energetic as ever, Linnell filled the time with a brisk walk up the nearby Redstone Hill where he was so taken by the views that stretched outwards in all directions that he decided on the spot that this was where he would live. Eleven acres had been put up for sale by a London stockbroker. Linnell bought them at once.

Picking a vantage point on the brow of a well-timbered hill sloping down towards the west, he set about designing and building a substantial Reigate-stone house, adding sixty-three more acres to his original eleven, personally supervising every stage of the construction himself. By the time he had finished, Redstone was an impressive mansion with terraced grounds and magnificent views. It was near enough to London for him to take the train in easily, and also to Brighton for his wife to make trips to the shops or the beach. In July 1851, the Linnell family finally moved.

Redstone was organised around work. Two huge painting studios of the sort that Palmer could only have dreamt of took up the entire first floor; one was Linnell's, the other for the use of his sons, both by then also practising as professional artists. A lobby lined with plaster casts separated them. Downstairs there was a large sixty-foot drawing room with two entrances, so that it could be divided if necessary with a partition, while the windows of a spacious library offered an ample view over flowerbeds and lawns towards the wilder vistas of Linnell's own woods. In the evenings Linnell would gaze through these windows out over the sunsets which, famously glorious because of the red earth in the area, he would paint. How Palmer, who had studied a sunset ‘over the
same
piece of rock and sea'
41
for three weeks in Cornwall, would have loved such a view! Instead, back in London, he had to climb up to the attic and, standing on tiptoe, strain his neck out of the nursery maid's window to get even the tiniest glimpse of the sky.

Linnell was lord of all he surveyed at Redstone. No one could arrive at the front door without him throwing up the sash and issuing his challenge. He might not have been quite as ferocious as his hound, Niger – it had to be shot after biting a girl who was delivering eggs – but still regular tradesmen preferred to dodge round under cover of the trees to the entrance at the back of the house. The local hunt was also upset. Used for decades to drawing cover in the mature oak woods, they resented the territorial fences that Linnell put up. A long battle ensued which Linnell won in the end. His house remained a stronghold, an empire over which he presided. There, unimpeded, he could pursue his painting, pore over his books of Hebrew and Greek, grind his corn, bake his bread, brew his ale and thunder forth his opinions to a well-disciplined family which increasingly seldom dared venture dissent.

 

 

In 1851 the Palmers also moved house, taking up residence in 6, Douro Place. It was only a short walk from their previous cottage, but it was considered an upward move. Douro Place was a pretty cul-de-sac. The then fashionable sculptor, John Bell – his dramatic
Eagle Slayer
was to stand at the heart of the Great Exhibition that year – had a house on the corner. But, if a succession of social luminaries arrived at that end of the street, the other, where the Palmers lived, was blocked by a high brick wall.

Number 6 – now singled out by an English Heritage plaque as the home of Samuel Palmer – is, by current standards, a substantial residence: a four-storey Georgian building set in quiet seclusion, it would be far out of the financial reach of an unsuccessful artist today, but in Palmer's era it was considered a modest establishment. The visitor, arriving through a green wicket gate, would follow the path through a shady patch of garden which was cheered up in summer by abundant marigolds, to a flight of steps with a tangle of white roses growing around its railings, leading up to the front door. It was dark inside, the daughter of their neighbour, Charles West Cope, remembered, with a long low room on the left as you entered, the floor of which sloped steadily down towards the windows. There was no studio. Palmer used a corner of the drawing room. It had a southerly aspect, which he liked, even though it looked onto the houses opposite. Palmer tried to make the best of this far-from-perfect set-up, settling down amid his clutter of artist's materials, mended picture frames and homemade portfolios and, in memory of Shoreham, planting a root of hops among the garden's lilac bushes.

Many happy hours were spent in that home. Cope's daughter would much later describe them, recalling how Hannah would caution the guests about the sloping flagstones, remembering her ‘pretty gentle way and voice' and how Palmer would sing as he played the tall silk-fronted piano or tell the children blood-curdling stories about wolves in which the creatures' far-off howling seemed to draw nearer and nearer and nearer as the children clustered about him, half-frightened, half-thrilled. She particularly remembered the magnificence of his voice ‘rolling out
By the waters of Babylon
'.
42
This psalm of exile must have meant a lot to him. He was a suburban outcast of his rural dreams. And it would only get worse. The green spaces of South Kensington were being rapidly buried under stucco. ‘They have so built us up with great houses,' Palmer mourned, ‘as to destroy the elasticity of the air.'
43
Sometimes he would burn blotting paper that had been soaked in saltpetre in his bedroom so that he could breathe better. The acrid vapours helped to clear his lungs.

His health was declining. Throughout the 1850s he was regularly ailing. Appointments were frequently cancelled or postponed. He blamed his impaired constitution on the transition from Italy's dry summer climates to London's damp clay. Coughs, colds and wheezes seemed constantly to plague him and, by 1856, he was referring to himself – albeit mockingly – as ‘a wretched invalid'.
44
The enthusiastic young visionary who had used to ramble all night across the Kentish Weald was now entering his fifties. Winter, with its ‘bitter weather and untoward rains',
45
herded him towards his hearth; but in summer it wasn't much better. ‘I DREAD the DUST of town, which withers me whenever I go out,'
46
Palmer moaned. Hannah would apply mustard plasters to his chest. But she was not well herself. She had suffered several miscarriages before finally, in September 1853, giving birth to a third and last child, a son who was christened Alfred Herbert: Alfred after the king and Herbert in honour of the poet. For some time his father called him the former and his mother the latter; but in the long run it was Hannah who won out. The boy was known as Herbert, or Hub for short. Cope and Reed were his godfathers.

From the beginning the infant was sick, succumbing to fevers, convulsions and fits. Dr Macintyre once more became a frequent – sometimes a daily – visitor, and Mrs Linnell, with whom Palmer shared few other interests, became a medical confidante, privy to the details of every symptom and remedy. The baby was prone to squinting, Palmer told her in 1854. ‘We . . . have noticed it all along at intervals.' ‘[Dr McIntyre says] it might proceed merely from wind or from a very serious cause, congestion of the brain.'
47
Within such wide parameters, there was plenty of room for anxieties to run amok and the unfortunate infant was subjected to an assortment of unpleasant treatments that ranged from the administration of grey powders to the lancing of its gums.

Later that year, Hannah, the baby and his nurse, went to stay at Redstone while Palmer, freed for a few days from teaching commitments set off – with the help of £5 from Linnell – for a holiday with More. Herbert grew temporarily stronger but by 1855 he was seriously ill again and, had it not been for the advice of Dr McIntyre, would have been ‘laid by the side of his still dear little sister',
48
Palmer wrote. By the time the baby had recovered the whole family was exhausted: Hannah had sat up with him every night but one for six weeks, while the nurse had never got to bed before two in the morning. Preparations were once more made for a recuperative trip to Redstone. ‘We have indeed much reason for thankfulness,' a relieved Palmer wrote, ‘when after fever and insensibility we see our poor Herbert amusing himself with his old playthings and playing his old tricks.'
49

It was around this time that Palmer developed a fascination for homeopathy. This system of medicine, based on treating a patient with highly diluted substances which trigger the body's natural system of healing, had been introduced into Britain in the 1830s by an Edinburgh trained medic, Dr Quin, who while travelling in Europe had met Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of this holistic discipline. By 1850 he had founded a homeopathic hospital in London and by 1858 had negotiated an amendment to the Medical Act as a result of which homeopathy became not only tolerated but in many cases preferred to traditional treatments – perhaps hardly surprising in an era when mainstream practitioners regularly advocated such measures as bloodletting, purging and the administration of Venice Treacle: a mixture made up of sixty-four substances among them opium, myrrh and viper's flesh.