Mysterious Wisdom (48 page)

Lodged in the depths of his dilapidated armchair, Palmer would preside over his hoarded clutter. Behind him, along one length of wall, were row upon row of curtained shelves laden with plaster portrait busts, wax sculptures, boxes of pigments, brushes and books (with at least four dictionaries among them) as well as his private gallery of little antique casts which he kept safe in a series of specially adapted cedarwood boxes. Here too, lying about gathering nostalgia and dust, were his precious relics of happier times: an old-fashioned smock of the sort that would once have been worn by farm labourers; the battered tin ear-trumpet that had belonged to his nurse; the violin, now unstrung, which would once have struck up its tunes on the banks of the Darent and on which his son had first tried to learn. Palmer himself would never play it again for the music only reminded him of how much he had lost. Running down another side of the room were wider shelves bulging with homemade millboard and canvas folders and box portfolios into which artworks of all sizes and subjects, differing media and degrees of finish were sorted. Nearby stood a chest of drawers, holding anything from the cherished mementoes of his dead children to a little box labelled ‘brights' in which, carefully wrapped in white paper, he kept his most luminous cakes of colour. And on top of the chest balanced an old packing case which Palmer had turned into a cupboard and in which he stored his etching materials and kept a small collection of miniature classical busts, each carefully wrapped in a protective calico bag. This was his favourite corner of the room. It may well have been here that he hung the tiny glowing rectangle of Blake's
The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth
; this little gold-tinted tempera – now in Tate Britain – was owned by Palmer until his death.

There was not much room for manoeuvre. The painting table – a rickety wooden washstand – creaked under a hoard of piled china palettes; brushes of all sizes from the broadest fresco painter's hog bristle to the miniaturist's hair-point sable; mugs of water, saucers of pigments and mixers' gallipots, most of them stained with the rich colours in which Palmer delighted and whose succulent recipes he was constantly reinventing. A further table was laden with heavy folios and quartos and a bed was pushed up against another wall leaving only one place where the easel – a student's simple construction of plain deal wood – could be set. Palmer barely had room to back away from it to assess what he had done.

Palmer fitted Venetian blinds on the windows which had to be lowered at noon, but still the sun would come slicing through the slats, sending reflections from the garden shimmering round the room. Eventually he painted the glass with whitewash.

 

 

For the first months at Furze Hill, Palmer continued to live the life of a recluse, his painting the only refuge from despairing thoughts. ‘I am
obliged
to work, for I dare not leave leisure,' he wrote. ‘There is a time for prayer and a time for sleep; but every other
moment
I am obliged to snatch from the monopoly of grief.'
11
Even a couple of vacant minutes could be the ‘leak through which the black waters gush'.
12
He would often have to struggle to see his work through his tears. Frequently, unable to sleep, he would sit up late into the night, writing letters, or rise in the lonely darkness that preceded the dawn. He felt listless and dull, as if his skull was full of sawdust, he said. He could find no inspiration. Each new day felt like a burden to which he had painfully to stoop. By the end of that first summer at Furze Hill, he had lost his appetite. He took comfort only in contemplating the fewness of the years he had yet to live.

His relationship with Hannah remained distant, and though in the evenings they would still sit together perusing volumes of sermons or reading aloud passages from their respective books, their intellectual ways had wandered along different paths. Palmer must have felt a wince of envy when he heard from a former pupil that she was learning to engrave so that she could illustrate her husband's forthcoming book on human bones. Once, he and Hannah had had shared ambitions too.

With Redstone less than two miles away, Hannah saw her family more than ever. It must often have been awkward for Palmer who, in moving there for her benefit, had lost his teaching income and so, for all that he was doing a little better as an artist, still depended heavily for financial help on his father-in-law. But Linnell, delighted to have his daughter back, made their situation easier when, two years after the Palmers had taken the tenancy of Furze Hill, he bought the house from the local builder who let it and gave it as a present to one of his sons, John. Palmer was no longer directly beholden to Linnell and John proved a kindly and considerate landlord who, leasing the property at a much-reduced rent to the Palmers, eventually bequeathed it to their son Herbert in his will.

Linnell and Palmer never re-established the close friendship they had lost. The former's beliefs grew even fiercer with age and in 1864 he published a tract,
Burnt Offering not in the Hebrew Bible
, a discussion of his views on the mistranslation of the Bible. Visitors to Redstone were invariably handed a copy. Palmer, in his turn, could still be tactless and awkward and though Linnell would still occasionally come to visit his daughter, these calls became less and less frequent, all but ceasing after 1862 when his wife fell ill. In September 1865, Mary Linnell died and was buried the next week in the Reigate churchyard. Linnell was glad to have a Nonconformist minister to read the service. Thirty years earlier, when he had buried his father, he had had to perform the ceremony himself.

The next year, 1866, Linnell started regularly seeing an old friend of his wife's. Mary Ann Budden – or Marion as she was called – had known Mary Linnell for more than twenty years, but now the widower discovered that he had much in common with her, most importantly fervent Nonconformism and a fascination for Greek. In July that year, at the age of seventy-four, Linnell proposed, and Marion accepted; but although he wanted to be wed as soon as possible, she persuaded him to wait until after the first anniversary of his wife's death. That September they were married in the local registry office. Linnell had been told that it was not customary for the bride to come to the groom but he had disregarded the convention. ‘There is full authority for it,' he declared. ‘Rebecca came to Isaac. Why should not Mary Ann Budden come to John Linnell. The only difference I see is that Rebecca brought all her wordly goods on a camel, whereas my bride's belongings came by Pickford's van.'
13

 

 

As the months passed into years, Palmer slowly grew reconciled to his grief. In society he appeared so cheerful, so animated in conversation and so ready to join in a hearty laugh, that a guest remarked that he seemed a
bon vivant
. His immediate neighbours might not have agreed. Palmer would hide himself away when Hannah's acquaintances called. He hated the pretensions of the local ‘villarians' as he dubbed them, far preferring ‘good stay-at-home sensible Christian people' to these ‘pleasure-taking ninnies and jackadandies with their “aesthetics” and exhibitions and Soirees and concerts and quizzing glasses'.
14
Herbert always remembered how one of them, convinced that an etching had been done with pen and ink, set out to elucidate the matter by scratching at one of his father's finest proofs with a knife.

Palmer, however, was unsuited to solitude. He had barely been at Furze Hill for a month before he began recommending its merits to his former London neighbour Charles West Cope, trying to persuade him to buy a nearby plot. It was a pleasant enough place, he encouraged: far enough from ‘the dismal sentiment' of Redhill not to be tainted and with ‘pastoral crofts' and ‘overhanging orchards' and a two-mile run along the hill tops for his children to enjoy. He held out the added temptation of blooming sunburnt country girls as models to work from. ‘How is it that the very artists who live to embody ideal beauty can confine themselves to London skins?'
15
A couple of months later he tried to tempt Richmond and then Giles with other plots and a short while after that wrote to Richmond's daughter wondering if any of her friends would like to rent a nearby house. Palmer may have felt that any happiness could only be momentary, ‘like tinsel and spangles on a black ground', but still he missed company. ‘Seeing the face of a friend does us much good; and we seem for the moment cheerful and merry,'
16
he wrote. If a man has lost his last earthly hope, he said, one last crumb of comfort can be found in his speaking of his misery to a kind friend.

He was cut to the quick when, in the summer of 1862, after suffering a succession of strokes that had left him largely paralysed, the companion of his childhood and fellow Ancient, ‘that
good
man Mr Finch',
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died. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Palmer penned a little ‘In Memoriam' that would appear in a first edition of Gilchrist's biography of Blake. He encouraged Finch's widow to gather her own thoughts, which she did, publishing her
Memorials of the Late Francis Oliver Finch
in 1865, a book which included among other testimonials Palmer's own recollections of his erstwhile companion. ‘In Finch we lost the last representative of the Old school of watercolour landscape painting,' he wrote. ‘If among Blake's deceased friends we were suddenly asked to point to one without passion or prejudice, with the calmest judgement, with the most equable balance of faculties and those of a very refined order, Finch would probably have been the man . . . among Blake's friends he was one of the MOST REMARKABLE – remarkable for such moral symmetry and beauty, such active kindliness and benevolence.'
18

Meanwhile, the genial Richmond continued to move from success to success. In 1860 he had been elected a member of The Club, an exclusive gathering founded by, among others, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. In 1866 he was made a Royal Academician. The letters that passed back and forth between him and Palmer, though less frequent than formerly, were just as impassioned. ‘Almost tomorrow morning', Palmer dated an 1869 missive in which he decided to disburden himself of intemperate attitudes to atheism. Rationalism, he raged: ‘it is only infidelity with a fraudulent label'. His excitable arguments flew vigorously on before, pausing for breath, he drew his rant to an end ‘with many apologies for my garrulity'.
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Richmond would occasionally come down to spend a few days at Furze Hill, or Palmer would see him in London when, staying in the home of Giles, they would all three meet up.

Giles continued to spend Christmas with his cousin. From the time of his arrival, Herbert remembered, he and Palmer would retreat to the study where, secure of all interruption, they would converse of old days, ‘deploring modern innovations, and extolling antiquity'. The ‘plethoric “Shoreham Portfolio” was invariably in requisition', recalled Herbert,
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its dusty colony of pictures carefully leafed through, placed image by image on the easel for eager discussion. There was not one of these works that was without its story, or that failed to call up a host of associations, which, even at second hand, had a charm of their own. ‘To hear those two old men talking together over that portfolio was to live through the seven years of secluded happiness over again,' said Herbert: ‘to abandon oneself to the same enthusiasms, to see the same “visions”, and to creep with awe or shake with laughter at the stories and adventures'.
21
Year after year, Giles's admiration for these pictures augmented and, one by one, he would buy them until he was the owner of several of the very best. And each purchase, Herbert remembered, would lead to some refreshing paint touches for which it was necessary to re-open the ancient oil-colour box. Its smell of copal and spike-lavender would stir more memories up.