Mysterious Wisdom (58 page)

 

Two fellow Ancients still survived. Calvert wrote mournfully to Richmond after Palmer's death: ‘You are the only one of our little early band of cherished friends, animated by God-gifted desire to ascend the heavenly slopes of Love – the beautiful ideal of “a kingdom within”,' he said.
2
That was in August 1882. Within a year, he too was dead. Only Richmond remained. By then a grand old man of the arts, he had captured many of the most famous faces of his era from Darwin through Charles John Canning (the Governor-General of India during the Mutiny) to Dickens and Charlotte Brontë; but his lively sketches of the Ancients remained as mementos of a high spirited youth: the picture album of a band of fellows he was never to forget. Richmond died in 1896 a few days before his eighty-seventh birthday.

 

 

Palmer's reputation enjoyed a modest revival after his death. The Fine Art Society, one of the world's earliest private art galleries, had been founded in 1876 and three years later, introduced to the work of Palmer by Valpy, had proposed that it should become the sole agent of his etchings. Palmer, who had gone through the agreement clause by clause with his son and decided that the twig of a tree should become his remarque (the marginal drawing on an engraving or etching which indicates an early state of the plate), had accepted the terms. By the autumn of 1879 he had been sympathising with his poor out-of-place bellman gazing forlornly from the window of a shop in Bond Street.

Shortly before Palmer's death, the Fine Art Society had purchased his
c
.1830
Yellow Twilight
, among the richest and most luminous of his Shoreham works. ‘In few things painted by an English artist is vision held so securely and with such simplicity and such delicate, grave concentration,'
3
Geoffrey Grigson, a later biographer, recorded. Palmer had submitted two of his Milton watercolours –
The Eastern Gate
,
in which dawn flares like a vast conflagration across the morning sky, and
The Prospect
, a mellow Italianate panorama in which far-stretching vistas are warmed by a rising sun – to the annual exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society in the last year of his life. He was to be on his deathbed by the time the show opened but the hanging committee accorded his contributions places of high honour. They were praised in reviews. ‘Epoch-making pictures,'
4
said his friend Frederick George Stephens and comparisons with Turner were made by two other critics. The sublimity of sunrise had ‘never found nobler expression',
5
declared
The Times
. ‘Work of almost unequalled intensity',
6
was the
Spectator
's opinion
.
Hannah would probably have read the reviews out aloud to her husband, watching the smile spreading across his peaceable old face. The struggle of the painter was ‘solitary and patient, silent and sublime',
7
he had once said. Only at the very end did he find some reward. It was modest. But by then he had learnt not to expect too much.

In the autumn of 1881, a few months after his death, the Fine Art Society staged a memorial show in which more than a hundred of his works were gathered. In the next year, in a further effort to secure his reputation, his son Herbert published a memoir which was followed a little over a decade later by a ‘life'. Herbert was a fierce custodian of his father's legacy, most particularly of his etchings, and when Goulding produced what he considered to be an inferior impression of the delicate
The Morning of Life
he angrily denounced it as a savage wiping. It assaulted the viewer, he said, like a slap in the face.

In 1883, Herbert published Palmer's
An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil
in a limited edition. Only one of the ten plates –
Opening the Fold
– had actually been finished. Four others, in various states of incompletion, had to be brought up to scratch by Herbert who worked, as far as he was able, in accordance with his father's spoken intentions. The other five were included as facsimiles after preliminary designs. But the publication of this volume on which Palmer had lavished so much thought, time and love went almost unnoticed.

In 1893 his sepias, which had remained closeted away for most of his lifetime in his Curiosity Portfolio, attracted some attention when they were exhibited at Burlington House, but still Palmer remained a marginal figure as far as a wider public was concerned. When people thought of the great British Romantics they imagined the magnificent light-flooded dramas of Turner, the passionately naturalistic oils of Constable, not the tiny luminous squares of some peculiar old visionary who had seldom made anything larger than an open book. Besides, few of Palmer's pictures ever came up for sale. Although in 1881 the works which Giles had owned – four little oils and a number of watercolours and drawings – were put on the market, there had been no big studio sale after the artist's death; and so, apart from the Milton series which Valpy, having waited more than fifteen years for their completion, disposed of within a decade, there were very few Palmer paintings to be bought.

Then, in 1909, Herbert decided to leave England to settle in Canada. Retaining only a few favourite pictures, he sent the remainder of his father's works to auction. The rest of Palmer's legacy – including some twenty clasped pocketbooks – was disposed of in a back garden bonfire that smouldered for several days. ‘Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt, I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate,' Herbert said. Perhaps he was trying to act in accordance with his father's wishes: ‘No scraps' had been his ‘serious rule'. It was ‘seclusion or fire' for ‘everything that was not done as well as I could do it at the time'.
8
But it is also likely that Herbert felt awkward about his father's open expressions of emotion. His mental condition was ‘in many respects . . . uninviting', he thought; ‘neither sufficiently masculine nor sufficiently reticent'.
9
He was discomfited by Palmer's effeminate tendencies and even more so by the unbridled affection that he had shown to his fellow Ancients. When once Richmond had spoken about how Calvert had left the Navy because his ‘dearest friend' had been killed, Herbert had remarked: ‘There was too much “dearest” about Mr Richmond and sometimes about my father too.'
10
The ardent dreams of a youthful Romantic were probably too remote or too risqué for an ageing Victorian to understand or decode.

 

 

It was not until well into the twentieth century that the rehabilitation of Palmer began to take place. His etchings found wider admiration first. They inspired an illustrator, Frederick Griggs, who had originally come across them in a public library as a boy. At about the same time that Herbert was leaving for Canada, Griggs, by then in his mid-thirties, was taking up etching in earnest and, having spent years working on illustrations for a guidebook to the English counties, he particularly appreciated Palmer's feeling for atmospheric landscape. He got in touch with Herbert who, discovering his correspondent to be a brilliant technician, agreed to part with five of his father's copperplates so that impressions could be made. Griggs's prints, which he worked on along with Frank Short, the head of the Royal College of Art's Etching School, and Martin Hardie, an assistant keeper in the print department of the V&A (who had himself been in touch with Herbert since 1910), were of exceptional quality. In 1913 the first catalogue raisonné of Palmer's etchings was produced.

Palmer's paintings, however, remained little known, though in 1917 the Tate acquired
The Bright Cloud
for its collection and in 1922 a further group of Shoreham paintings, among them his
Coming from Evening Church
. Then, in 1925, Laurence Binyon (the writer now best known for his poem
For the Fallen
,
read out every year at Remembrance Sunday services) published a scholarly volume:
The Followers of William Blake
. Binyon was not interested in mere imitators of this master. He wanted to follow a more spiritual line of inspiration and he looked at how Calvert and Palmer, in particular, had found in Blake's woodcuts a fresh path that would lead towards the renewal of British art. His book included examples of their work alongside that of other Ancients.

In 1926, Griggs's prints were published by the Cotswold Gallery. In the same year Martin Hardie, in collaboration with Herbert (who wrote an introduction and loaned most of his father's works), mounted an exhibition:
Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake
. Opening at the V&A it had a huge and unpredicted impact. ‘The early watercolours in particular are an absolute revelation,'
11
Sir Eric Maclagan, the Director of the V&A wrote. A year later Hardie gave a lecture to the Print Collectors' Club. Looking at Palmer's work throughout his long career, he said, ‘with its mixture of research and imagination, of actuality and romance, one feels that it has the quality of classic poetry . . . It is Gray's
Elegy
in terms of brush and paint. For it was always of twilight and sunset of which he thought. For years he turned the pages of the book of sunsets and never tired.'
12

Interest in Palmer gained momentum. Among his most ardent new admirers was a band of student printmakers from London's Goldsmiths' College. Graham Sutherland and Paul Drury were the most prominent, but Edward Bouverie-Hoyton, Alexander Walker and William Larkins also played a keen part. This group of students had first encountered the work of Palmer a few years earlier when Larkins had stumbled across his etching,
The Herdsman's Cottage
, in a shop on the Charing Cross Road. They had been astounded by the detail and density of the image. Palmer covered the whole of the copperplate in a way that to them seemed revelatory. They had never before seen, explained Sutherland, such a complex multiplicity of marks coming together to create such a luminous tone. It was the complete antithesis of the manner in which Whistler, for many years the most highly acclaimed master of the medium, had etched. Sutherland visited the Tate to look at Palmer's other works. He was entranced by their oddity, by their bold disregard of convention and their quirkily archaic style, and picked out in particular a little ink sketch of a peasant girl standing in a ploughed field. ‘It seemed to me wonderful,' he later remembered, ‘that a strong emotion such as Palmer's could change and transform the appearance of things.'
13

Dressed up in cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, Sutherland and his friends set off with their sketch pads to Shoreham (and Sutherland, later renting a house in Farningham, began what was to be a long association with the Darent Valley
landscapes). They started, in the late 1920s, to emulate Palmer's style. Drury turned away from the portraiture that had been his primary interest to look at churches and cottages and dilapidated farmsteads while Sutherland wandered nostalgically through undulating pastoral views.

For a short while this group flourished. They became known as the New Pastoralists and their etchings in particular were much in demand. A tranquil English landscape could hardly have been further in mood from the up-thrusting Modernism that characterised the then dominant New York markets and there were plenty of buyers who still kept their conservative tastes. Speculators pushed up the prices of limited editions. It was boom time for these prints. It is to this brief era that the phrase ‘Come up and see my etchings' dates: to own a collection would have been a mark of some wealth. But with the 1929 Wall Street Crash the bottom fell out of a bumped-up etching market and by the early 1930s the New Pastoralists found themselves increasingly sidelined. Sutherland, needing to make money, pushed himself into closer alignment with the international Modernist movement: he began moving away from printmaking towards drawing and painting; away from Kentish subjects towards a wider world.