Mysterious Wisdom (59 page)

Palmer, however, was not forgotten. Sutherland, along with his contemporaries John Piper and Paul Nash, went on to become part of a grouping which a reviewer, Raymond Mortimer, was subsequently to label ‘Neo-Romantic'. They made art that appealed to mystics, he wrote, ‘and particularly to pantheists who feel fraternity . . . with all living things' and to those ‘with a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused'.
14
They produced work that showed a deep familiarity with Palmer's Shoreham visions, sharing its shadowy atmospheres, its intensity of feeling and its elaborate techniques.

Appreciation of Palmer gathered pace. Kenneth Clark, as Keeper of the Ashmolean between 1931 and 1933, brought two of his works (his haunting self-portrait was one of them) for the museum and another three paintings (including
Cornfield by Moonlight
) for his own private collection. In 1934 an exhibition of British Art at the Royal Academy showed a dozen Palmer pictures, among them items from the famous Curiosity Portfolio. To eyes by then attuned to the expressive distortions of Modernism, these seemed peculiarly contemporary, even as they spoke of some mystical past. In 1936 the agenda-setting magazine
Apollo
reproduced images of Palmer's sepias for the first time and Grigson, who was to become the artist's biographer, started publishing a number of articles on his work. In 1941, the Ashmolean Museum added the sepias to its Palmer collection.

It was around this time, also, that Palmer cast his spell over a second wave of Neo-Romantic artists. A circle which included among its principal members Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, John Minton, Ivon Hitchens and John Craxton (though the young Lucian Freud and Henry Moore were also loosely associated) looked to his closely wrought vision. To them it seemed to arise from a quintessentially English tradition which they tried in their modernistic work to develop. Nash also renewed his erstwhile interest in Palmer. He wanted to capture what he thought of as the imprisoned spirit of landscape.

In 1947, Grigson's
Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years
was published, putting the spotlight on Palmer's Shoreham works. These became widely admired as examples of English pastoral, of a peaceful ideal which a world war had put under threat. Soon their influence could be spotted all over the place, from the rural designs of Eric Ravilious through the Utopian drawings of Clifford Harper to the poetic engravings of Laurence Whistler.

Palmer came to have ‘almost too pervasive an influence'
15
on English art, Kenneth Clark declared in 1949. Indeed, with the hindsight of history, there seems scarcely a figurative painter in Britain between the 1920s and 1950s who did not look at his work. Anything from the eerie miracles of Stanley Spencer's Cookham canvases to the domestic harmonies of Winifred Nicholson's still lifes were indebted. Palmer's inspiration can be found in the luminous dreams of Cecil Collins, the lyrical patterns of Victor Pasmore's landscapes, the primitive clarity of Cedric Morris's compositions, the shadowy intensities of the engravings of Muirhead Bone. The canvas which still hangs in Palmer's old Shoreham church – it shows the triumphant return from Africa of Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron (son of the vicar) having completed the first East–West crossing – was by the artist's old friend Cope. In 1876, when it was painted, the work of this Academician was far preferred to that of the eccentric visionary who had once lived in the village. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, Cope's pictures were being passed off as Palmer's by then extremely popular and hence valuable works.

In the 1950s, however, the baton of Modernism passed from Europe across the Atlantic and, by the end of the decade, artistic trends had undergone a dramatic shift. Painters were looking towards the full-scale abstractions of a New York School that had abandoned descriptions of nature in favour of expressionistic renderings of inner emotional states. Palmer's reputation languished again for a while. He did still continue to find a few cultish followers. His Shoreham visions, with their peculiar magnifications, their mushrooming patterns and their luminous glow, appealed to the tastes of the psychedelic sixties. His
Magic Apple Tree
looked mad as an orchard seen on acid. His proliferating blossoms belonged to some LSD trip. During one druggy binge, Jim Leon, the most important artistic contributor to the magazine
Oz
, had a mystical experience in which he was visited by a divinity called the Goddess of Nature, he said. From then on he devoted his talents to creating paradisiacal visions which can easily be tracked back to the influences of Palmer, as can many of the paintings of Syd Barrett, a founder member of Pink Floyd. But, for the most part, Palmer was forgotten by fashion until, in the 1970s, a faking scandal aroused interest once more.

A cockney, Tom Keating, having returned from a wartime career as a sailor, turned his hand first to picture restoring and then to creating forgeries of, among other paintings, Palmer's Shoreham works. Buying old canvases from junk shops, he would steam the picture from its mount and then paint or draw his own in its place, sprinkling the finished product with vacuum cleaner dust to make it look older, flicking a spoonful of coffee powder to make convincing ‘fox marks'. He polished his techniques. Boiled walnuts, he discovered, made a perfect brown bistre for pseudo-Rembrandts and, for Palmer, a layer of gelatine which cracked when warmed was just right for the faking of thickly painted ‘frescos'. Keating pulled the unused watermarked pages from an old leather bound diary and then he just waited for the ‘the feeling to come over him',
16
he said. Once he made sixteen Palmers in a weekend.

‘I'd just sit there whistling softly to myself to help me think, then I'd start to doodle and look at the moon. Dink, donk, dink, tick, tick, tick – it would start to happen. God's honour, I have never drawn a sheep from life, but Palmer's sheep would begin to appear on the paper tick, tick, tick, and there they would be in the guv'nor's “valley of vision” watched over by the good shepherd in the shadow of Shoreham's church. With Sam's permission I sometimes signed them with his own name, but they were his work and not mine. It was his hand that guided the pen.'
17

With the benefit of hindsight, Keating's pictures present crude amalgams of Palmeresque traits, but in 1976 a prestigious gallery paid £9,400 for what it believed to be an authentic image. Scholars were not convinced. Investigations ensued and
The Times
eventually published an exposé – though ironically, after this widely publicised scandal, Keating forgeries became sought after in their own right and at least one dealer was subsequently to be duped into buying a fake of the faker's work.

From then on, Palmer's work once again exerted a pervasive power. A painter who could capture the landscape in a manner that was not merely naturalistic, who could infuse it with feeling in a way that escaped the sentimentalism so associated with the Victorians, who could transcend the literal and speak of spiritual forces, directly inspired such artists as those who in 1975 formed the Brotherhood of Ruralists, (a group which, incorporating David Inshaw and Peter Blake, aimed at following a traditional strand of figurative British painting) and found reflections in anything from the hallucinatory landscapes of the Turner Prize-nominated Peter Doig to the computer-scanned drawings of Paul Morrison who, turning the tiniest weed into a wall-sized triffid, plays Palmeresque tricks with scale. In 2009, the Tate staged a show,
The Dark Monarch
, in its St Ives gallery, linking the Romantic legacy of Palmer via the work of a variety of Modernist practitioners to a number of established and upcoming contemporaries, Damien Hirst, Eva Rothschild, Simon Periton and Cerith Wyn Evans among them. Exploring the tensions between progress and tradition, it looked at the meanings – geological, mythical, mystical and magical – that over the course of the twentieth century have been inscribed by British artists into the contours of their landscape.

For a long time it was only the Shoreham paintings that were widely appreciated. The rest of Palmer's career, thanks to the strong critical slant of Grigson's landmark biography, was regarded as little more than a process of sad decline. Only at the very end was he considered to have become interesting again as, withdrawing into the obsessive world of etching, he condensed a lifetime of vision into a few square inches of work. Then in 2005 the British Museum, to mark the bicentenary of Palmer's birth, put on the first major show by this artist in Britain since the V&A's exhibition of almost eighty years earlier. This exhibition, staged in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (to which it subsequently travelled), posited that a thread of unique sensibility could be followed from the Shoreham pictures, weaving its way through Palmer's work right to the end of his life. It gave the whole a sparkling coherence. The more commercial works that had until then been dismissed were scanned for sublimations of earlier obsessions, for adumbrations of future concerns. More than 51,000 visitors flocked into the cramped basement gallery – at least double the number that had been predicted. Curators at the British Museum were as astounded as thrilled by the huge popular response.

 

 

Kenneth Clark thought of Palmer as the English Van Gogh. There are several similarities between these two eccentric recluses who both believed passionately in the perfect community and set out to establish one: Palmer in Shoreham with the Ancients, Van Gogh with Paul Gauguin in his Studio of the South. They both were profoundly religious and sought to uncover a spiritual presence in nature. And they were both, during their lifetimes, all but completely neglected, considered by all but close friends to have failed.

Van Gogh died before he was forty, having shot himself with a revolver during one of his periodic bouts of insanity. Palmer, however, survived into old age, coming to understand only too well that for those who stand fast to the truth of their convictions – a truth which for him stood ‘at a fixed centre, midway between its two antagonists Fact and Phantasm'
18
– the fight will always be tough. ‘No one can clear away the brambles without getting thorns into his fingers' he told his son a few months before his death. ‘I do not think anyone can get his living without a struggle. The painter's and the poet's struggles are solitary and patient, silent and sublime.'
19

In comparison with his fellow British Romantics, Turner and Constable, Palmer still has to struggle. His name remains relatively unfamiliar. In part this is because his finest pictures – a scattering of images done in secret by a young idealist in Shoreham and a handful of etchings produced by an ageing recluse who, having lost faith with so many of life's promises, returns to the land of dreams that he had wandered in his youth – are so few. Further to this they are small. They do not ambush the gallery browser like Turner's grand dramas or, like Constable's canvases, unfurl to lengths of six foot. And yet their very fewness makes them even more precious and, by their very smallness, they become all the more intense.

There is a memorable passage in Emily Brontë's 1847
Wuthering Heights
, written when Palmer was in middle age, in which the narrator tells of his stay in the house from which the novel takes its title. Coming in from the moor, he unlatches the gate, crosses the garden and is let into the kitchen. From there he gradually progresses inwards, moving through a series of ever more narrowly confined spaces until finally, encased in a box-bed, he lies down to sleep. It is at this moment of physical restriction that his mind flies wide open and imaginative visions are free to flood in. A ghostly Cathy comes clawing at the latticed windowpane. Is it dream or reality? The reader is never quite clear.

Palmer's pictures work in something of the same way. His are not images to be admired from a distance. The visitor has to step closer, to peer inwards as if through the frame of some tiny window to gain an exhilarated glimpse of a painter's private world. Imparted with all the emotion of a passionately held secret, it is capable of holding the imagination transfixed.

The spectator gazes into landscapes as intensely felt in their own way as the passionate canvases of Van Gogh. These little framed boxes, like theatrical sets, their cardboard-cut-out horizons thrown high by the footlights, their moons hanging like lanterns amid foliage unruffled by winds, present a hermetic realm that feels at once far removed from reality and yet, at the same time, full of fresh relevance.