Mysterious Wisdom (7 page)

Success at the summer exhibition was crucial and competition was fierce. Only a fraction of the works submitted could be selected. The jury was far from impartial; and even having been chosen, an artist still had to hope that the hanging committee would accord his works an honourable spot. In 1784, Gainsborough withdrew his contributions in a huff because he felt that they had not been treated with the dignity they deserved and, in 1809, the placing of Benjamin Haydon's
Dentatus
in an insignificant side chamber ignited a quarrel with the Academy which was never to be soothed. Everyone aspired to have their work hung in the Great Room (rather than in one of the cramped subsidiary spaces) and ‘on the line' which now means roughly eye-level but, at that time, had a quite literal connotation for in the Academy's galleries, first at Trafalgar Square and then in Somerset House, a dado rail ran around the room about eight feet above the ground. A picture was ‘on the line' when its frame rested almost upon it. Large works were almost invariably placed above the line and, if they were higher up, tilted slightly forwards; smaller pieces, distributed like space fillers among them, would often be all but impossible to appreciate, even though spectators would bring spyglasses or even telescopes.

As artists competed for attention, jealous rivalries broke out. In 1781, Fuseli and Reynolds went head to head. The former, having spotted Reynolds at work on his
Death of Dido
, decided to challenge him by painting his own version of the subject. This was the sort of stunt which could make a name known. The combative Turner was certainly not above such behaviour. In 1832, he made his usual visit to the summer exhibition on ‘varnishing day'. This was a day just before the public opening which had originally been allocated so that artists who had submitted freshly painted canvases could apply a protective gloss to their works; but for many years it had been used instead to make last-minute alterations. Turner, fond of parading his daunting technical skills, was particularly famous for putting this extra time to good use: he would submit half-painted canvases and then, on varnishing day, proceed to complete the entire picture right in front of his fellows in just a few hours. When, in 1832, he found his muted seascape
Helvoetsluys
hung alongside a festively coloured Constable canvas,
The Opening of Waterloo Bridge
, he thought it looked drab and so added a small red buoy to his composition: a bright dab of scarlet to give it a new life while, just as importantly, making the work of his rival look gaudy. ‘Turner has been here and fired a gun,' Constable remarked in dismay when, at the grand opening, he saw what had been done. A canvas that had taken him almost a decade to complete had been suddenly diminished by his competitor's stunt.

The more sharply the artists elbowed for attention, the more eagerly the public crowded to see, pushing and shoving to gawp at the most gossiped-about pictures. Parasols, umbrellas and walking sticks had to be banned and in 1806 when David Wilkie, then still an unknown Scottish teenager, made a debut with his
Village Politicians
, a realistic portrayal of rustics arguing in their local inn, a subject of such mundanity that no previous artist had ever aspired to paint it, crush barriers had to be erected to contain the chaotic throng. Everyone wanted to look at this most extraordinary image of completely ordinary life.

For emerging artists, the summer exhibition was a formative experience. The first that Palmer attended was to be fixed in his mind forever by Turner's 1819
Entrance of the Meuse
:
Orange Merchant at the Bar, going to pieces
. Even to the modern-day viewer familiar with this master's late canvases, in which light and colour dissolve in tempestuous flurries and sublime passions are whipped up by the sheer power of paint, this cloudscape feels stirring. The young Palmer was rooted to the spot. Here was a freedom he had never before encountered. He was, as he put it, ‘by nature a lover of smudginess'.
20
He could find a painting lesson, he said, in the sediment at the bottom of a coffee cup. A lifelong admiration for Turner was instilled. ‘I have revelled in him from that day to this,'
21
Palmer recorded more than fifty years later. The finest artists, he came to believe, could combine both precise visual description and hazy vagueness of mood but, of these two, he considered the indefinite part to be the most difficult as well as the most desirable. ‘When I think of a pocket sketch-book of soft printer's paper, a piece of charcoal, or very soft chalk, and a finger to blend it about, I think of improvement,' he wrote.
22
Turner led the young artist away from mere description towards a pursuit of the ‘effects' that he was to fight to capture all his life. He began to experiment with a new vigour, even trying out blustery Turneresque scenes, attempting to convey the glower of a rainstorm as it sweeps its sullen shadow across a bay's glittering expanses. And yet, for all the gusty freshness of the gales that, over the course of his life, he would find himself dashing down, his landscapes would tend to owe more to the peaceably nostalgic views of Dutch painters than to Turner's dramatic visions.

Little in Palmer's early work heralded his distinctive talent, though future subjects can be spotted – the softly domed hills that enfold humble dwellings, the church towers that speak of higher spiritual truths, the cattle that will wander off to re-emerge as sheep (the more conventional denizens of the pastoral dream) – and themes that will later be developed emerge. Palmer followed Turner to the riverside vantage point from which he had painted his 1819
Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday
. This impressive view, its vistas stretching away down lush green slopes across the ancient Petersham meadows and beyond to the broad curve of the Thames, was already famous as the landscape that had inspired Henry Purcell to compose and tempted Thomas Gainsborough away from his portraits and, retiring in old age to Richmond, James Thomson, the author of the words to
Rule Britannia
, would describe it as the very quintessence of ‘happy Britannia'.

At a time when painters were first turning away from the tenets of antiquity and, with an affection nurtured by fear of invasion, starting to associate native scenery with Britishness, it is significant that Palmer should have tackled so emblematic a view. ‘Landscape is of little value,' as he was later to put it, ‘but as it hints or expresses the haunts and doings of man.'
23
In painting his local countryside, he was also speaking of a quintessentially British way of life.

The young artist also made several studies of his beloved churches which, from the soaring cathedral to the humblest grey turret, seemed to him as a Christian ‘the most charming points of our English landscape – gems of sentiment for which our woods, and green slopes, and hedgerow elms are the lovely and appropriate setting'. Take away the churches, he said, ‘where for centuries the pure word of God has been read to the poor in their mother tongue . . . and you have a frightful kind of Paradise left – a Paradise without a God'.
24
For Palmer, the English countryside embraced the lives of its people like the walls of a church surrounding its congregation. It seems no accident that one of the few overtly religious subjects that he tackled was that of the Old Testament wrestling match between Jacob and the Angel. Palmer's work grappled with the spiritual world in much the same way. He struggled to give it a physical presence, to bring it back down to the earth. Slowly but ineluctably a sense of landscape, Church and nation drew together in his imagination. It is not hard to see why, after much time spent ‘in controversial reading which ought to have been given to painting',
25
he moved towards the Establishment faith. He became a committed member of the Church of England and considered even those he most loved – his father and his dear old nurse – to be misled. One cannot help wondering what his hero, John Milton, an almost heretical freethinker and a ‘surly republican',
26
would have thought.

 

 

Palmer enjoyed a modest early success. In 1819 he exhibited two oil paintings at the British Institution, a club which, founded in 1805 by private subscription to promote national talent, had provided an important alternative to the Academy at a time when an open market for art was fast developing and the number of practitioners escalating apace. One of his pictures found a buyer much to Palmer's delight. The scrappy little note that he got from the keeper informing him of a sale made to a Mr Wilkinson of Marylebone was discovered among his papers at the end of his life.

Mr Wilkinson suggested that Palmer should pay him a visit. He may have been a little surprised at the youth of the artist who arrived on his doorstep. Palmer, having just turned fourteen, had not embarked upon his career at an uncommonly early age but, judging by the drawing which his friend Henry Walter did of him at this time, he looked little more than a child and, for all that he has trussed himself up in wing-collar and cravat for the portrait, was possessed of a child's earnest innocence to boot. It was an impression that Palmer was often to give for, small and pink-cheeked, he had a high piping voice which, though imbued with a richness that made him a fine tenor, was always to keep the clear timbre of youth.

Palmer was hopeful. His career was showing promise – not least when compared with that of his father who, supported by an annuity from his brother, Nathanial, was in the process of uprooting himself again. He was moving his home, his sons, his loyal family retainer (on whom, without his wife to tell him to put on fresh small clothes, he was more than ever dependent) and his bookshop to 10, Broad Street in Bloomsbury. It was a dingy house, disturbed by the rattle of incessant traffic, but the social cachet of the area was on the way up. ‘You must not confound us with London in general, my dear sir,' insists Jane Austen's haughty Isabella Knightley of her house in the locality. ‘The neighbourhood . . . is so very different from all the rest. We are so very airy!'

Airiness would have suited the asthmatic Palmer but his father's new home was rather closer to the cramped tenements of the run-down Covent Garden than the Regency terraces that Miss Knightley extols, and his health started to decline around this time, causing him to miss appointments and deadlines. Nonetheless, the move fitted his career. He was now just around the corner from Charlotte Street which, as the upper classes decamped to the fashionable West End, was increasingly colonised by painters and so became known as the new artists' quarter, while the British Museum, the capital's richest repository of books and antiquities, was only a short walk away. It was here that Palmer would later spend a lot of time drawing.

The young painter also benefited from the help of his grandfather's friends. Thomas Stothard offered advice and encouragement and would occasionally present the young artist with tickets to Academy lectures at which he would hear such celebrated figures as the sculptor John Flaxman, then the single most influential artistic practitioner of his day, enjoining his students to search out the ideal lineaments that lay hidden within nature, to look to such great home-grown talents as Milton, to appreciate the beauties of a lost medieval aesthetic and respect the simple purity of line. ‘Sentiment is the life and soul of fine art!' Flaxman said. ‘Without it all is a dead letter.'
27
Such ideas lodged themselves firmly in Palmer's mind.

Palmer was also forging his first artistic friendships. George Cooke, a line engraver, often used to call in at Broad Street for rousing discussions. He encouraged the young artist to keep looking at Turner for whom he and his brother, from 1811 to 1826 (when they fell out with the artist), did many engravings. They possessed a magnificent collection of Turner prints which ‘formed part of the pabulum of my admiration', Palmer wrote.
28
A watercolourist, Francis Oliver Finch, three years older than Palmer and at the time of their first meeting studying under the renowned drawing master John Varley, joined Henry Walter as an artistic ally. Palmer was also to remain friendly with Wate and when his old teacher succumbed to cholera a decade or so later leaving his widow with nothing but a few sticks of furniture, Palmer went to some effort to secure her an annuity from a beneficence fund.

In 1820, Palmer had a picture accepted by the Royal Academy and the next year another while the British Institution took two. The year after that, despite having none at the Academy, there were three at the British Institution, one of which was singled out (along with Constable's
Haywain
) by the critic of
The Examiner
who praised it for ‘touches at once so spontaneous and true, and light so unostentatiously lustrous'.
29
Prospective buyers were beginning to make appointments. And yet, despite these tokens of public success, Palmer was floundering. He lacked the confident grounding of a classical training. He had not learnt the rudiments of anatomy. ‘O that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head thirty years ago,'
30
he was later to lament, wishing that he had been ‘well flogged when somewhat younger'
31
and so forced to adopt a less dilettantish approach. He came deeply to regret the ‘years wasted any one of which would have given a first grounding in anatomy – indispensable anatomy'. ‘The bones are the master key,' he would say. ‘Power seems to depend upon knowledge of structure.'
32