Palmer at first was entranced. ‘What shall I say of Rome?’ he cried. ‘Rome is a thing by itself which, once seen, leaves the memory no more – a city of Art which one . . . can scarce believe one has seen with these ocular jellies – to which London seems a warehouse and Paris a trinket shop.’13 They watched the sun as it sank beyond the dome of St Peter’s, visited the Colosseum by flickering candlelight, witnessed Pope Gregory blessing prostrate multitudes and joined their fellow English tourists for opera trips. For Palmer, the magic of unfamiliarity infused everything at the beginning, although the Richmonds, in their neighbouring lodgings, found the atmosphere rather less charming and three months later moved on.
It was not until May 1838 that the Palmers, disentangling themselves from the happy society of the many artists they had met, got going again, travelling to Naples to escape the rising summer heat. Their carriage, hopping with the fleas that had disembarked from an accompanying greyhound, was protected by a guard with two pistols for there had been several robberies on the marshes which they had to cross. Naples they found ‘filthy and uninteresting’;14 their rooms were pestiferous dens with the foul stink of drains, and for all that Vesuvius bubbled fitfully away – they described dreadful rumblings and drifting ash and a sun that glowed red as if shining through a fog – they did not hang around waiting for the promised eruption, for the volcano, locals told them, could go on grumbling for weeks.
By early June, the Palmers were in Pompeii where they found lodgings in a rustic cottage at the edge of the ancient ruins. ‘You can go into their kitchens and cellars and see their jugs and utensils,’15 Hannah told her parents. She was spooked by the eerie silence that hung over the site and the skeletons of trapped prisoners still fastened by their chains. Palmer was astounded by the quality of the paintings: ‘If these are the works of antique house decorators what must Apelles have been!!’16 he exclaimed.
The sun was baking: by nine o’clock each morning the young couple were forced to stop working because of the heat. They spent August and September sketching in the cooler climates of the mountainous Torre Annunziata, Salerno and Corpo di Cava, before returning to Rome at the end of October in preparation for a second winter, throughout which Hannah worked on her father’s commission.
Arriving back in the capital, they felt like old hands. They were welcomed as friends by their earlier acquaintances and met up with the Richmonds whose baby, born at the beginning of that year, had already cut six teeth. By the time Julia left the immortal city she was pregnant again.
From Rome, the Palmers took a diversion to nearby Tivoli – ‘the most charming place we have seen in Italy’17 declared Hannah with the effusive delight that marked arrival at any new spot – where they settled down for a month or so in rural lodgings. Palmer, taking advantage of the balmy late autumn weather, produced some of his best paintings before retiring to the hearthside to spend hours reading Shakespeare while his wife worked at resuscitating her tattered wardrobe. By New Year 1839 they were again in Rome where they remained before heading northwards for the summer, reaching Subiaco on donkey-back by June. The heat here was intense and, tortured by fleas, they moved a month later to the fresher climate of Civitella until the temperature there also mounted and an outbreak of plague sent them fleeing, travelling by mule under the light of a moon which picked out the speckled green corpses of abandoned plague victims, to Papignia, a picturesque little village in the Umbrian hills. From there they travelled via Terni back to Florence, where, passing the entirety of September and October ‘wholly absorbed in art’, Palmer became ‘so imbued with love for the landscape of Titian and Giorgione’ that he vowed never to ‘paint in my old style again’.18
The letters written by Palmer and Hannah from Italy are irregular. They reached the Linnells haphazardly, sometimes in the wrong order, sometimes two at once; long and (as far as Hannah’s parents were concerned) nerve-wracking interludes often fell between them, provoking terrible anxieties and leading to angry recriminations. Read all together, however, they give a vivacious account of foreign adventures. Palmer, who would pull out his pen as soon as the tea was drawing, had rather less time than his wife for writing; but their missives – his often poured onto the page without revisions or erasures, hers full of apologies for not writing sooner, for having bad handwriting, broken pens or for being too brief – bring their experiences to vivid life. ‘An account of all the novelties which I have seen, if hung from the top of the Monument, would trail upon London Bridge,’19 Palmer said.
He and his new wife observed everything wide-eyed, from the extravagant masquerades of the Rome carnival to a papal procession in which a white satin pontiff was borne aloft like ‘something the English boys carry about on the fifth of November’.20 They remarked on the ‘dear precious shining heavenly faces’ of the ‘poor barefooted pilgrims’21 arriving at churches to pray. They witnessed a monk securing his dinner by offering fish-market traders a coloured print of the Virgin to kiss in exchange for a small gift from each of their stalls: ‘I think in Billingsgate he would find himself as much out of his element as the fish themselves,’22 Palmer observed dryly. They met a curly-headed urchin who had been christened after Christ’s prophetic cousin: ‘I saw John the Baptist this morning eat a very large raw Cucumber for breakfast,’23 Hannah said. And they watched a funeral in which boys dressed as angels carried the bier, their large pasteboard wings knocking against everything, and making, Hannah noted, the most uncelestial noise. They listened to nightingales, saw the oxen of Theocritus and the frescos of the Florentines, ate pomegranates and oranges and sketched cypress trees planted in the days of Ariosto. They crammed their letters full of detailed observations of everything: from the way that bedsheets, shaken out of windows, scattered passers-by with bugs, through how swaddled babies were hung up on hooks to keep them out of the way, to the heat of the door handles which could not even be touched. Nothing was too small to mention – from a screaming match with a curricle driver to the loss of a parasol.
The weather proved a matter of constant discussion. One moment Palmer was shivering in Rome ‘wearing always two shirts and two waistcoats lined with flannel – and sometimes an India rubber cloak’,24 a few months later he was sweltering through the high summer of Pompeii. ‘It is a labour here to lift my hand for a dip of ink,’ he moaned, though at least he was being baked in a ‘pleasantly ventilated oven’.25 In Florence a stifling heatwave reduced him to the consistency ‘of the jelly fish which we find on the sands’.26 Food provided a source of at least as much fuss. They started off, Hannah assured her mother, by eating only the sort of things that they could be sure of: fowls, beefsteak, fish and veal, and, since all was ‘cooked in the French way, covered with sauce and curiosities’,27 they left anything they didn’t recognise. At first Palmer considered Italian cookery ‘most hateful’ – ‘nothing portly, nothing round, majestic or profound in it’28 – but in Rome he mastered a modestly priced bill of fare and, from the 580 dishes on offer, found six he could manage, though macaroni, he warned Richmond, was ‘vile rubbish . . . most constipating . . . and hard of digestion’, its effects only rectified by ‘blessed bowel opening’ oranges, grapes and figs.29 But they soon grew accustomed to foreign eating habits and came to relish raw ham and fresh fruit for breakfast or the ample ‘fat of the land’ fare of mountain dwellers. Every dinner seemed to be ‘better studied than the last’,30 the increasingly portly Palmer declared. In the course of his Italian sojourn he grew so fat that a visiting friend reported back to his family that he stood ‘like a fixed easel’. ‘Well you are likely to come home a man of substance in some sense,’31 the sardonic Linnell remarked.
The Palmers described all their encounters with the natives, from the cries of ‘Piccola Inglese’, pursuing Hannah down the streets, to the body odour of the locals which Palmer found more problematic than their beliefs – though it was not just the human population that could be troublesome. The local fauna proved equally threatening, from the pack of fierce
dogs which Palmer charged with his iron-tipped walking stick, through the wolves that supposedly prowled the wild mountain tracks (and which Palmer, hearing strange rustlings, one day bravely confronted, only to find that ‘lo! up came a goat!’32), to the snakes and the scorpions that lurked under beds. And though, in the long run, none of these creatures caused them any difficulties (a scorpion was even popped into a box as a present for Hannah’s little brother), the mosquitoes turned out to be a constant torment. Palmer and Hannah spent many a sleepless night rubbing themselves alternately with soap and vinegar, pacing their rooms and scratching, before eventually one day deciding to travel ten miles by donkey (Anny falling off on the way when the girth suddenly broke) specifically to buy nets. Even these didn’t entirely solve the problem since the nights were so hot that even a layer of gauze could become unbearable. The fleas – F sharps, they called them, F for their initial letter and because their bites were so sharp (whereas the bed bugs were known as B flats, B for their initial and because the insects were flat) – proved to be a particular trial. Palmer suffered ‘perpetual minute venesection’, he said. ‘I suppose daily body washes are peculiarly tempting to vermin,’33 he groaned, unwilling to give up the personal hygiene that ever since Shoreham had remained a point of pride.
Despite such tribulations, however, the Palmers soon began to feel at ease in Italy. In Rome, they met up round a trestle table every evening for dinner and animated discussion with a colony of English artists. They discovered a Protestant church, and they quickly learnt to make friends with fellow travellers, a cast of characters that included a Mr Macdonald, a Scotsman who angrily stormed out of the room when one day a rude comment about the bagpipes was passed (Palmer was not the offender but tried to make peace, he assured Linnell) and the artist Edward Lear whom they met in Civitella and who played the flute for an impromptu ball. A year into her trip, Hannah was not remotely worried to find herself travelling in the company of complete strangers. ‘I made myself at home with them in minutes,’ she wrote, ‘though at first they gave me the usual fashionable glare which I am now so used to that it does not in the least discompose me.’34
Soon the Palmers were taking siestas and speaking passable Italian. Hannah befriended the locals with particular ease and an Italian lady in Papignia was so grieved at the prospect of their eventual parting that, amid profuse tears, they exchanged locks of hair. In her second winter in Rome, Hannah started Italian lessons with a man whose brother was a captain in the Swiss Guard. The Palmers became seasoned travellers. They found out how to face down the wily veturino drivers, to bargain with shop keepers and boil up coffee in a tin in their room. They learnt to carry their own soap because there was never any on the washstand, to sleep between blankets when the sheets were damp, to hire a boy to fend off the people who would crowd them while they were sketching and, when communicating with locals, to exchange decorous English manners for boldly flashing eyes and a loudly raised voice. Unfortunately, it was only many years after leaving that Palmer learnt that burning camphor could keep mosquitoes away.
As soon as she arrived in a new lodging, Hannah would pull out her knitting and make herself at home. ‘Travelling is nothing when one is used to it,’ she airily informed her sister. ‘A clean coarse mattress in a little hot room without a single decoration’35 came to feel like a blessing. The Italians, she enthused, were ‘truly delightful people’; she praised their warm-hearted affection, the way they would jump up and hug. ‘We are such a cold set of people,’ she remarked.36 She was particularly charmed by the way that the villagers would kiss her hand in the street and say ‘Buon-giorno Eccelenza’.37 They were ‘wonderful people in spite of their fleas’,38 Palmer declared. ‘I have learned more of mankind since I left England than I did all my life before . . . [I] fancy I know how to get through the world pretty well.’39
Though the Linnells had had qualms before the wedding of their daughter, Hannah’s honeymoon letters were designed to reassure them. ‘The propriety of our marriage is a thing I never doubt for a moment,’ she told her mother a few months after leaving. ‘If Mr Palmer had come abroad without me you would have lost me altogether as I am quite sure I should not have lived.’ ‘I am fatter and better than I have ever been in my life.’ ‘Mr Palmer is kinder to me than even I could have expected.’40 ‘We live in increasing mutual delight in each other’s society’. ‘We have not had one quarrel yet, and I do not think there is any fear with so kind a creature.’41 Palmer, in his turn, was equally enthusiastic. ‘Anny is exactly the wife I wanted,’ he told Linnell. ‘My anticipations of happiness’ in her society ‘have been most fully realised and every day I think brings an increase of affection without exception or alloy.’42 He especially liked her high-spirited moods. ‘I had no notion she had so much sparkle and buoyancy,’ he declared one evening when, fearing that she might have been unsettled by the bustle of the Roman carnival, he had approached her ‘thinking to comfort her very tenderly’ only to find to his amazement that she had leapt up and, bursting into laughter, had started to dance and sing. ‘I thought myself a tolerably merry animal,’ wrote Palmer, ‘but I am quite a Simon Pure compared with Anny who is all dance and frisk and frolic.’43
The young couple’s missives offer glimpses of close mutual happiness: of Anny giggling as she mischievously erases a bit of a letter that Palmer is writing, or laughing open-mouthed as her husband, kneeling on the carpet before her, attempts to stuff three large onions into a duck. When Julia Richmond brings news that Anny has permission to draw a privately owned Titian portrait, Palmer is so pleased that he falls upon the floor and, kicking like a lady in hysterics, seizes a tambourine before leaping up to perform a Bacchic dance. Linnell would no doubt have considered the response a trifle undignified, though the Richmonds would more probably have understood, for it was in a letter to them that Hannah told of how she had had to tick her husband off for his ‘most beastly’ trick of trying to cram as many grapes as possible into his mouth at once ‘till the juice ran out of each side, like the lions of the Roman fountains!’44
Palmer and Hannah – often mistaken by shopkeepers for brother and sister – were much at ease with each other and it is perhaps surprising that, in the course of their honeymoon, she never became pregnant. Perhaps the couple deliberately avoided conception because they feared that it would interfere with their future work. Having travelled with the expectant Julia, they would have been only too aware of the awkwardness; Hannah had often been snappy with the Richmonds’ four-year-old son and perhaps did not want to shoulder the burdens of motherhood quite yet.
The creation of paintings – not progeny – lay at the heart of the Palmers’ plans. Sam intended to return to England with a portfolio of drawings to sell as well as sheaves of preparatory sketches for more significant commissions; Hannah too had ambitions which he took as seriously as his own. He believed her capable of great things. ‘I should like to fight up into fame and get her a Greek and Latin master from Oxford – Novello for music lessons – I see her quite a Lady Calcott,’ he wrote, referring to the wife of a naval officer who, when her husband was at sea, became a writer of children’s and travel books: ‘tho’ I hope she will be more – namely a fine and original artist’.45
Hannah often found drawing frustrating and sometimes, losing her temper, she would hurl down her papers and stamp on them in pique. If it were not for Palmer, she told her parents, she would have given up for good. But he was a patient master and soon she was producing what she believed might be saleable sketches while he coaxed her on, always ready to hail each new effort as her finest so far. In Rome she would set off for the Sistine Chapel with her basket of painting materials and stay there from nine until four in the afternoon, working on her copies of the Michelangelo frescos for her father’s commission, while her husband would find some other spot to sketch. They would take it in turns to grind colours for each other’s boxes, sometimes share a hired model or draw side by side in a scenic landscape. A comic pen sketch by
a fellow artist, Penry Williams, captures them at work: the bespectacled Palmer and his bonneted wife perch on a rock like a pair of puffins while half a dozen other artists roost all around. Anny was particularly taken by the picturesque local costumes and, taking a brigand’s wife as her first sitter, made the first of a series of records of the exotic Italian dress. She planned to turn these drawings into a book. She also dreamt of selling a set of five etchings done after her husband’s pieces to a London publisher. Palmer could thereby become ‘as much known in a week, as he would become by a year’s private circulation of the etchings’,46 she wrote.
They were both optimistic. It was in Italy, after all, that artists from the idealising Richard Wilson to the atmospheric J. M. W. Turner had made their names. But talent alone, they discovered, was not quite enough. Where Richmond had arrived in the capital armed with a bundle of introductory letters, Palmer had brought no recommendations and without them, he soon realised, Rome’s social circles remained resolutely sealed. He grew increasingly self-conscious about his lack of social graces. While Anny, he told her parents, ‘will do very well for society . . . “I – the dogs bark at me as I halt by them”,’47 he wrote (quoting from Shakespeare’s Richard III). His eccentric dress sense can hardly have helped, not least as his journey progressed and he hatched idiosyncratic plans to avoid the darning of stockings which involved cutting patches from one bit of footwear and tacking them on to the other’s sole. Where Hannah was presentable – she even invested in a new evening dress for Roman parties at which artists’ wives, she noted, dressed more like queens – her husband, however passable he tried to make himself, always looked in comparison with any regular dandy much like a coal barge beside a royal yacht.
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