Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Herbert, mastering the art of printing, managed to coax from even the most worn-out plates some of the finest proofs of his father’s works. He was paid for his efforts; he needed the money because by then he had met the woman whom he hoped to marry. Yet Palmer was never truly to value his talent with the press and eventually, just at the moment when Herbert felt his prospects were brightest, he was persuaded to give printing up on the grounds that it was less an art than a trade. He had, however, by 1880, managed to save enough to be able to afford to make Helen Margaret Tidbury his wife.

  In May 1880, John Giles died. According to one account, he was run over by an omnibus – mown down, quite literally, by the progress that all his life he had fought. Richmond arranged for him – ‘the greatest and dearest friend that I had on earth’ – to be buried in Highgate Cemetery (where Finch also lay) in the same grave in which he and his family would later be interred. It would not be long before the first of them arrived. Early the next year Richmond’s wife, Julia, passed away, just twelve days before their golden wedding anniversary. Richmond was distraught: ‘On January 12th I laid the dear and faithful partner of all my joys and sorrows in the grave and my heart is well-nigh broken. My pencil as it were, fell from me and the love of art left me. I wholly gave up professional engagements and spent most of the year wandering in artlessness’.46

  Palmer tried to comfort his friend. ‘Had your affliction befallen me,’ he wrote, ‘I should have been left almost alone upon earth.’47 But Richmond, he reminded him, had the blessing of a family. He recommended books that could bring comfort – devotional meditations and the works of Pascal – and he wrote to the young Julia, who was going round daily to visit her father, suggesting that she coax him back to ‘medicinal’48 work.

  Palmer was now in his mid-seventies. All too aware of the brevity of the time that remained to him, he found comfort in such stories as that of a Bishop Butler who, just a few days before his death, had been strolling in his garden in the company of his chaplain: ‘I feel that my feet are upon the rock,’49 he had said. On warm summer evenings, Palmer too would still wander into the garden and, leaning on his staff, stand gazing at whichever of his wild flowers struggled on. He revelled in his old prints and Shoreham memories, said Herbert. His folio volumes were still kept piled on his table and the contents of his etching cupboard in orderly array. And he still kept on working. He might be found sketching a fine cloudscape or sunset from his windows or pondering one of his pastoral designs. His friends, encouraging him, kept up his hopes. ‘I feel like a promising youth with remarkably light hair,’50 Palmer laughed. And though, to the very end of his life, he suffered from his old disinclination to get on with his tasks, he had at last formed the habit ‘of taking the bull by the horns’: ‘[I] always find that after a little grunting he comes along like a lamb,’ he said.51 When instructed by a doctor to lie on a sofa and do nothing, Palmer managed to do so only for a couple of minutes before rising again with an impatient howl.

  The weather was harsh in Palmer’s final winter. Snowstorms swept over the country and he found himself mostly confined to the house. Day after day he would sit in his room, pulling out the pages of an almanac sent to him by Hook. On 18 January 1881, a great blizzard struck, sweeping a white blanket across southern England. Drifts as deep as lamp posts blocked miles of road and track.

  Palmer, bundled up in the rough flannel coat of a navvy, retired to the bed in his studio. From there, he worked on the watercolours of his Milton series, completing two paintings – The Prospect and The Eastern Gate – both images of dawn and both submitted for exhibition that year. Looking at his Eastern Gate – a picture of a powerful, bare-chested ploughman guiding his pair of yoked oxen out onto sun-flooded slopes – it is hard not to be moved by a parallel vision of its maker: a little old man bundled up in his bed with the flaring radiance of that glorious dawn breaking like the blare of a trumpet in his head.

  As the warmer days of spring approached, Palmer rose and flew to his Virgils. He finished his designs for the second eclogue and, having abandoned it at first attempt, returned with redoubled zest to preparing the tenth. Sometimes working at the washstand that doubled up as a desk, more often remaining in bed, he continued, but the only work that would ever be completed was Early Morning (or Opening the Fold), which had been published the previous year by the Fine Art Society. This image of the shepherd’s penned flock rushing out of the fold with the first rays of new light spoke perhaps of Palmer’s own yearning for the dawn of a new world. ‘If I were quite certain of rejoining my beloved ones, I should chide the slow hours which separated me,’52 he wrote in April that year. At the beginning of May he was taken ill and by the middle of the month his family had given up hope of him pulling through. Yet he continued to talk cheerfully, his mind ranging freely across familiar pastures, discussing among other things the continuation of his long cherished Virgils. His eyes would brighten with pleasure as he contemplated the difficulties to be overcome.

  Palmer’s earthly affairs were all sorted. The previous summer – shortly before his son’s marriage – he had written his will leaving Hannah modestly provided for, but, knowing that her father would continue to look after her, leaving as much as possible as an annuity to his son. He had suggested that Herbert’s fiancée should be given one of the Palmer family bibles and recorded as much as he could remember of his ancestry for a member of the Giles family who had shown an interest. Palmer had few possessions of any financial value to leave. A man who did not even own a watch – what use would he have had of it in his life of peaceful routine? – counted among his most treasured possessions an old shepherd’s smock, a huge battered straw hat, a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that had once belonged to his nurse, a few relics of Blake’s and a handful of fragmentary casts from the antique. The most precious thing he had ever had was his vision. He had put it down in his pictures. Hannah did not want these to go to auction, Palmer told his son.

  The elegant local doctor, in regular attendance at all the most handsome Reigate homes, must have looked a little askance at his latest patient. He would not have thought much of the muddled little room with its makeshift furniture and its cluttered shelves nor of its occupant, the diminutive figure who sat, propped up by pillows, an old cigar box on the table beside him in which were lovingly hoarded a row of densely scratched copperplates. The Homeward Star – an image capturing that magical moment when the first star of the evening rises into the night – would regularly have been pulled out of this case. It was probably the very last piece that Palmer worked on before he gave up entirely, only, from then on, from time to time stretching out a frail hand, its seams deeply stained with etcher’s ink, to lay it on the cigar box as if its mere presence could offer him comfort in some way.

  Palmer suffered the last days of his final illness with the patience that he had been taught by a long and difficult life. He regretted the trouble that he was giving. Hannah sat by his bedside, an attentive figure, for hour after hour, her watch periodically relieved by Richmond who, sitting peacefully by the bedside, must have felt a great loneliness as he watched this companion of his youth slipping slowly away.

  On the morning of 24 May 1881, Palmer asked that his son be called into his room. Herbert leaned over his father but he could only guess at the words that were whispered into his ear. A touch of their hands was to be their farewell. Palmer died later that day. When Herbert returned he found Richmond reading prayers by the bedside, his voice broken by grief.

  Palmer was not buried beside More, but in what was then a shady corner of Reigate churchyard. It was a fresh showery spring morning of the sort that he would have loved. The leaves of the elm trees cast a dappling shadow and, as the pastor read the words of the liturgy which Palmer had always so loved, a skylark hung singing in the sky far above. Just as the last words of the service faded, it dropped down silently into the grass.

  The grave is modest. It is fairly hard to find now. A low and narrow length of local stone
, its carved ribs forming a cross, lies amid the long grass. Pale lichens spread across it like opening blossoms. ‘He that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live,’53 is inscribed in Gothic script. A church tower presides over the scene. The church had always been the lynchpin of Palmer’s world and standing there gazing up at it, it is hard not to recall the lonely tower of his picture. The etching that he made from this painting is among the finest works in this medium by any English artist and the bright pinpoint of light that he picked out from the darkness has become for posterity a symbol of all that he stood for.

  It is this bright speck of shining that inspired the poet William Butler Yeats. He described it in a poem that he wrote to the moon:

  The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,

  An image of mysterious wisdom won through toil.54

  23

  The Legacy

  Vision held . . . with such delicate, grave concentration

  Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years

  Linnell outlived his son-in-law by six months. Too fragile to stand at his easel, he passed his time studying his own translation of the Bible and sometimes, on fine days, being pushed around his grounds in an unstable Bath chair. The unappealing picture that his grandson Herbert painted of him is mitigated by the more affectionate account of another descendant who described him roaring with laughter when, tipped out of his wobbly conveyance, he landed feet upwards in a garden bush. Linnell could only write with great difficulty. Even his cashbook entries finally came to a stop, though he still managed to pen a corrective line to his doctor when he found that he had been overcharged on a bill. His last letter was to Hannah, the daughter he had tried for so long to reclaim. ‘Why don’t you come to see me?’ he asked.1 He knew his time had come. On 20 January 1882, fully conscious to the last, he passed away. He was five months short of his ninetieth birthday.

  Linnell was buried in the same Reigate churchyard in which, the previous year, Palmer’s coffin had been laid; but this time it was not a small private ceremony. The death of a famous painter was a public event. Shops were shut and a stream of carriages formed part of the cortège. Reigate neighbours were joined by mourners from London until the churchyard was crowded and the little funerary chapel so tightly packed that its doors had to be locked. Linnell, who had disliked the studied dolefulness of conventional mourning and had only rarely attended funerals himself, would not have approved, but the local papers gave voluminous accounts.

  Linnell’s grave is marked, as befits his character, by a severe upright headstone. He was buried beside his first wife, and his second was to follow in four years’ time. His daughter Lizzie, who had never married but remained at Redstone to look after her father, was eventually, when she died in 1903 at the age of eighty-three, to share his burial place. Immediately to the left and right are the graves of other relations. Linnell, in death as in life, gathered his family about him; but Hannah, who died on 27 October 1893, by then no longer in her right mind, was not laid beside her father. She found her last resting place not far off, alongside her husband in his humbler grave.

  God, family and art had always been the three most important elements of Linnell’s life. The devotion with which he served the first two had had their effect on the last. His paintings varied from the vigorously eye-catching to the merely competent. It is not surprising, given the huge quantity of canvases that he turned out. To the Victorians he had seemed an artist of great talent. ‘The most powerful landscape painter since Turner,’ The Times obituary declared: with his passing ‘a glory seems to have faded from the domain of British Art’. And yet, his reputation soon faded. Critical tastes were turning away from descriptive narratives towards the atmospheric innovations of the Impressionists and though in his late works a certain ‘impressionism’ has sometimes been remarked upon, this stylistic freedom was probably more a result of fading eyesight and faltering hand than a conscious attempt to imitate the innovative French painters who had first burst on to the Parisian art scene in 1874. Superseded by fashion, his oeuvre was soon forgotten. He disappeared into the sort of obscurity that Palmer had long known.

  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.