Mysterious Wisdom Read online

  Praise for Mysterious Wisdom

  Shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize

  ‘One of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic, with an understanding of the human heart, has produced this masterpiece. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read of anyone: it captures the tragedy of Palmer’s life, and brings out the shimmering glory, the iridescent secrets of his Shoreham phase’ A.N. Wilson Spectator

  ‘She tells in detail the story of his long and often sad personal life, skilfully interweaving it with the many changes in his professional interests and outlook, and in the process illuminating hitherto obscure aspects of his career. Th is is a valuable study ... excellent’ Literary Review

  ‘The neglected artist Samuel Palmer is well served by this richly perceptive life’ Sunday Times

  ‘Triumphantly captures such ardent early Victorian piety with a vividness and an energy that carry the reader to the luminous heart of Palmer’s work … Campbell-Johnston deploys her talent as an art critic to delineate the technical as well as philosophical progressiveness of Palmer’s work, yet the figure who emerges from Mysterious Wisdomis too exuberant and vivid for tragedy. He strides from the pages, as warm and tenderly eccentric as the paintings from his “Curiosity Portfolio”’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘The compelling strangeness of Campbell-Johnston’s book, however, is that it doesn’t depend on a claim to Palmer’s artistic greatness. Rather, it’s carried by the almost shockingly polarised light and shadow of his life’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘A brilliantly written book. Rachel Campbell-Johnston brings a novelist’s eye to the life of Palmer’ John Wilson, Front Row

  ‘[A] vivid new portrait’ Evening Standard

  ‘Excellent … A hugely remarkable story engagingly told’ Sunday Times Ireland

  ‘This gentle, sympathetic book will encourage people to discover a visionary’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  ‘Yet if Palmer doesn’t quite live up to our expectations of the Romantic artist, the close society the author describes is as rich in detail as his paintings and vivid with the life of its personalities, the now neglected first movement in Britain, The Ancients’ **** Metro

  Mysterious Wisdom

  The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer

  Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  For Will whom I love and for Sebastian whom I have lost.

  ‘The painter’s and the poet’s struggles are solitary and patient,

  silent and sublime’

  from an 1881 letter from Samuel Palmer to his son

  Contents

  Preface

  1 The Palmer Family

  2 Early Years

  3 The Beginnings of an Artist

  4 John Linnell

  5 The Sketchbook of 1824

  6 William Blake

  7 Palmer Meets Blake

  8 The Oxford Sepias

  9 The Primitive

  10 The Ancients

  11 Shoreham

  12 At Work in the Valley of Vision

  13 The Pastoral and the Political

  14 The Sensual and the Spiritual

  15 The End of the Dream

  16 Honeymoon in Italy

  17 Back in England

  18 The Years of Disillusion

  19 A Bitter Blow

  20 Redhill

  21 The Milton Series

  22 The Lonely Tower

  23 The Legacy

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Plate Section

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Preface

  The young man in the picture looks straight out at the viewer. But he is also at the same time staring into himself. His gaze is so distant that it seems almost drugged. What is he thinking? The spectator can’t help but wonder about the world that lies beyond that broad, high brow.

  Samuel Palmer was barely out of his teens when he drew his defining self-portrait. It’s hardly the image you would expect from an upcoming artist at that time. He does not strike the pose of the ambitious young professional; make a bid for new clients by parading palette and brush. He hasn’t bothered to shave or to straighten his collar; no comb has been run through his thick tousled hair. This is not a picture that presents a public persona. It is a portrait that asks you to look into a mind.

  How can he conjure the visions that move through his entranced imagination, speak of the feelings that swell like an organ fugue in the heart? These are the problems that Palmer faced all his life as a painter. To try to understand them is to enter the head of the dreamer who stares out from this picture, to know why his image, a longstanding favourite of Ashmolean Museum visitors, is also among the most evocative of its Romantic age.

  Palmer’s life leads its followers into a world that has been transformed by a visionary imagination, into the landscapes that lie beyond earthly veils. It is a place in which the magical shines through the material, in which nature and heaven are intertwined, in which God in all his mildness blesses man’s harvests and the darkness of night can be innocent and day. This is not the haunt of any workaday painter. It is the home of the artist as mystic and seer and poet.

  1

  The Palmer Family

  O! blessed biography which has embalmed a few of the

  graces of so many great and good people

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  To stand on the Old Kent Road amid the fumes of the traffic crawling in from the suburbs and the thunder of lorries rumbling off to the coast is to feel an awfully long way from the land of Samuel Palmer; from his slumbering shepherds and his tumbling blossoms, his mystical cornfields and bright sickle moons. But take a turn down a side street, beside the betting shop where cigarette butts scatter the pavement and opposite the fuel pumps of a garage forecourt, and within a matter of paces you will find yourself stepping into what could almost be another world. The noise of cars fades to a dull background grumble, the fumes leak away amid rustling plane leaves. You might even spot a songbird flitting into a garden as you slip between the posts that prevent the passage of vehicles and enter the peaceful enclave of south London’s Surrey Square.

  To the right, behind a row of ornamental iron railings, runs a handsome terrace of houses. They are Georgian. Each has an elegant three-bay façade with a smartly symmetrical pattern of sash windows, a panelled door with brass knocker and a pretty fanlight; a few are distinguished by an old-fashioned lamp bracket arching over the steps that lead up from the street. It is one of these – now number 42 – that is marked out with a homemade English Heritage-style plaque. And it is here that the story of Samuel Palmer starts.

  Life is always a lottery, but the odds were not good at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Almost a quarter of all babies would have been bundled into their graves before they reached their first birthday, a fraction that rose to more than a third among the urban poor. Palmer would one day learn the pain of loss only too well. But for now he was lucky: he was born into a middle-class family whose comfortable financial circumstances could cushion a few of the world’s harsher blows.

  The surname of Palmer is not an uncommon one. It derives from the medieval nickname for pilgrims who, returning from their long, faithful tramps to the Holy Land, brought home with them palm fronds which they displayed as proof. But the branch of the Palmer family to which Samuel belonged boasted gentlemanly origins. Its members bore arms, tracing their ancestry back to the fourteenth-century Henry Chicheley who, as Archbishop of Canterbury, had been immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry V. In the play, he is the favourite who first urges the King to lay claim to France a
nd, in real life, to atone for his role in disastrous French wars, he founded the Oxford college of All Souls.

  Palmer, however, would relate rather more closely to a later Anglican lineage which included the sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker and the eighteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake. The family also claimed kinship with the Whig politician Charles James Fox who, having filled a number of senior government posts including that of Britain’s first foreign secretary, was still in office when Samuel was born, though he died the following year. ‘My Father used to say that his brother . . . made out their relationship to Charles James Fox in two minutes, beginning with the words “Sir Stephen Fox married so and so”,’1 Samuel would recall towards the end of his life, though the only evidence he could offer of this connection was the story of a Mr Barry who, standing in the same relation to Fox as Palmer’s father, had upon application been endowed with a valuable government appointment for life. As for the Palmers’ much-vaunted relationship to the Church of England’s principal primate, it was no closer than that effected through a marriage to an archiepiscopal niece.

  The family descended more directly from a line of rather humbler Anglican clergy. Palmer’s great-great-grandfather, Samuel, had left Ireland in the early eighteenth century and, having made an advantageous match with the aforementioned niece, was offered the living of Wylye in Wiltshire where his memorial slab can still be found inset in the church wall. His son, Edward, had followed in his clerical footsteps, becoming the rector of Ringmer in East Sussex. But towards the end of the century the family had moved into business as the rector’s son, Christopher, set himself up as a hatter, becoming a partner in the firm of Moxon, Palmer and Norman based in Cannon Street on the fringes of the City of London.

  Hat-making in England at this time was a lucrative business. In 1795, in order to raise money to fund a war against France, the government had imposed a tax on hair powder with the result that, almost immediately, the modishly puffed coiffeurs of the era had gone out of fashion to be replaced by a taste for millinery. Soon the British ‘topper’ would be reaching a foot in height. The unfortunate beavers whose pelts were required for these towering adornments did not prosper – the animal was rendered all but extinct – but members of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, the city livery company to which hatters belonged, flourished. Palmer’s paternal grandfather, Christopher, was of this thriving breed. He married the daughter of one of his business partners and, setting a precedent for the longevity which his son and his grandson would later enjoy, lived until the ripe old age of eighty-two. He had a ‘most excellent natural constitution’, Palmer later recorded, adding with what was to become an obsessive interest in digestive functions, that ‘he would have seen a hundred if he had minded his bowels’.2

  Christopher Palmer had five children: three sons, Edward, Nathanial and Samuel, and two daughters, Sarah and Mary. Little is known of the girls. The eldest son, Edward, owned property in Ireland which, after he was killed in 1830 by an overturning hackney carriage, was sold out of the family. The second boy, Nathanial, became a corn factor at a time when a corn factor was a force to be reckoned with, for first the Napoleonic Wars had prevented cereals from being brought in from the continent and then, when foreign trade was finally resumed, the newly passed Corn Laws would place punitive tariffs on imported grain. The price of Britain’s staple food soared, not least in the wake of an appalling 1816 harvest. There were riots and, at the heart of the fray, stood the profiteering factor: the intermediary without whom no business could be carried out. The third son Samuel, Palmer’s father, would not prove so shrewd. Too squeamish to follow the surgeon’s career which he had initially contemplated, he had embarked on a career in the family hatting firm, purchasing his Freedom of the City of London as a feltmaker before, realising that he far preferred folios to animal furs, he had decided to set himself up as a bookseller instead. His family, considering trade a grave slur on its gentlemanly credentials, had tried to discourage him but he was of stubborn disposition and had remained resolute. Palmer’s father was always to put personal fulfilment above fiscal ambition or social status.

  Palmer was proud of his paternal heritage. As a young man he liked to seal letters with his armorial crest: a bowed arm grasping a spear. But when it came to more practical matters – particularly monetary ones – his mother’s half of the family played the more important role.

  Palmer was descended on the maternal side from the Yorkshire-born William Giles who, having travelled extensively in his youth and visited China, had returned to London to work briefly as a hatter before taking up stockbroking instead, a career in which he would find great success, boasting friendships with such esteemed figures in the field as Sir William Forbes, the pioneering founder of a private banking firm.

  Giles’s interests, however, extended beyond the financial. He was a committed member of the Baptist Church – a congregation which, finding its roots in post-Reformation Europe had, until the eighteenth century, been much persecuted. By Giles’s day it was rapidly expanding, however, not least in Britain where ordinary people were growing increasingly critical of the corruption and complacency of the Established Church. The name Baptist, originally coined as a term of mockery for the initiatory rite involving total immersion in water, was eventually adopted by members of the faith themselves. They were also in the nineteenth century commonly known as ‘dissenters’ or ‘Nonconformists’. The Church of England, the dissenters argued, had moved much too far from its original forms; pomp and ceremony had come to play too large a part; it was to the Bible and not the bishop that the faithful should turn; the Church should be constituted of true believers not of just anyone born into a parish and these believers should be free to follow their hearts.

  In 1773, Giles married Martha Covell, a fellow Nonconformist. Martha was born in Margate, the daughter of one of the town’s first dissenters, a Mary Covell who, initiated at the age of almost sixty, had, despite the jeers of a husband who nicknamed her ‘Nanny Baptist’, remained steadfast in her loyalty to her new creed. The pair established themselves in a comfortable home on the fringes of south London, looking over leafy gardens towards far-off Dulwich slopes. Here Giles could pursue not only his business dealings but his cultural ambitions, entertaining such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Stothard and Thomas Uwins, the most sought-after society painters of the day, and indulging his talents as a writer, producing several books which, though now entirely forgotten, had that tone of didactic piety which particularly appealed to the religious sensibilities of his times. Such titles as The Refuge, The Victim, Thoughts on the Sufferings of Christ or A Guide to Domestic Happiness went through several editions and the last was included in a collection of English classics. Giles also compiled a volume of British poetry, composed music, particularly psalmodies (one of which made its way into a Wesleyan hymn book) and tried his hand at humorous sketches, claiming authorship of one of Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, a popular series of comic monologues published in Punch which purported to be the outpourings of a poor henpecked shopkeeper who, unable to sleep after the death of his wife, lay in bed nightly recalling her protracted rants. Unlike this browbeaten fellow, however, Giles was a man of overbearing character. His word was law to a wife who meekly obeyed him and, revering his literary talents, would refer to him deferentially as ‘The Author’. She bore him four children: William, Martha, Thomas and Mary. It was the second of these, Martha, who, born on 3 November 1778, was to fall in love with the bookish youngest son of the mercantile Palmer family.

  Palmer’s father was twenty-eight years old when, in October 1803, he took Martha as his wife. He had joined her Baptist faith but, since law at that time required all marriages to be conducted in church, the ceremony took place at St Mary’s in the parish of Newington in which the young couple were to live. They could have walked home afterwards to their new house in Surrey Square; it would have made a pleasant stroll. The area was still semi-rural, a place of lush g
ardens in which day-trippers could wander, of fields and orchards, flower nurseries and vegetable plots. Newington Butts, now part of the traffic clot of the Elephant and Castle, was famous in those days for cultivating luxury fruits. The pineapples, grapes and nectarines which furnished grand London tables were nurtured in the conservatories of a parish that could boast its very own exotic species: the Newington peach made a sweet, summer treat when it ripened around Bartholomewtide.

  In 1801, the year of the first London census, there were 14,847 people recorded as living in the south London parish of Newington, but suburbia was already beginning its inexorable creep. Thirty years later that number had almost trebled; by the end of the century the parish’s pleasurable green acres would be all but completely buried beneath sprawling brick. This was the sort of development that Palmer was to come to detest; and yet his first home was a herald of its approach.

  Surrey Square had been the first of several housing projects to be undertaken by the architect Michael Searles. Its construction had been quick. Within two years of the first stone being laid in 1792, all the houses had been occupied. They had appealed to a well-off sector of mercantile society which, keen to keep up with fashion, had liked Searles’s cut-price copies of current architectural tastes.

  Surrey Square was never actually a square. It was a terrace of houses with an elegantly laid out communal garden to the front. Each residence, with two principal rooms on each floor, a kitchen tucked away in the basement and a long narrow garden running out at the back, was possessed of exactly that air of gentrified respectability that its residents would have desired. It must have suited the newlywed Samuel and Martha: small but smart and just around the corner from the bride’s old family home. Maybe Martha’s father had helped them to choose it. He had probably paid. Certainly, the dowry that he settled on his daughter provided the couple with a modest independence and, as they set out on their married future, their lives bore little sign of any troubles to come.