Mysterious Wisdom (28 page)

Palmer's sexual frustrations may have found a focus in one of the Tatham sisters. Richmond, who had been employed as their drawing master, had already fallen in love with Julia, the elder of these girls. Palmer quite possibly harboured feelings for the other. But an impoverished drawing tutor and an eccentric recluse were far from desirable matches – and not least in a family which at that time was struggling financially. When an elderly peer made an offer for Julia's hand, her father decided to accept on her behalf. Richmond was heartbroken. His 1829 painting
On the Eve of Separation
shows a young couple clinging in desperate embrace. Julia clearly shared his feelings and, in 1830, she and Richmond eloped, travelling northwards in separate post chaises to the Scottish borders where they spent the night at the Crown and Mitre – the pillowcases were so dirty that Julia had to lay her silk petticoat over the linen – before being wed the next day over the anvil at Gretna Green. The Ancients had all been party to this plan. Palmer had lent £40 to pay for the venture and Walter had chipped in a further £12 loan. When the newly wedded couple returned south they found a welcome in Shoreham while Linnell played a persuasive role in convincing the irate father that this young drawing master was possessed of sufficient talent and ambition to ensure that he would eventually turn out well. He was to be proved right. By the end of the first year of his marriage, Richmond had finished no less than seventy-three portraits, earning £207 from which he could pay Palmer back – and with interest at 3.5 per cent.

 

 

Palmer, his closest companion now lost to him in marriage, found his thoughts turning more and more frequently to his own matrimonial prospects. It was fortunate that Linnell had the same faith in his talents as he had shown for Richmond's because Palmer looked no further than his own family.

Hannah (or ‘Anny' as she was known), born in 1818 with Dr Thornton attending, was the eldest of Linnell's nine children. Palmer had known her since she was five when she had been the first of the squabbling troupe who had tumbled out to greet him on his visits to Hampstead, when she had sat on Blake's knee singing his
Songs of Innocence
and received her first drawing lesson at the visionary's hand. Linnell had attended to the education of all his children himself, teaching them to read and write, introducing them to Shakespeare by acting out all the parts, his performances based on productions he had been to see with Blake. He had encouraged them to draw and set them at an early age to colouring his prints. Later, he would instruct them in painting and engraving, bringing them up in the proud belief that an artist's practice was a high vocational calling. All of his sons went on to follow careers as professional painters. The girls would have had to help out in the nursery and learn needlework, too, but there was little division between male and female when it came to household duties and Anny – who never grew taller than five foot – was often employed in the garden, digging for vegetables and lugging heavy watering cans. Such drudgery, she later believed, may have been detrimental to her health. If so, her mother's medical administrations would not have helped. Armed with her abridged copy of
Materia Medica
(a fat but obsolete volume on family doctoring) and an unfailing conviction in her powers of healing, Mrs Linnell would administer bizarre assortments of pills and home-brewed potions to her brood. In an era in which housewives commonly thought that the tail of a black tom cat would cure a sty and an onion stuffed in the ear ameliorate a painful toothache it was not unusual for medical treatments to do more damage than the original injuries.

Palmer approved of the Linnells' egalitarian methods and, for all that Hannah herself would voice conventionally effeminate fears, worrying that only a man could grapple with art and that she as a woman had too weak an intellect, he believed that much might be made of a woman if ‘caught young' and especially if secluded ‘from the cap-and-bonnet-society of her own sex'.
17
Hannah, he was delighted to discover, had been studiously trained up to be most industrious in her habits, not to hanker after the gewgaws and trumpery that befooled so many girls, and yet to be as kind, neat, clean, and orderly as any of them. In this curly-haired teenager he had found all the requisites of a perfect wife.

In July 1833, the twenty-eight-year-old Palmer made his feelings known to Linnell, and, though neither he nor Mary considered the young painter to be financially prepared to marry their daughter, he was soon to become an amorous caller at their Bayswater home. The girls, hearing his knock at the door, would run to greet him with bright eyes and hearty handshakes. Left alone in the drawing room, the courting couple would bend their auburn heads together as they turned the pages of books and talked. Sometimes, chaperoned by Anny's sister Elizabeth (with whom Palmer, for all that she was prone to fly into the exasperated rages which her father called ‘fits', would forge a fond friendship), they would go out for summery evening walks or pay visits to galleries. They shared their love of art and Anny grew into an accomplished draughtswoman: snatching every moment that she could from her domestic duties, she would copy from old masters or work up her own designs. Palmer greatly admired such skill in a woman. Calvert's wife – his model for uxorious perfection – was also a talented painter who, when separated from her husband, would continue aesthetic discussions by correspondence and who, when her husband set up a printing press in his Brixton home, was prepared to rise from her bed in the middle of the night to prove a picture over which her spouse and some fellow Ancients had been brooding for the past several hours.

For a long time nothing was plainly spoken, but Palmer, right from the beginning, felt sure that his affections were returned. ‘With respect to Anny's “sobriety”,' he later wrote, ‘I always looked upon it with a suspicious eye, knowing that the solemnity of young ladies under the process of courtship much resembles the demureness of a certain animal watching for a mouse.'
18
He was proved right. In the summer of 1835, he was handed a surreptitious note. ‘I think it will please you to hear that my affection so far from decreasing in your absence increases daily,' Anny confided. ‘I think of you more than ever and look forward to your coming back with stronger emotions of joy than I before felt.'
19
To Palmer the way ahead seemed clear. ‘My energies are now at last unimpaired, because I have found vent for my strong and passionate love for women,'
20
he told Linnell in September 1835. His confidence was unshakeable, his affections unquenchable, his bond with Hannah grew every day more indissoluble, he said. And so the young couple became officially betrothed.

15

The End of the Dream

 

Pinched by a most unpoetical and unpastoral kind of poverty

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

‘If my aspirations are very high, my depressions are very deep,'
1
Palmer told Richmond in 1828. Though Shoreham was the place where he felt most ecstatic, it was also the setting of his most anguished despairs: ‘Great hopes mount high above the shelter of the probable . . . know many a disastrous cross wind and cloud; and are sometimes dazzled and overwhelmed as they approach the sun; sometimes vext and baffled, they beat about under a swooping pall of confounding darkness; and sometimes struggle in the meshes, or grope under the doleful wings of temptation or despair'.
2
He learnt to accept, even welcome, these abrupt mood swings. ‘My pinions never loved the middle air,'
3
he wrote. ‘Better to cry and shriek and howl every morning and get a cosey oily hour out of the night, than to mix up joy and grief in the mortar of moderation till they neutralise and to smear the nasty mixture over the day.'
4
And yet, he would find himself increasingly suffering ‘jaded halts of intellect', floundering through terrifying ‘eclipses of thought': a ‘living inhumement . . . equal to the dread throes of suffocation, turning this valley of vision into a fen of scorpions and stripes and agonies'.
5

Such vividly felt despairs were not helped by his financial situation. By 1828 he was already overspending his budget and, by the early 1830s, struggling to live on the few shillings that his cottage rentals brought in, he cut back his expenditure to five shillings and two pence a week. An inability to pay for materials was beginning to curtail his ambitions. He feared he would have to hire frames for the Royal Academy exhibition. ‘It is a very trying situation in which I am at present placed,'
6
he complained. If once he had dismissed financial worries as ‘terrific phantoms',
7
he now reconsidered such glib pro­­nouncements. ‘Really a handsome income and personal influence do enable a man by his savings and his authority in society to do a very great deal for those two great interests . . . the Poor and the Church,' he informed Richmond. ‘I do not think,' he continued, ‘that Christianity is meant to damp the spirit of enterprise or the desire of success.'
8

Palmer was only too aware of the professional gap that was widening between Richmond and himself, for his friend, while still enjoying the occasional Shoreham foray, was by then established as a society portraitist who could count William Wilberforce, Lord Sidmouth and the Bishop of Chester among his sitters. The young man who had once had to record every frugal expense, from the purchase of a gaiter strap to the repair of a shoe, would soon be earning £1,000 a year. ‘As you are now become a great man I will address you on a sheet of my best writing paper not gilt edged and delicate like yours but rather too extravagant for me,'
9
Palmer began a letter to Richmond in October 1834. ‘I am in solitude and poverty,' he lamented. If he could ‘but get a twenty-guinea commission even if it were to take a view of Mr Stratton's conventicler or to draw the anatomy of a pair of stays,' he wrote, he should be ‘as happy as the day is long'.
10
He ended up accepting a commission to clean a picture by the historical painter John Opie to make financial ends meet.

Prospects did not improve. ‘Poetic vapours have subsided and the sad realities of life blot the field of vision,' he wrote in August 1835. ‘O miserable poverty! How it wipes off the bloom from everything around me,'
11
he mourned as he touched Richmond for a loan of £3. His friend was quick to oblige. ‘How sad to think that at 30 my dearest friend should be struggling to earn a few pounds a year unsuccessfully,' he scribbled on the margin of the letter he received. But if he pitied Palmer, it could hardly have been more than Palmer pitied himself. ‘I am all in the dumps . . . and feel as if I alone of all mankind were fated to get no bread by the sweat of my brow . . . If you've a mangy cat to drown christen it “Palmer”,'
12
he wailed. Financial matters had finally come to a head. The unworldly dreamer had to earn a living. He now determined to take any teaching job he could find and, until such time as he began to earn that wage, he would have to sell his pianoforte and a few of his beloved books. The prayer that had once seemed enough to support him felt no longer sufficient: ‘Is daily bread promised to those who overspend their income?'
13
he asked.