Mysterious Wisdom (33 page)

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'.
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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',
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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”,'
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he wrote (quoting from Shakespeare's
Richard II
I
). 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.

Richmond did his utmost to help, introducing the couple to Joseph Severn, a pivotal figure in Roman society, and securing for Palmer a commission from John Baring to paint a panorama of Rome. But even the Richmonds' young son could spot Palmer's social failings. ‘Tommy sends his love . . . and says that you must not eat the backs of the sticks that we have for dinner,' wrote Julia: ‘meaning that you began to eat the asparagus at the wrong end.'
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Palmer became increasingly troubled. ‘All who know us by sight, know us as nobody, and as creatures whom nobody knows,' he lamented.
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How galling it must have been for him to meet a young artist who (in his opinion) could not draw and, even more unforgivably, had been heard dismissing Michelangelo's
Last Judgement
as ‘a mass of rubbish'
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get two fifty-guinea commissions from the Russian ambassador and an introduction to the Duke of Sutherland. ‘There seems to be a great chasm between me and gentility,' he mourned: ‘that gentility which I despise, but of which I should like to suck the sweetness.'
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Linnell was not worried. ‘I think it of far more consequence that you bring home plenty of fine studies rather than fine connections,'
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he reassured his son-in-law. But success remained elusive. Though Baring was interested in a pendant piece for his Roman panorama and Palmer spent weeks grappling with possible compositions, the banker employed another artist in the end. Nor did Hannah's commission from her father go well. The colouring in of his Sistine engravings may have been anticipated as a pleasant enough pastime, but it turned out to be a strenuous, time-consuming, neck-cricking feat.

 

 

As Palmer's time in Italy progressed his relationship with Linnell grew increasingly strained. Hannah's parents missed their daughter. They worried about her health, especially when the country was struck by an outbreak of cholera, and although at first the young couple sent back constant reassurances – bowels are reported on, diets assiduously monitored and an account of sudden hair loss by Anny meticulously proffered along with the benefits of Veritable Moelle de Boeuf oil, the application of which brings back her curly auburn mop – no profusion of reassurances could ever be quite enough. Palmer entreated his mother-in-law with ever-growing exasperation to dismiss her excessive anxiety. She must get over her ‘dread of boats and drownings and moving accidents by flood or field',
he admonished; he felt provoked to intemperance by what he described as an ‘unjustifiable and distrustful anxiety' which ‘embitters and falsifies'.
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‘Your daughter is well and unhurt,' he insisted towards the end of his trip ‘and has spent nearly two years acquiring intellectual and moral power, and experience which will . . . lead her safely through the mazes of life.'
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Linnell, though more sanguine than his spouse, was not much easier to deal with. His very first letter to his daughter reproached her for not writing sooner and suggested a strict routine whereby missives – which he would pay for – would be dispatched once a month. When this did not happen as planned he grew more insistent and blamed his son-in-law. ‘Why did not that Bartholomew Pig write?' he demanded. ‘Was he so tired going halfway up the hill that he has not yet got over it?'
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he asked, alluding to the portly Palmer's failure to climb a steep slope to the hill-top statue of Santo Carlo Borromeo.

The balance of an already unequal relationship had finally tipped. Palmer's letters were increasingly stuffed with professions of gratitude, persistently proffered compliments and ingratiating requests for advice – should he draw entire scenes or only details; should he concentrate on foregrounds or backgrounds; should he draw figures on the spot or in the studio? – while his father-in-law ever more firmly took the upper hand. By the time the young couple had been away a year, Linnell was instructing them as to when they should don their warm stockings and flannel drawers. Where once he had had faith in Palmer's artistic future – admiring his lack of compromise much as he had admired Blake's, describing his own practice, in comparison, as an inferior ‘pettifogging'
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path in which success had been sacrificed for the sake of a family – over the course of the honeymoon he progressively lost confidence in the son-in-law for whom he had once fostered such hopes.

Religion, predictably, became a point of contention. Though Hannah went to some lengths to explain how much Roman Catholicism disgusted her – not least a ceremony in which two lambs were blessed and their skins used to make monks' cowls – Linnell's festering suspicions that Palmer harboured Romish tendencies eventually found expression. There was no disguising his tone of voice when Palmer anticipated the pleasure of paying family visits when they got back home. ‘It is all very nice what you say about home at Grove Street and your visits to Bayswater with only the wooden bridge to get over etc. – but it appears to me there is another Bridge which you have assisted in building and keeping in repair for some years and which is rather a barricade than a means of communication. I mean that Asses Bridge of Superstition built with nothing but the rubbish of human tradition – obscene, false and fraudulent.'
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Money turned into another source of friction. Palmer's financial affairs were not running smoothly. Grove Street remained untenanted, in large part because the next-door house had been rented by a pair of prostitutes who advertised their services by throwing up the sashes and shouting out of the window. Palmer's father had by then left, moving to Aylesbury to become the pastor of a congregation of only nine people, and leaving Palmer's home to the improvident William to take care of. But William, having adopted a foundling from the workhouse, was using the Grove Street front parlour as a bedroom, which was hardly conducive to paying lodgers.

Palmer badly needed the money that the letting of Grove Street would bring. He politely but firmly pressed his brother for rent, but though William had plans to follow his father into the country and set up a school, for the time being he could not pay. He even hatched a shady plan to sell Palmer's Shoreham cottages – a scheme to which Linnell, efficiently, put paid. Meanwhile a strange and never-quite-explained affair occurred whereby charges were brought against William for the barbarous treatment of his adopted daughter. The child was removed. The rumours were eventually proved unsubstantiated but by the time that William was asked to take the child back, his wife was expecting a baby of her own.

Without any rental income, any sales of his work in Rome exhibitions or any private commissions coming in, Palmer found himself falling into dire financial straits. ‘Pray tell me what you mean Samuel, by the gloomy picture you draw of your funds, tell me how much money you have spent?'
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Linnell asked him in June 1838. The news which Palmer sent back was not good; though Linnell laughed off his wife's worries that their daughter was starving – Palmer would eat the geese from the Capitol before he starved, Linnell joked – matters grew more pressing. Palmer, for all his penny-pinching, bargaining and making-do, was barely able to manage and, reduced to delineating his expenditure in humiliating detail, he handed over all financial responsibility to his father-in-law who, in return for providing regular funds, took the fiscal control that he would keep for the rest of his life.

Linnell's commission was also becoming a source of friction. A project that had initially been greeted as a ‘joyful business'
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was beset with problems, not least among them Hannah's frail constitution. At first, walking across the city every morning to set herself up in the Sistine on a folding camp stool, she had enjoyed the feeling of being a professional artist, but after a while the long hours spent amid chill damp stone, craning up into the lofty gloom, scanning the ceiling with the help of small mirrors or squinting against the glare of the light, had started to take a toll on her eyesight and health. A job which – after Palmer's long and timidly circumloquacious negotiations – would bring in only six shillings and nine pence per drawing was not worth so much effort. And yet Linnell was implacable. It had to be done, he insisted, and in the end Palmer (helped by Albin Martin, a pupil of Linnell's who had been dispatched to join them as much as a parental spy as travelling companion) had to waste precious time that should have been devoted to his own portfolio, revising and correcting every one of his wife's works. By the time the Palmers finally left Rome after a second winter, he had spent more than a third of his stay completing what, in the long run, amounted to little more than a colouring book.