Mysterious Wisdom (34 page)

 

 

For much of his time in Italy, Palmer had found himself working feverishly against the clock. The honeymoon would have been far more fulfilling had he had the leisure to venture off the beaten track, to discover landscapes other than the tourist's hackneyed spots. But there was no question of prolonging a sojourn which had already lasted so much longer than the year that had originally been planned. The Linnells were outraged when the idea was even mooted. And so, as the summer of 1839 progressed, the Palmers' thoughts turned more and more to home. Hannah grew effusively excited at the prospect of seeing her family and though the thought of London's ‘filthy smoke and black chimney pots'
60
sickened Palmer, he was at the same time eager to begin proper work. ‘When I left England my mind was like a house full of furniture and utensils some good and some bad. I think the bad are now thrown out of the window and the good put into tolerable order so that I know pretty well what I want,'
61
he wrote a few months before returning. ‘I long to leave study making,' he added a while later. ‘I have had a glut of roaming.'
62

By August 1839 the Palmers were on their long homeward trek. They would have taken a boat from Marseilles, but they dared not trust their precious cargo of pictures to a long sea voyage and so, by the end of October, they were trundling steadily northwards at the rate of thirty or forty miles a day. Hannah could not resist telling her mother one more bloodcurdling story, recounting in detail the crossing of rapids on the flooded River Po. Palmer was more concerned to make completely sure that his brother would not be in the house when he finally got back, but added a little pencil note to the end of a letter from Hannah. It is scribbled from the very top of Mount Cenis: ‘We have crossed the Alp and left Italy!! “Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwelleth. Hail railroads! hail!'
63

News of Hannah's return had sent her siblings capering like savages around the frosty London garden. They were thrilled when the Palmers at long last arrived back; when they saw the sister who had left them two years earlier now turned into a well-travelled woman who could speak Italian and had learnt to fire a pistol in an olive grove. But for Palmer the homecoming was tinged with sadness. He would never forget the contrast between the brilliant skies and the marble buildings of Italy and the filthy Thames warehouses that greeted him on his return. He was often to dream of one day returning. But he never did. Only sometimes, when the sunburnt Italian organ-grinders stopped outside his London house, Palmer would speak to them in their native language and, where most people considered them to be public menaces, he would pay them a shilling to go on playing for a while.

17

Back in England

 

Real life began

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

‘Real life began', noted Palmer many years later, as he looked back at that moment in the autumn of 1839 when he and his wife had returned from their two-year honeymoon. They had been eager to embark on the next phase of their life, but Hannah's parents had had other plans. They wanted their daughter to live with them at their home. She ‘must be
ours
again for a time',
1
Linnell insisted in a letter. He went into a sulk when his son-in-law took a rare stand. ‘I do not like the word “
must
”,' Palmer replied; Hannah's ‘filial affection and veneration' would always remain with her father, but ‘her
obedience
is transferred to me'.
2
In the end, Hannah spent only a few days in Bayswater while her husband busied himself with other tasks: retrieving his portfolios from the snares of customs officials, addressing various financial muddles and making the Grove Street house feel more habitable.

Lisson Grove had first started developing in about 1720 when, with the sudden expansion of London, the village of Lisson Green had provided labour and service to the capital. But the construction of New Road (later called Marylebone Road) in 1756 had made it much more accessible. Its leafy byways had attracted several well-to-do residents including the historical painter Benjamin Haydon and the sculptor Charles Felix Rossi who carved the classical caryatids that can still be found ranked along the front of the nearby St Pancras Church. But Palmer was a latecomer and although the locality was still just about presentable, it had already entered a period of decline. The itinerant Irish labourers who had first arrived there in the 1830s to build the canal which cuts through dank alleyways and tunnels under roads, had made it their home and, as their shoddy dwellings multiplied, it would soon be little better than a slum.

The street in which Palmer lived no longer remains but a few surviving Georgian houses – two-bay red-brick buildings – still give an idea of what it must have been like. It was modest, and though the Palmers in the long-term hoped to find somewhere less cramped, for the time being they were happy. Their house, with its ten little rooms and its field out at the back, felt palatial, Hannah said, when compared to Italian lodgings and so, with the outside repainted, with old furniture and kitchen utensils borrowed from Palmer's father and a brand new mattress purchased for their bed, the couple set about constructing a shared domestic life. Neither of them was particularly suited to the task. Palmer had always had Mary Ward to rely on and had not fared well when, after her death, he had been forced to live under the hired administration of a Mrs Hurst who had left his damp clothes draped along the passageways and heaps of dirty saucepans piled up in the sink. With Hannah as his wife, domestic arrangements were hardly set to improve. She knew little about housekeeping. She certainly couldn't cook. A maid called Peacock was employed: a slovenly dogsbody whose methods were slipshod. The Palmers were, for the time being, unconcerned. They were set on a loftier artistic course. Their work would be their haven. ‘Whatever I do,' Palmer wrote, ‘I wish our painting room to be the cleanest in the house – that however I be kicked about in the world I may be able to retreat thither with Anny as to a little pleasant mountain in the desert – and there try once and for all to do something which may rescue me from neglect and contempt.'
3

 

 

Palmer had set off to Italy full of optimism for his professional future. He had put in long hours on his honeymoon trip, watching for his subjects like a tiger watching for its prey: seizing upon landscapes and monuments and old master paintings, figures and foregrounds and poetic effects. Buildings and costumes, cascades and mountains, distances and outlines, tonal juxtapositions and atmospheric skies had all been assiduously added to his artistic stock. Little could distract him from his task: not even the swarm of wasps which, attracted by the honey with which he kept his colours moist, had besieged him in Subiaco, crawling about his face and spectacles and ‘eating little clean, round holes into the oil paint'. ‘But never having, on any consideration, left off a sketch from external annoyances,' he later told a friend, ‘I persevered to the end; only moving my arm and hand very gently, as I knew they were insects full (as the novelists say) “of just pride and proper spirit”; and by respecting their heroic instincts, I came off unstung.'
4
Sometimes his fingers had grown stiff and painful from clenching his pencil; sometimes, hauling his heavy sketching apparatus uphill, he had rubbed his hip bones raw. For a while he had complained that he had hardly been able to squeeze his brushes, though this, it had turned out, had been caused not by hard work but by an attack of gout.

Palmer had tried to learn whatever Italy and its old masters could teach him: he had noted how tenderly Michelangelo depicted the strongest muscles or the way in which Titian would deepen his celestial blues so that subjects could glow more brightly when set against them. His Baring commission, a
View of Modern Rome
, had been of a size and complexity he had never before ventured but it had had a striking clarity, learnt at least in part from the Veronese
which, painted in the ‘highest key of light' and with the ‘purest brilliancy of colour',
5
he had seen and admired in the Louvre. Later, struggling to compose a classical counterpart to his modern panorama, he had faced such frustrations that after a while he had turned quite yellow and grown so thin that he could pull out his waistcoat three inches from his stomach; but determined to do it or die, he had done it in the end.

‘I now see my way and think I am no longer a mere maker of sketches, but an artist,'
6
Palmer had written a year into his trip. He had felt a sense of ‘enlargement'
7
he said – and not just as a result of too many good dinners. He had discovered the dangers of yellows, found out how far to venture ‘a good deep green' or which passage of a picture needed particular attention and which might be skimmed over with a rapid touch of the pen. Though only one known work survives from this particular period (a coloured study of the hermitage at Vocatella), it demonstrates how much he had learnt since discovering back in the studio that his
plein air
Welsh sketches were unworkable, for this delicate architectural piece is a finished drawing of the sort that he had long aimed for, ‘with effect, foreground and figures quite settled'.
8
It was this type of drawing, he believed, that would be most useful to him on his return. The ‘good deep greens'
9
also played a part, most notably in his studies of an ancient cypress avenue in the gardens of the Villa d'Este. As Palmer had wandered the grounds of this extravagant villa with their nymphs and their fountains, their grottoes and lakes, he had bitterly regretted not having known of them earlier. ‘I have seen nothing like or second to it,'
10
he had said. In his sketches he had endowed the cypresses, towering sentinels of bygone Baroque splendours, with a grandeur quite lacking in more conventional treatments; not least that done by Linnell's acquaintance William Collins who, having met the Palmers in Rome (and passed on troublemaking gossip to the Linnells) had probably recommended the villa as a picturesque site.

Palmer had regretted the long hours wasted on helping his wife with her father's commission. ‘I try only to choose in each place what seem to be the very essence and what I think it probable we may never see again in our travels,'
11
he had written as he had all but dashed along, desperately concerned to make the most of each moment. Towards the end of his trip he had been convinced that he had found a new way forward. His habits had undergone ‘a complete renovation',
12
he said. And though he would still long in his heart to make one last ‘humble effort after deep
sentiment
and deep
tone
',
13
he had vowed to ‘make a steady effort to turn all to account'.
14
And so, at the beginning of 1840, banishing poetic dreams to a single private hour every morning, he began dedicating the rest of his working day to whatever drudgery was required to adapt old visionary tastes to the demands of the new Victorian era which had dawned with the 1838 coronation during his time away.