Mysterious Wisdom (6 page)

Palmer had grown up steeped in the Baptist faith. His parents' shared beliefs created a powerful marital bond. On Sundays they would attend a succession of religious services and the content of sermons would be much discussed. And yet Sam, from first youth, showed a particular fascination for Anglican traditions. In his earliest surviving letter he reports to his father on the Margate vicar and though, at the age of nine, he is rather more riveted by a mighty blow dealt by the choirmaster to a boy in the organ gallery than anything more conventionally clerical (and is soon diverted to telling how he has written the name of his cat on the sands of the beach), it was an ecclesiastical interest that was to gather rapid pace.

The church would, quite literally, have served as a beacon in the young Sam's life. As he crossed London Bridge the shadows of its twin sentinels, the tower of St Saviour's and the steeple of St Magnus's, would have fallen across his path. The scattered pinnacles of the City's churches would have poked up through the smog. The great dome of St Paul's would have been a prominent landmark and, as a miserable schoolboy, he often found solace in its echoing spaces, frequently visiting on Sunday afternoons. ‘Gazing upwards into the sublime obscurity', he would listen to sacred music: music which he came to ‘prefer to all other of every kind'. The way that it brought together ‘sublimity fullness and power with the most luscious sweetness and last delicacies of sound',
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he said, could allay all nagging anxieties and feverishness of mind and many years later he was to rail against the (never-to-be-accomplished) plan to tile the ‘dim and solemn' cupola of Wren's majestic cathedral with ‘metallic reflectors' to make it ‘gay'. ‘There is a kind of craziness which neither raves nor mopes: – it rummages,' he protested. ‘Whatever it encounters it desires to change into something else; to reverse to pervert.'
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‘Fancy putting frescoes into the dome to give it light, when its essence is gloom and mystery!'
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For Palmer, the sacred calm of the city's stone temples felt akin to that peace which he discovered in the countryside. Religion and nature, first beginning to mingle in his mind as his father read to him from the Bible among meadows and woods, continued to blend in his thoughts. Moved by strange mystic feelings, he applied himself to drawing pictures of the church buildings that bred them. His parents, eager to help but misunderstanding his motives, took this as evidence that he wanted to be an artist and so supplied him with architectural drawings, botanical engravings and art historical prints of famous canvases and frescoes to copy.

 

 

After the death of his mother, a drawing master was engaged for Sam, a minor artist who would have fallen through a hole in art history if it were not for the passing role that he was to play in Palmer's life. William Wate was a landscapist of unostentatious ability: a competent painter of pleasant topographical views. Not for him the passionate extremes of a Romantic aesthetic; Wates leant safely towards the mildest form of ‘the picturesque'.

In 1782, the clergyman, author and artist, the Reverend William Gilpin, had introduced the idea of the picturesque to cultural debate. Looking for ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture',
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he had toured the country, squinting upwards at rocks from vertiginous angles, framing foregrounds with trees and sprinkling distances with ruins as he had sought to present a new painterly ideal. He had found much room for improvement in nature's sense of composition and a colourful peasant or misplaced hovel could easily be added to or subtracted from a scene. Ruined castles and abbeys were objects of particular ‘consequence' and a low viewpoint which tended to emphasise the sublime was always preferable to a higher prospect.

Soon, the picturesque as Gilpin had defined it was considered the very apogee of cultural fashion. With the continent closed off by conflict, there was hardly a beauty spot to be discovered in Britain without finding also an amateur artist in its midst. Equipped with their easels and a portable clutter of artistic knick-knacks, they surveyed the landscape in their dark-tinted ‘Claude' glasses
–
small, convex mirrors which, by isolating a fragment of the natural scenery and unifying its tones, created a hazily atmospheric composition of the sort which the seventeenth-century master Claude Lorrain had made highly popular. The wild places of Britain were treated like hunting trophies: they were taken to be mounted on drawing-room walls.

The more clear-sighted were sceptical, even scathing, of the picturesque's formulaic rules. In Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey
, drafted and written in the 1790s (though only posthumously published in 1817), Catherine Morland, the naïve heroine, while out on a walk, is given such an effective crash course on the subject, on foregrounds and distances and second distances, that by the time she and her teacher, Edward Tilney, have reached the top of Beechen Cliff she has ‘voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape'. And, in 1809, the comic writer William Combe, working in collaboration with the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, dispatched a satirical character, an impoverished schoolmaster called Dr Syntax, off on a tour of Europe atop his grey mare Grizzle in search of fashionable prospects the recording of which, he hopes, will make him ‘a real mint'. ‘I'll
prose
it here, I'll
verse
it there,/ And
picturesque
it every where', Syntax informs his wife in the opening canto. The ensuing narrative with its accompanying illustrations, published in monthly instalments between 1809 and 1811 in the
Poetical Magazine
and subsequently turned into a book that ran into several editions, proved an immense success. But such satire did little to shift popular tastes. By the time Palmer was learning to paint, Gilpin's principles had become as narrowly prescriptive as a painting-by-numbers chart. Any bravely original thinker would by then have abandoned them; but Wate was no flaringly talented Turner, no stubbornly rebellious John Constable: he followed a peaceably commercial path and it was along its obedient course that Palmer was now led.

Only two of his early sketchbooks survive. The earliest – a slim rectangle, about the size of a cheque book, bound in soft battered leather and fastened by a brass clasp – is now in the custodianship of the British Museum. The visitor who makes an appointment at the Department of Prints and Drawings and leafs through its pages with white art-handler's gloves can wander off on a sketching trip with the fourteen-year-old Palmer, stroll alongside him through his south London haunts, rambling upriver from Greenwich to Battersea, visiting rural Chiswick or Richmond's lush meadows or embarking on forays to Bedfordshire or Kent.

The sketchbook is dated 1819. King George III – ‘old, mad, blind, despised, and dying' as Percy Bysshe Shelley describes him in his passionately radical political sonnet
England in 1819
– was entering the last year of his reign. His son, who for almost a decade had already presided as regent, was on the verge of ascending to the throne. A foppish and dissolute figure, he was hardly likely to fulfil Shelley's hopes of a ‘glorious Phantom' to ‘illumine our tempestuous day'. It was he who, in the aftermath of the infamous 1819 Peterloo massacre – in which the cavalry had charged a crowd of demonstrators in Manchester, peacefully campaigning for parliamentary reform – had issued royal congratulations to the cutlass-wielding hussars.

The Napoleonic wars were over but the political problems of Britain were still far from resolved as the second generation of Romantics emerged, Keats publishing in 1819 two of his most famous works,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
, a ballad of a knight who falls under the fatal enchantment of an ethereal temptress, and
The Eve of Saint Agnes
, a passionately charged poem which tells of the elopement of two lovers, and Byron producing the first cantos of his satirical epic
Don Juan
in the same year. Meanwhile Constable, though still unrecognised by the painterly establishment, was embarking on the unique six-foot sketches of local Suffolk scenes which were to represent his great breakthrough and mark him out as a modern, while Turner, inspired by a trip to Italy, by the classical lineaments of the buildings and the clarity of the light, was learning to unite atmosphere and architecture, past and present, art and history, in his work. In 1819 he showed his largest canvas ever: a landscape painted on Richmond Hill, a picture of a real England made ideal, and he was about to begin another canvas which, like some imaginative verso, would present an ideal Rome made real.

This was the cultural milieu into which Palmer was setting out, but his first sketchbook reveals quite how far he had to go. Occasionally it offers intimate glimpses of the developing artist. A special feeling for trees is revealed by a particularly attentive pencil sketch – ‘the willow behind the cottage was thin and playful' he noted – or a still unformed personality is found trying out different versions of his signature: the name ‘Sam Palmer' is followed by the more grown-up ‘S Palmer' and then – as he contemplates posterity – a date is added as well. But for the most part this book consists of a series of unremarkable topographical studies by a young man who is learning basic skills.

Wate would have introduced him to the elementary drawing lessons of the popular tutors of the day: to the eighteenth-century Alexander Cozens who wrote four major treatises on ‘practical aesthetics', setting out to fix the basic forms – ‘shape, skeleton and foliage' – of thirty-two species of tree, or producing nineteen plates that purported to define the ‘principles of beauty relative to the human head'; or to Rudolph Ackermann's books, including his 1811 study of watercolour which was to become one of the most influential manuals of its day. Illustrated by David Cox (though he was not actually credited), it had the unforeseen effect of training a whole generation of artists to adopt Cox's style – albeit that of his earlier more picturesque landscapes rather than of the later atmospheric works for which he is now more admired. In 1808, Cox had settled in Dulwich. His subject matter – gypsy encampments on the common, kite-flying children, grazing donkeys and rustic cottages – would certainly have been familiar to Palmer and, in his 1819 sketchbook, he follows Cox's instructions for the capturing of atmospheric effects as he carefully records the sepia gradations of twilight or studies the Margate pier by the glow of the setting sun. But later he would come to dismiss him: ‘Cox is pretty – is sweet, but not grand, not profound,' he wrote after a day out in Dulwich. ‘Carefully avoid getting into that style which is elegant and beautiful but too light and superficial.'
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Palmer had by then found a master to inspire him. In 1819 he had gone for the first time to a Royal Academy summer exhibition. This annual art show was a major event. The Royal Academy was a prestigious institution. Election to its charmed circle was a coveted honour for, established in 1768 under the patronage of George III, it had been founded to raise the professional standing of artists by providing not just a school which could guarantee a sound classical training but a public forum in which to display new work. The Academy conferred status and with status came commissions and wealth.

At that time, an art show was a novelty in England. The Academy's summer exhibition, a higgledy-piggledy parade of densely packed paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, was among the great spectacles of Georgian and Regency London: a glorious bear garden which every ambitious artist would have aspired to be part of and no gossiping socialite would have wanted to miss. This was the stage upon which the triumphs and the tragedies, the scandals and sensations, the celebrations and controversies of the British art world were played out. It was here, upon the canvases of the most fashionable painters, that the public could meet aristocrats, dignitaries and stars; come face to face with Thomas Lawrence's Prince Regent in all his flamboyance, see Thomas Gainsborough's Georgiana in her rakishly tilted hat or admire Joshua Reynolds's Sarah Siddons in full theatrical flight. It was here that artists would introduce their most eye-catching ideas; that, in 1771, Benjamin West would challenge the traditions of history-painting by clothing the figures in his tableau of a dying General Wolfe in contemporary rather than classical dress; that, in 1781, Henry Fuseli would assure himself of a lasting reputation by revelling in the sensual eroticism of a woman abandoned to nightmarish sleep or that, in 1812, Turner would show off the sheer audacity of his vision, whipping up a great vortex of a snowstorm in his
Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
.