Mysterious Wisdom (9 page)

In July 1817, in front of a magistrate, the pair were finally married and set off for a honeymoon-come-sketching-trip in the Highlands. It was hardly luxurious. One day they got lost and, before passing a night in a cow shed, dined on a trout begged from a passing fisherman. Linnell wouldn't have worried. He always remained true to his humble roots. He lived simply and was never afraid of menial tasks. He would walk everywhere, carry pictures to clients and hang them himself; he would often tell the story of the time that he had taken a lift in a pig cart to visit a patron, only alighting a short way from the grand country house of his destination lest his hosts mistake him for a ripe-smelling hog.

The first of Linnell's offspring was born in 1818 and his family grew rapidly from then on. He was eventually to have nine children. Meanwhile, ever resourceful and undaunted by such temporary setbacks as being thrown out of lodgings, he worked busily to expand his practice. His prices went up and he kept back a little from every sale that he made. A successful artist had once complained to him that it was impossible to save anything on an income of just £2,000 a year, but Linnell had replied that, even had his income been only £20 a year, he would still have put at least a shilling aside. In business matters, he remained unbudgeable and pioneered the now standard arrangement whereby a deposit is paid down before delivery. When payment was due he was no respecter of rank and once greatly embarrassed the Duke of Argyll by button-holing him in public, loudly demanding settlement of an old debt. Yet, for all his penny-pinching, Linnell could also be generous. The very same account books that record his hoardings show him making loans to his father, Mulready and Varley.

From 1821 his career gained rapid momentum. For a while he wondered if he might even be made a court painter. Twice he was commissioned to execute a portrait of Princess Sophia Matilda, the sister of George IV, but his unfailing regard for truth lost him further commissions. ‘I ventured to make my pictures to look really like . . . and I calculate it was on that account I had no more from that connection,' he later said. ‘I asked Lady Torrens at the time what would be the consequence in her opinion if, in the event of my being employed to paint George IV, the King, I made a faithful likeness. “It would be your ruin,” she said. “I cannot help it,” I replied. “So I shall do if I get the commission.” Which I did not. And a good thing for me, too, that I did not.'
6

Linnell was never elected to the Royal Academy. He supposed it was because he was a dissenter who nurtured republican leanings; but professional jealousies and personal antipathies also played a part, not least those of Constable who, hearing rumours that Linnell had engaged in sharp financial practices, preferred to pass on the gossip than check whether it was true. But Linnell's lack of social graces would not have recommended him in elevated circles: a friend once advised him that he should dress more carefully, pointing out a large stain on the front of his coat. From 1821 to 1841, he applied year after year for Academy admission, going through the prescribed motions of setting down his name as a candidate for an associateship (an initial form of half-membership, hopefully transmuted with time to full academician's status). Finally, after twenty years in which he had been consistently passed over in favour of often far inferior men, he gave up. ‘The Academy can make me an RA but it can't make a fool of me,' he said and, even when subsequently entreated to revoke his opinion, he remained steadfast. ‘Let them keep the RA for men who can't sell their pictures without it. I can,'
7
he told Edwin Lawrence, who had been deputed to try to persuade him. The once-coveted badge of honour had come to seem a mere bauble to Linnell by then.

In the early 1820s, Linnell moved his wife and their by then three offspring to a rented cottage in Hampstead where the air was much healthier and the children, who were often ferociously quarrelsome, could run free. His family remained always at the top of his priorities. At weekends he would spend time with them, making bread, brewing beer, keeping hens and digging wells, but the weekdays were passed in his Cirencester Place studio where he would work on six or seven canvases at once. His was a punishing schedule; often he would start at half past six in the morning and still be standing at his easel well after midnight, a timetable which took its toll on his health. For a while he would buy bottles of oxygen, or ‘vital air', which he would inhale to increase his energy. It became a compulsive habit and at one point his consumption rose to twelve bottles a day as he struggled to overcome what he described as a weakness in the limbs. He blamed this debilitation on his having overtaxed his strength in boxing matches with the boisterous Mulready, but, more probably, he was suffering the lingering effects of some viral infection.

Linnell battled his ill health. He kept himself fit, often walking home to Hampstead after a full day's labour, sometimes, when his family had been up to visit, with one of his daughters perched on his shoulders. One day on this journey he came face to face with an infuriated bull thundering down the road towards him, head lowered and horns sharp. Linnell's wife, Mary, enjoyed telling the story of how her husband had stood his ground until the last minute when, whipping off his cloak and flourishing it like a matador, he had let the animal take it. As it had galloped away, the cloth wildly flapping, he had vaulted for safety over the nearest stile.

It is easy to see why the wavering Palmer would have been fascinated. Linnell was a man of many facets. A gentle father who at one moment might be playing with his golden-haired daughters was a tyrant the next, delivering strident opinions that brooked no dissent. He could turn from elaborating the daintiest of ivory portrait miniatures to kneading the bread dough with his huge strong thumbs. He would stay up late into the night, drinking and discussing abstruse theories with Cornelius Varley, and then be away the next morning, tramping through the predawn darkness to his latest painting job. He could turn from the labour of love which his own engravings represented to receive some distinguished sitter and then shift focus again to give a lesson to a pupil for whom drawing had to be included in a plethora of fashionable accomplishments. But, for all his many aspects, Linnell never lost his sense of purpose, never abandoned his professional focus or his religious quest.

Palmer was impressed. But then Linnell, for all that he was small in stature – he was only five foot five – had a powerful presence. He had a firm mouth, a penetrating stare and a loud and unexpectedly raucous voice that commanded the attention of those who met him. To shake him by the hand was to be assured of his strength. He had the hard, bony grip of a labourer. This was the grip that he kept on his life. It was precisely what the aimless Palmer was looking for.

5

The Sketchbook of 1824

 

A good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art

from
The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Few works remain from the period when Palmer and Linnell first met, but it was a pivotal moment for the younger artist as his only surviving self-portrait, which most likely dates to around this time, suggests. Drawn in black and white chalks on a piece of cardboard coloured paper, it may at first glance seem a fairly scrappy memento, smudgily finished and carelessly splashed. But there is no mistaking the unflinching intensity of his look as, bringing his eyes, nose and mouth into sudden sharp focus, picking out each eyelash and the adolescent moustache that dusts his upper lip, Palmer searches his face for signs of the future, even as he captures his mood of introspective retreat. This is an image that speaks of profound self-exploration. It presents a Romantic spirit at the moment of awakening.

Feeling the sudden fresh influx of his new teacher's energy like a numbed limb feels the rush of returning blood, Palmer filled notebook after notebook with his ideas, busily recording, as his father had taught him, everything that he considered to be worth remembering: lines from poems, passages from essays, lists of unusual words, columns of accounts. Even his problems were punctiliously listed because, in so doing, he often found that a solution would suggest itself.

Only one of these metal-clasped pocket books survives: the sketchbook of 1824. Its pages, cut out and mounted, can now be seen in the British Museum. They are the first record of Palmer's visionary future. Gone is the meek obedience to the picturesque manuals. Here is a vivid new strength of design. Palmer credited Linnell for the change. He had fallen into a pit, he said, and entirely lost all taste and feeling. ‘I not only learnt nothing . . . but I was nearly disqualified from ever learning to paint.' But then ‘it pleased God to send Mr Linnell . . . a good angel from Heaven to pluck me from the pit of modern art'.
1

What Palmer thought of as ‘the pit of modern art' was on display annually at the Royal Academy's summer show, for, though in theory this institution had been set up to inculcate classical principles, to instruct developing artists in a rigorous academic style, the stern discipline which Reynolds had promoted in his seminal
Discourses
was, by the early nineteenth century, beginning to look outmoded. The ‘History Painting' – grand renditions of battles, Bible stories and mythological dramas – that he had championed as the noblest genre, had fallen from favour. Reynolds might have hoped that by offering the British public access to the best works of art the Academy would elevate the nation's taste, but fewer and fewer people were prepared to pay for some vast military picture. Portraits were far more desirable: they added a personal touch to the drawing room and showed off the frills and the furbelows of high society tastes. Even Reynolds had earned his bread and butter by painting them.

Landscape was also growing increasingly popular. The history of this genre dates back many hundreds of years. Its skies and its mountains, its pastures and trees can be admired in anything from ancient Greek murals through the manuscript illuminations of the medieval era to the glowing oil canvases of the High Renaissance. But in these earlier images, landscape remained merely a background, the setting for some mythical encounter or biblical event. It was only in the seventeenth century in the hands of such masters as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain that it found its beginnings as a genre to be appreciated in its own right. It was to the example of such forebears, and most especially to Claude – almost half of whose entire oeuvre of almost three hundred paintings would by the early nineteenth century have passed into British collections – that Turner and Constable had started to look.

Turner had proved a consummate master. He had managed to turn his pictures into talking points. This mattered. Painting was still a fairly precarious profession and most practitioners were presented with two basic choices: either they became popular, commercial entertainers or they had to face impoverished obscurity. Most chose the former, but competition was fierce. First impressions were vital, however superficial: the louder, the brighter, the more audacious the picture, the better; it would increase its chances of attracting a buyer.

Palmer's contemporary, the author Edward Bulwer Lytton, satirised the art scene of the era through the persona of his Mr Gloss Crimson. This character ‘ekes out his talk from Sir Joshua Reynolds' discourse . . . is intensely jealous, and more exclusive than a second-rate countess; he laments the decay of patronage in the country; he believes everything in art depends upon lords; he bows to the ground when he sees an earl'. But ‘his colours are as bright and gaudy as a Dutchman's flower-garden for they are put on with an eye to the Exhibition where everything goes by glare'.
2

Turner, applying his own competitive dab of gloss crimson to his exhibition canvas, would have recognised the truth of this description. His rival, Constable, certainly did. In an 1802 letter to his East Bergholt friend, the plumber John Dunthorne, he put his finger on the problem: ‘The great vice of the present is
bravura
,' he said; ‘an attempt to do something beyond the truth . . .
Fashion
always had, & will have its day – but
Truth
(in all things) only will last.'
3

Constable eventually proved his point. His ‘truth' in the long run was acknowledged; but he had had to wait many years. Meanwhile, in the marketplace, a crowd of diverse styles and manners and idioms all jostled for attention. Palmer was setting out into a confusing world. Cash counted for more than aesthetic acumen as rich manufacturers replaced perceptive connoisseurs. Flashy techniques supplanted spiritual feeling. ‘The low and the mercantile creep over the national character,' declared Bulwer Lytton, who created another character called Snap, a minor academic who, having studied Locke at Cambridge, laughed down his sleeve if he heard the word ‘soul'.