Mysterious Wisdom (23 page)

And yet, where Linnell was fascinated by the facts of astronomy, Palmer was entranced simply by the sky's starry wonder. Though he did paint a double-tailed meteorite at Shoreham and later, towards the end of the 1850s, Donati's
Comet (named after the Florentine astronomer credited with its first sighting) as it streamed over Dartmoor, he did not need such rare manifestations to inspire him. (The only other reference he made to a specific astronomical occasion was a mention, in 1856, of being summoned outdoors to witness a lunar eclipse.) The heavens in their everyday guise were quite magical enough. The celestial beauties to which his paintings bore testimony – ‘the mottley clouding, the fine meshes, the aerial tissues that dapple the skies of spring . . . the rolling volumes and piled mountains of light . . . the purple sunset blazoned with gold . . . the translucent amber'
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– seemed to him a manifestation of divine presence in the world. He sought out those moments – the flushed dawns and glowing twilights – in which he sensed its special benediction. He tried to capture the mysterious transformative effects of the night. The moon was, to him, the planet of poetry. Inside the covers of his pocket Milton he made a list of every lunar reference and, in the series of small Shoreham monochromes which he called his ‘blacks' or ‘moonshines', he picked out its silvery shining as it sprinkled the landscape with ethereal brightness, glimmering like fish-scales upon winding streams. In these little dark paintings, shadow becomes far more than a mere absence of light. It becomes a soft, breathing presence that transforms the world's mundane mass.

 

 

‘I overspend that time in talking which should find me doing,'
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Palmer wrote in 1828. ‘Every day convinces me with wise and good Dr Johnson that this life is a state in which “much is to be done and little is to be known”,' he told Richmond in a fit of industrious fervour. ‘What is done at leisure is done wrong and whatever is done best, is done when there is hardly time given to do it in.'
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Throughout his Kentish sojourn, Palmer applied himself to his work in sudden vigorous bouts. ‘Talk of putting thistles under donkeys' tails to make them go!'
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Determined to conquer the constitutional indolence of the daydreamer, he learnt always (as he would later tell anyone who would listen) to tackle any job that he felt disinclined to do first. He could be stubbornly persistent. In winter, huddled up in his cloak against the cold, he would work at a drawing until his finger bones ached. In summer, he would haul his artist's equipment uphill under a broiling sun. Often he would stay up drawing long into the night, sitting alone at his table, working up sketches by candlelight or later, when money ran short, eking out the single penny dip that he allowed himself daily for as long as he could.

He worked in a wide range of materials, using anything from the rough, thick papers produced in the local mill, to smooth, commercially prepared boards. Occasionally he would paint on a wooden panel and at one point he asked Richmond to bring him some slivers of polished ivory. It would seem that, following the lead of both Linnell and Richmond who briefly during the 1820s restored the art of the portrait miniature to a delicacy it had not enjoyed since the Elizabethan era, he was planning also to turn his hand to such dainty pieces but, if he did ever paint any miniatures, they have never been traced. For sketching, Palmer liked a strong grey-brown paper with a well-sized finish so that watercolour washes would not soak in too deeply, though for more detailed work he preferred a glazed pasteboard (called Bristol board) made of high-quality woven paper with a smooth surface.

Technically, Palmer was at his most experimental during his Shoreham period. Blake was his role model in this as in so much else. Preferring the precision of medieval painting to the blurry fluidity of the oils which had been prevalent since the high Renaissance, the old visionary had consulted Cennino Cennini's
Il libro dell'arte
, the famous ‘how to' manual of the fifteenth-century craftsmen. He was looking to revive outmoded dry fresco techniques in which designs, mapped out on a rigid surface, were coloured with tempera – a fast-drying mix of pure pigment bound into a viscous emulsion with some water-soluble substance, usually egg yolk, but often glue or gum. This medium, drying in hard, translucent films, kept the crispness of outline and clarity of colour that Blake most admired. Linnell too was an inveterate meddler. As students, he and Cornelius Varley had indulged in a variety of experiments, eager to ascertain just how far a painter's materials could be pushed. Most commonly, an artist would thin heavy oil pigments with turpentine or linseed, but Cornelius tried adding gum copal to the mix, a natural resin which, though it would not evaporate as quickly as turpentine, added body to the colour and a heightened gloss. Linnell, who had witnessed the experiment, was later to put it to practical use. By the late 1840s, with characteristic self-sufficiency, he had all but stopped buying commercially produced colours and, building two iron furnaces at the bottom of his garden, was producing pigments and varnishes himself.

Palmer, too, persisted in testing new approaches and materials: abandoning precisely rendered details for a bolder handling, trying out richer colours and a more vigorous line, letting realism melt away into an atmospheric sense of mood. Sometimes he would build up thick areas of underpaint; often he would ink in dark outlines at the end; occasionally he would add pigments in big, bright, unmodulated blobs; more frequently he would mix them with other colours, keeping the density but playing down the glare. Sometimes paintings which had begun as water-based temperas ended up as oils. Palmer would stick the sheets of paper onto wood panels and continue to work, applying his pigment in thicker and thicker layers, adding more and more glue, mixing in dollops of ultra-glossy cherry gum and then adding sugar to try to bind it all together. Often his experiments led to unforeseen consequences. The Ancients particularly enjoyed telling the story of the time that he had manufactured an egg-yolk emulsion which, poured into a tightly stoppered bottle, he had deposited in one of his pockets in the hope that his constant movements would mix it up well. Not for the first or last time, however, something had got lost in the capacious compartments of his coat. The concoction was completely forgotten. The coat was worn daily until suddenly one afternoon as a detachment of Ancients was strolling through London, their senses were assaulted by an explosion so loud and a stench so unspeakably foul that all bar one of them were completely befuddled. Fortunately, this one (most likely Calvert, the most practical among them) had the presence of mind to pull out his knife and, ripping Palmer's pocket from its lining, hurl it complete with its sulphurous contents away into the gutter. The Ancients moved hastily off, but when they looked back they saw an old-clothes dealer darting to recover the discarded item who, no sooner had he grasped it, than he flung it away with such a dramatic gesture of disgust that they could never recall the event without laughing.

Other experiments, however, caused less amusing problems. The addition of too much gum would lead in time to cracking and Palmer, trying to achieve ever glossier effects to capture quite literally the glowing spirit of divinity, used a serious excess in his later tempera pictures. The thickly embossed surfaces of some of his finest paintings have deteriorated severely with time.

 

 

Palmer worked away ‘with the patience of an ox'.
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Year after year he submitted his annual quota of eight pictures to the Royal Academy. He was attentive to every detail of their making, from the first preparation of the surfaces down to the frames which Linnell's father would construct for him. Palmer may have chosen a life of eccentric seclusion, but he wanted professional recognition. And yet his early successes proved hard to follow. In 1825 he attracted the attention of the critics with two intensely bright landscapes. They possessed ‘a clear and brilliant light and a vivid style of colouring which it would be vain for any other artist to hope to equal', declared the popular weekly periodical
John Bull
. It recommended visitors ‘to seek out these gems'.
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But to another journalist, the very same works seemed less eccentrically commendable than downright peculiar. ‘There are two pictures by a Mr Palmer so amazing that we feel the most intense curiosity to see what manner of man it was who produced such performances,' the
European Magazine
mocked. ‘We think if he would show himself with a label round his neck “The Painter of a View in Kent” he would make something of it at a shilling a head.'
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The next year an understated monochrome was not even noticed. In 1827 and 1828 all of Palmer's submissions were turned down. In 1829 two drawings were accepted, although even the artist found the committee's choice of his brawny Ruth striding home from the gleaning fields unaccountable. It was shown in the Antique Gallery where the hang was so bad that, in the opinion of one reviewer, the pictures might as well have been turned with their faces to the wall. In 1830 and 1831 Palmer again had no success and even though in 1832 seven of his eight submissions were selected they were consigned once again to the Antique Gallery, likened by the same reviewer to ‘purgatory, if not a worse place'.
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The young painter returned the next year to submitting oil paintings, among them a rich autumnal depiction of gleaners at eventide and a picture of bustling harvesters amid profusions of glowing corn. The moon hangs low as a lantern in the surrounding elm trees; stars shine like spotlights from a transparent sky. Both panels were hung in the Great Room where the majority of visitors would have had a chance to view them, but, put into competition with Turner's first oil painting of Venice and his view of a storm-swept Seine, the little rural landscapes were all but overlooked. In 1834 a reviewer for the
Athenaeum
mourned the lack of ‘that rare quality, imagination'
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amid the general mass of domestic landscapes. But Palmer was growing disheartened by this time. He had chosen a tangled and long disused path and he was beginning to despair of it ever being opened again.

 

 

The viewer has to look back with modern eyes to understand the greatest painterly achievement of Palmer. The finest – and now most famous – of the works that he did while in Shoreham were paintings that he never in his lifetime showed. He kept them hidden away in the folder of his ‘Curiosity Portfolio'.

‘There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion,' Francis Bacon had said. It was one of Palmer's favourite quotes. ‘I believe in my very heart,' he told Richmond in 1834, ‘that all the very finest original pictures . . . have a certain quaintness by which they partly affect us – not the quaintness of bungling – the queer doing of a common thought – but a curiousness in their beauty – a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them while the sublime eagles and the big birds of the French academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections.'
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It is this strange beauty that may be discovered in his late Shoreham works. His
In a Shoreham Garden
and his
Magic Apple Tree
are works of mad splendour. Nature runs riot. Close observation combines with abstracted daring to capture and celebrate the exuberant fecundity of the world.