Mysterious Wisdom (37 page)

The prices fetched by watercolours seldom reflected the hours that went into their making. Palmer needed to supplement his income. In 1843 he returned to teaching. Linnell encouraged him. It was better than pot-boiling, he said: churning out ‘cheap pennyworths of Art'
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that would only degrade his talent. Richmond, employing Palmer to instruct his own daughters, was quick to recommend him and Linnell, likewise, introduced him to moneyed patrons. Palmer's election to the Old Watercolour Society would also have helped: indeed, the very day that he was informed of it, Lady Stephen (the wife of a successful banker and prolific author who had helped Linnell to sort out the deceased Blake's affairs and later sat to him for a portrait) inquired whether he was a member before asking him to come round and give lessons twice a week. It was the start of an acquaintanceship involving repeated and pressing invitations to come and stay with the family in Dorset – invitations which Hannah persistently, and at the risk of real rudeness, refused. She was reluctant to leave her precious baby in some far-off nursery while she sat trapped politely in the drawing room.

For most of Palmer's pupils, painting was merely part of a repertoire of desirable accomplishments. They had no real feeling for their subjects, he said, and in nine cases out of ten simply wanted some fine touched-up drawings for public show. ‘A good bold quack with plenty of tact, a comely presence, and well-cut Hoby boots, would beat any real artist out of the field as a teacher,'
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he declared, telling the story of how Turner, when he had tried his hand at instruction, had been discharged for incompetence. And yet Palmer was popular. He was a patient, attentive and – when he came across a student who was prepared to ‘take pains', to produce proper studies instead of ‘a parcel of half-studied fragments'
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– a passionate teacher who believed that, if his pupils did not master the basic grammar of drawing, they would ‘come out as like each other mentally, as a batch of rolls out of the oven'.
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He would prepare a drawing while his young protégées looked on, explaining his methods and encouraging them to take notes so that in their next lesson they could imitate his model. Sometimes they would draw from portrait busts or plaster models and, in spring, when the weeds in his ill-kempt Grove Street garden shot up lush and green, he would fling open his windows and teach drawing from nature. Over time he fostered some lasting acquaintanceships with his pupils, most notably with a Miss Louisa Twining, a member of the tea-growing family, and with a neighbour, Miss Wilkinson, who lent him her copy of
The Times
every day. His relationship with these women was to continue for years and he was also to grow very close to Laura and Julia, the two Richmond girls.

Palmer was an assiduous taskmaster. ‘All who draw from Nature must be exact,' he said. ‘I would rather see young people play at marbles [than pursue an inexact education] – for there they do manage to be exact as they can – and so far it is a true educational exercise.' To turn the pages of a small, bound sketchbook in the Ashmolean, is to sit quietly in on one of Palmer's lessons. Here is page after page of annotated sketches, of neatly pencilled notes on light and shade, outline and form. Here are lists of recommended colours and recipes for combining them to make tints; suggestions as to how to layer these tints on paper and advice on capturing distances, sunsets and the ‘EXPRESSION' of nature. Palmer's correspondence with Louisa Twining constitutes among the most detailed and lively expositions of an artist's technique. ‘Take hot-pressed
thickest
imperial [paper],' he tells her. ‘Put bistre into a
swan pinion
. . . and outline firmly . . . Keep on refreshing your ink outline as you go on . . . When you use heightening lights, on a tree already painted for instance, do the lights first, delicately and sharply with white; when dry add the colour . . . No scrubbing and fumbling with colour dried hard,' he admonishes. ‘Until a vituperative dictionary is published, I can't tell where to find any epithet vile enough to hit this kind of work.'
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He would treat each pupil as an individual. ‘You are the only lady to whom I should recommend
dashing
, but I advise you to
dash
at these,' he instructs Miss Twining. ‘Turn your swan pen into an anchor and then be bold . . . sometimes painting with your brush, then with your fingers. With his finger, they say, Titian put his last finish; it is a wonderful instrument.'
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Palmer himself would certainly use his own: as he fought to capture waves smashing against Cornish rocks, his prints appeared amid the boiling spray.

In her memoirs, Miss Twining recalled his lessons with the greatest pleasure, remembering how his ‘original and striking conversation' would be mixed with ‘the profoundest rules and directions concerning art'.
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She went on to become a prominent philanthropist and campaigning reformer who published books and pamphlets, several of which she would send to Palmer. The conversations he enjoyed both with her and with Miss Wilkinson ventured far beyond painting to encompass anything from the methods of poorhouse schooling through artistic discoveries (‘Beware of the notion that shadows cannot be cast
upon
water . . . I lately saw the shadow of a pier cast upon the sea, and its colour thereby totally altered by losing the warm sunlight'
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) to the prevention of sunstroke. They continued to exchange letters and pay occasional visits late into his life. His relationship with young Julia Richmond was even more established. As he watched her grow up and get married and have children of her own, an open and affectionate correspondence continued which ranged from music and poetry to personal anecdotes, from fun-poking disquisitions on the frivolities of women to fussing imprecations not to sit in wet shoes.

Over the years, Palmer's teaching practice expanded and he may even for a while have teamed up with a figure-drawing instructor, Miss Meakin, who seems to have lodged for a time with the Palmers or, at least, given their home as her accommodation address. All his former pupils – except for members of a certain Campbell family whom, after they left off coming to him, he avoided with exaggerated tact for fear that they might think he was touting for business – returned to him again and again. His system of payments was eccentrically complicated, his charges varying from one guinea for two-and-a-half hours to ten shillings and sixpence an hour if less time was required, unless the teaching took place in his home when he asked for only seven shillings. He worried about what he should charge such wealthy clients as the Duke of Buccleugh, who expected him to travel to their country estates, and, with habitual indecision, he had to consult Linnell.

For many years, teaching would provide Palmer with his main source of income. Though he sometimes longed to abandon it – ‘if I could but stand the loss of the first disentanglement . . . I think it would be a hundred times overpaid'
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he declared – he could not make that first break for, however meagre the end-of-season sums may have been, they were all that lay between him and the humiliating handouts of his father-in-law.

 

 

Teaching duties kept Palmer in London long into the summer, when the capital sweltered in a miasma of filth. ‘What use I could have made in the country of these three weeks of fine weather!'
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he cried in an 1847 letter to his wife. As he threw up his window sashes, gazing out hopelessly at a patch of withering grass, he must have longed to be tramping the wild landscapes of England. He would take a brief sketching tour almost every year, sometimes in the height of the summer and sometimes in early autumn. He always went south, far preferring ‘dear old spongey Devon',
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that ‘loveliest of lands'
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to the dramatic austerities of the windswept north. He preferred ‘the ancient granges and manor houses which are to me the gems of England . . . the grand large cottages (for grand they are) . . . buttressed with stone and ribbed with heart of oak' to a good many Loch Lomonds with their ‘lumpish mountains and leaden lakes'.
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Palmer visited Wales in October 1843, Guildford the following year and Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire the year after that. August 1846 was passed in Margate; in the summers of 1848 and 1849 he travelled again to the West Country and, throughout the late 1850s, he would repeatedly return.

Palmer was thorough in his explorations. He scrambled about with a guidebook always
to hand for fear that without it he might miss a fine sight – he recommended John Murray's because ‘it is written by an artist and has a real savour of Devonshire Perception'.
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All the best things, he believed, lay hidden in chinks and combes; to find them, he said, it was essential to walk, to get as close as possible to the edges of cliffs and brows of hills. Those who lease out the carriages, he warned, tended to get set down on the wrong side of the chasm, to be left ‘gaping at the opposite cliff – while the real spectacle is what they are standing upon' and usually strewn, he added, with ‘Pic Nic bottles and broken plates'.
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His sketching trips were a vital source of refreshment. ‘I can
begin
my subjects . . . in London,' he told Hannah, ‘but when
Italian
weather sets in I should like to get out of town directly, if it were only for a week . . . The weather from which I get my subjects and my suggestions for the remainder of the year is that dazzling weather when all the air seems trembling with little motes. A week of that is, to me, worth three months of ordinary fine weather. It is then I see real sunsets and twilights.'
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Where other artists travelled in luxury with well-stocked portmanteaus and elaborate painting boxes, Palmer took only what he could carry by hand. He liked to tell his pupils the story of Turner who, to the list of implements he needed, would add ‘myself', wisely knowing, Palmer said, ‘that it was better to forget some of his colours than not take the whole man to the work'.
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Donning his plainest clothes, a broad-brimmed hat to protect him from rain or sun and heavy hobnailed boots for the steep mountain tracks, he would slip a tin box of spare pigments, an old campstool and his lunch or dinner into a wicker hand basket. A capacious sketching portfolio (big enough to carry a good supply of paper, together with two large but very light wooden palettes) would be slung round his shoulders by a large strap. Everything else went into one of the accumulation of pockets in which were stowed away the ‘all-important snuff-box', knives, chalks, charcoal, coloured crayons, sketchbooks, water bottle, poetry book, diminishing mirror and a pair of ‘large, round, neutral-tint spectacles made for near sight'.
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Little wonder that, waddling about with all these encumbrances, he got mistaken for a pedlar by a pair of fellow artists, Richard Redgrave and Charles West Cope, future friends who first came across him one evening at an inn in Wales.

To look at his 1847
Gypsy Dell by Moonlight
, its ragged travellers huddling about their bright fire while the darkness gathers around them and a barn owl glides from the rocks, is to suspect that Palmer is not merely appealing to a then popular taste for pictures of travelling folk which the painter Francis Topham had turned into a fashionable speciality, but remembering his own happy days as a roamer, whether wandering free over the hills of Shoreham or clambering the shaggy moors of the West. ‘In exploring wild country I have been for a fortnight together uncertain each day whether I shall get a bed under cover at night; and about midsummer I have repeatedly been walking all night to watch the mystic phenomena of the silent hours,'
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Palmer wrote. He revelled in his precious weeks of freedom, sheltering out on the hills in a rough shepherd's hut; disembarking at a lonely little cove near Clovelly, his shoes filling with water as he leapt from the boat; getting trapped by the tide in a cavern at Kynance as (rather like Turner who had lain down at Land's End so that he could look up at the rock face) he scrambled under a cliff to find the right sketching point; or lying unclothed in bed while his rain-drenched garments dried over the kitchen fire of an inn. Little wonder that so often he caught dreadful colds.