Raymond Lister, Samuel Palmer: His Life and Art *

Joseph Viscomi **

“In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter. . . . He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy ... one of the few ... who are not in some way or other ‘double-minded’ and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect . . .” (23-25). This is Samuel Palmer remembering William Blake, whose peace of mind the younger artist desired but rarely attained, whose neglect he read as a sign of spiritual and artistic integrity, and whose depression about being neglected he failed to realize had been alleviated by the devotion of young artists who had befriended him in old age: John Linnell, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, and, especially, Linnell’s protege and future son-in-law, Samuel Palmer.

The last three of these artists, with a few other literary and artistic friends, referred to themselves as the “Ancients” and to Blake as the “Interpreter.” For them, Blake was an artist-prophet, a man whose life had coherently combined art, religion, and politics, a man from an earlier, more spiritual age. Their name for themselves—a rather ironic appellation given that Palmer was only 19 when he met Blake in 1824—expressed their desire to walk with Dante and Blake, and away from the modern and fashionably realistic art of the day. It reflected a desire to create an art rich in symbolism, in the Blakean sense that “the wisest of the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act.” Their name also alludes to their models in printmaking; with Blake’s (and Linnell’s) encouragement they studied the graphic art of Durer, Raimondi, Lucas and other Renaissance artist-printmakers, who were known as the “ancients” or “fathers of engraving,” and whom Blake had long championed in an age that considered their rarity more valuable than their artistry. All of Blake’s followers, though trained as painters, produced one or more prints, with Calvert producing wood engravings rivaling Blake’s own in beauty, and Palmer executing etchings late in life that were in subject and technique a return to this, the happiest period of his life. Through their (and Linnell’s) intensity and untrained perspective, the professional engraver learned to unlearn a career of conventions; as the Book of Job attests, he had come closer technically and spiritually to his models than ever before. In this sense of mutual stimulation, Blake’s disciples were not mere “followers,” but fine artists in their own right, something especially true of Palmer, as Lister makes abundantly clear in the biography, Samuel Palmer: His Life and Art.

Lister is well qualified to evaluate the relation between the Interpreter and the Ancients. He has written a general study on British Romantic Art (1973), the Fitzwilliam exhibition catalogue, Samuel Palmer and the Ancients (1984), biographies of Calvert (1962), Blake (1968), and Richmond (1981), and has edited Palmer’s letters in two volumes (1974). In addition to writing Infernal Methods (1975), a study of Blake’s printing techniques, though one too dependent on the erroneous works of others, he has written The Paintings of William Blake (1985), which discusses Blake’s art for a general audience. Lister has covered Palmer’s pictorial canon even more thoroughly, starting with Samuel Palmer and his Etchings (1969), a subject partly revisited (with three other authors) in Samuel Palmer: A Vision Recaptured: The Complete Etchings and the Paintings for Milton and for Virgil (1978), The Paintings of Samuel Palmer (1986), and culminating in the two most recent works: Catalogue Raisonne of the Works of Samuel Palmer (1988), and this new biography.

The biography is actually a complete rewriting of one published in 1974. The life that emerges in the earlier book is documented primarily by written rather than pictorial material, perhaps reflecting Lister’s having just edited the letters. The current biography includes 102 reproductions, 73 more than the earlier work, benefiting no doubt from Lister’s recent work on the paintings. Unfortunately, the plates are monochrome and reproduced poorly, which is especially troublesome with the etchings, whose rich shades of black are muddy. (Poor reproductive quality and the absence of detailed commentary are good reasons for reading the biography in conjunction with Paintings, where seventy-five paintings are reproduced in color and discussed historically and technically.) Still, this is a biography of a painter based primarily on his writings, as expressed in letters and notebooks. But what fascinating writing it is.

Palmer seems never to have stopped writing. Indeed, after the death of his son Thomas More (1861), he says just that: “to be unoccupied a moment was madness. I woke till very lately every morning before dawn and was obliged to employ myself in writing incessantly . . .” (196). Many letters exist today because they were written to his children, who were instructed to save them because “I shall die and my body will be put into a hole and you will never see me again while you live in this world . . . But if we love the Blessed God—and do what He has told us to do—we shall come to life again—much better and happier than we are now ...” (138). Lister likens this to “moral blackmail”; the reader may find that characteristically understating the case. Palmer’s letters from Italy, where he and his wife, Hannah Linnell, stayed and studied for two years, are a fascinating portrait of the man vacillating between assertiveness, when he finally tells his mother-in-law to stop her incessant and unfounded worrying, a letter calculated to get her off Linnell’s back and thus Linnell off his own back, and complete subordination of his will to Linnell’s—which in turn made such interference possible.

Palmer’s lucidity, whether on metaphysics, the details of daily schedules, personal hygiene, child rearing, self-analysis, or composition, often masks an alarming obtuseness and insensitivity. He seemed never to have stopped proselytizing for the established Church to his Baptist relatives or to the overtly nonconformist, rigidly puritanical, Linnell, or to have noticed his son’s poor mental and physical condition, continually pushing him academically. His letters to Linnell criticizing artisans reveals a political vision that is very difficult to reconcile with Blake’s; that it contributed to his and Linnell’s falling out is understandable, but that it was already in place when he met Blake and yet seems not to have affected Blake’s admiration for Palmer or Palmer’s reverence for Blake raises questions that remain unanswered.

Indeed, while Lister cannot be accused of not letting Palmer speak for himself, he can be faulted for letting Palmer go on at the expense of contexts. Palmer talks about religion, aesthetics, economics, and politics, but his statements and opinions are not historically or theoretically grounded. We never come to understand why a man who speaks of Blake as his “redeemer” paints landscapes instead of “the human form divine.” Or how such a zealot for the established Church could produce such richly sensual, even erotic, works of art. Admitting that the acquiescent tone of a letter to Linnell reveals Palmer’s need for a father figure is about as deeply psychoanalytical as Lister gets; acknowledging that narrative art was fashionable in the 1850s is about as much attention the aesthetic context receives. Passages from poems—and the fact that Palmer wrote poems, and poems in experimental meter and rhyme schemes—go without comment. His religious views, their intensity, meaning, and origins are glossed at best. Lister appears to think the writings and motivations are self-evident, but after Foucault and Derrida, let alone Marx and Freud, such an approach makes biographies problematic.

On the other hand, Lister’s refusal to analyze texts and images in light of current critical theories, to treat them as documents revealing culture, gender, or ideology, or to dwell on the political, social, religious, or aesthetic issues of the day, makes his biography the first place to start any study of Palmer. It is not itself a study of Palmer’s life or art, let alone the life and art of the times, but is a nicely written and detailed chronology of the artist’s life, firmly focused on what he did when, on his life as husband, son, father, friend, painter, and printmaker. It details, especially in its last four of six chapters, his domestic situation, a mid-Victorian drama of bourgeois expectations, artistic sensibilities, inconsolable grief, religious zealotry and argument, and, finally, spiritual peace.

It’s the first two chapters, “The Gateway to the Valley,” and “The Valley of Vision,” that will probably interest romantic scholars most. The former deals with his first meetings with Linnell (1822) and Blake, and presents a Linnell unfamiliar to Blake scholars. Instead of the altruistic patron, one sees a mentor as talented as he is autocratic, as important to Palmer’s artistic development as he was to Blake’s renaissance. While Palmer was enthusiastic about meeting Linnell (only thirteen years older yet well established), he knew that Blake was the turning point: “I know—I am certain and positive that God answers the prayers of them that believe, and hope in His mercy. I sometimes doubt this through the temptation of the Devil, and while I doubt I am miserable; but when my eyes are open again, I see what God has done to me, and I now tell you, I know that my Redeemer liveth” (26).

The Valley of Vision refers to the secluded valley of Shoreham, Kent, where Palmer bought a cottage (1826-32) and where he and the other Ancients produced many of their finest works. Unfortunately, there is not much of Palmer’s early work extant, or as much as there once was, for A. H. Palmer, the painter’s youngest son, “burnt ... a great quantity of [his] father’s handiwork—handiwork which he himself valued more than that work which the public could understand. Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate” (163). This incredible loss to art occurred in 1909 and “included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and lasted for days” (163). The works that escaped the inferno are of the highest order, and in theme, subject, and style, were deeply influenced by Blake’s Virgil wood engravings (1821). Their impact on Palmer can be gauged by his rapturous and poetic description: they were “visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry ... intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliancy . . . [expressing] a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are .. . the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of that rest which remaineth to the people of God” (25).

Blake’s pastoral vision, with its “infinite detail,” is readily seen in pen and ink wash drawings like A Rustic Scene, Early Morning, and The Valley thick with Corn (1825; ill. 5 and 6), where the pen lines delineating fields, foliage, hills, and the ground itself are densely patterned in the manner of ancient engravings. This was, according to Palmer, “nature ... sprinkled and showered with a thousand pretty eyes and buds and spires and blossoms, gemm’d with dew, and . . . clad in living green” and making up the “thousand repetitions of little forms, which are part of its own generic perfection” (49). Palmer understood well Blake’s axiom that “it is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too,” that material particulars manifest the divine, and that ideal or “imaginative art” (49) was incompatible with literal representation. The rural people, on the other hand, he seems not to have understood at all, idealizing their poverty in light of Virgil’s Eclogues and a romantic primitivism. And yet, these works are far more than just idealizations of places or people; the intense but carefully overworked lines, shapes, and patterns are imbued with a physical sensuality, an imprint of body and soul.

The Shoreham period represents the height of Palmer’s artistic powers, a view Lister does not contest. He does, however, in the third and fourth chapters, “Italian Interlude” and “The Battle for Life,” argue persuasively that the art of Palmer’s middle period, the 1830s and 40s, so little known today, was “always worth his skill,” and that its having been “created in conditions always of strife, and sometimes of high tragedy, is a measure of his unfailing artistic integrity” (134). Perhaps, but as Lister also acknowledges, the work of this period was fashionably picturesque, depending more on technique, which had always fascinated Palmer, and less on feeling. It pales not in light of his contemporaries (particularly the latter work of Calvert and Richmond) but of his own best work. The attention to technique is understandable; by 1848 two thirds of his income came from giving art lessons. Between 1843 and 1853, he sold only 45 works, averaging 16 pounds a piece, far less than Richmond and Linnell. But what a fine teacher he must have been! One student records that “it was not only a rich treat to watch him painting the beautiful pictures which were developed out of his imagination from day to day, and formed the lesson . . . but also to listen to his original and striking conversation, combined with the profoundest rules and directions concerning art” (129).

Palmer “ultimately recaptured a measure of the visionary outlook of his younger years” (165), but, as Lister argues in the fifth chapter, “A Harvest of Tragedy,” it was through etching rather than painting. Etching, a medium imbued with Blakean significance, offered the physical joys of technique, of building dense linear webs to create the visual brilliance of “thousands of little sparkles of white paper” (203), “those thousand little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching ... moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade” (170). The etchings were a return to Shoreham, in their pastoral subjects and technique, which recall Blake’s wood engravings and the “thousand pretty eyes” and the “thousand repetitions of little forms” of Palmer’s own heavily worked pen drawings. Palmer would have been “content to do nothing else, so curiously attractive is the teazing, temper-trying, yet fascinating copper. But my etchings consume much time ... I can get 100 guineas for quite a small drawing which does not occupy nearly the time of some of my etchings” (203). That they consumed much time is an understatement: Palmer finished only thirteen etchings between 1850-1880, fewer than Whistler could do in a month.

In old age, at Furze Hill House, not far from Linnell’s house (he was never far from the Linnells, for Hannah would not permit it), Palmer was able to meet two-thirds of Blake’s requirements for sublime art: “peace, plenty, and domestic happiness.” He was now financially secure and at peace when in his studio, which was off limits to everyone, especially his wife. It was his world and his alone, shared with the works of his friends, including Blake’s, works he called “mind toners” (207). It was, like Shoreham, a “deep delved womb ... safe, and still” (42), a room of his own where he could escape from the bourgeois pretensions of his wife and her friends: “I am sick of it all ... the drawing-room-genteel-life-servant-keeping-system altogether; and if I were alone again would build a vast airy hut on a dry soil in some old fashioned town where there was a wholesome cook-shop and be my own housemaid and char-woman” (207). Here, in this world, with Shoreham clearly in mind, Palmer began his last two projects, the eight watercolors illustrating Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, and the translation and illustrations of Virgil’s Eclogues, the subjects of the final chapter, “Grief and the Inspiration of Experience.”

The eight watercolors are among his largest (504 mm x 718 mm), straining the medium and necessitating every trick Palmer knew. Two of the paintings, The Bellman and The Lonely Tower, were reproduced as etchings and are in that form two of his greatest works. It is interesting to note that they were planned in 1864 but not completed till 1879, an indication not of their consuming much time but of Palmer’s “slow and toilsome method of work” (222), as well as his difficulty with letting a project go once started, though getting started, as he told a friend, filled him with “almost invincible repugnance” (224). The translation was completed in 1872 with Calvert’s assistance but not published till 1883, two years after Palmer’s death, with four of its five etchings finished by A. H. Palmer, who by this time had become Palmer’s assistant and printer. The translation was in rhyming couplets, a form saved from tediousness by Palmer’s mastery of stress and enjambement. Surely Lister is correct in assessing Palmer’s talent and love of literature: “Palmer could as easily—perhaps more easily—have been a writer as a painter” (228).

Palmer’s reputation, like Blake’s, seemed to die with him. It was saved by the V & A’s An Exhibition of Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake of 1926. Though, as the exhibition’s title makes clear, that reputation was based primarily on the Shoreham works. Now, with Lister’s Paintings, Catalogue Raisonne, and this biography, we have the materials necessary to begin reassessing Palmer’s entire canon—and to assess Lister’s assertion that the Welsh and Italian landscapes of the middle years, the late watercolors, and particularly the Milton paintings and late etchings, works that “condensed a lifetime of vision into a few square inches” (240), are indeed as worthy of study as the early works. We can also ascertain if, like the early works, they manifest one of the principles Palmer valued most in Blake, integrity, for as Palmer realized long before that fateful day in 1824: “If we merely ask ourselves ‘What will people say of us?’ we are rotten at the core” (134).

[*] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xx+272. 102 illus.

[**] Studies in Romanticism 30 (Summer 1991): 298-305.