Luminous art and shadowed life

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 8

Luminous art and shadowed life

Samuel Palmer. A biography by Raymond Lister. Faber and Faber. N.Z. price $17.30. Index. Illustrated. Raymond Lister has written an engrossing, readable account of an extraordinary life which would be so even if Samual Palmer had not after all been a painter. Samuel Palmer was born into an upper-class family in 1805; and the account of his upbringing and education is both terrifying and revealing. As an adult he had a massive and imposingly romantic head and chest (you see it in his self-portraits) but a height of just over sft, and as a baby and child he was a weakling. How lucky he was to be rescued from his mother’s bland administration of pap to the care of an extraordinary educated woman as nurse : Mary Ward, who became “a beloved preceptress and a stimulator of taste” to the boy, just as John Linnell, the artist who was to become his father-in-law, stood in the place of difficult and second father to him. Palmer’s father kept a bookshop, and the young artist’s first ambition was to be an author; but his mother “misinterpreted” this and encouraged him to draw and to paint. However, it was John Linnell who set him on the way to becoming an artist. Before they had met, Palmer had acquired a technique and had “dimly perceived a mystical relationship between his art and his religion.” The influence of Linnell, and of William Blake, enabled Palmer to express a unified vision in his art, the experience of a conviction: “I now tell you, I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Palmer settled at Shoreham m Kent, where his vision exalted the Kentish landscape in his paintings, and Linnell encouraged him in his art. However, in religion and politics the two were far apart, and when Palmer expressed a wish to marry Hannah Linnell, there was strong objection especially from Mrs Linnell at the thought of their talented daughter giving up nonconformity for Palmer’s Church of England. However, Samuel and Hannah married, and existed under the

financial patronage of Linnell. Soon after, extorting with difficulty a written agreement from his mother-in-law, Palmer and Hannah left for Italy with George and Julia Richmond, and a commission from Linnell for saleable drawings. Palmer hoped to sell his work to rich tourists, but with utterly no success he was forced to .make pitifully small amounts of money by teaching drawing to occasional young ladies. He sold 52 Loggia drawings to Linnell for £l7 Ils, very cheap even then, but said placatingly “I shall be quite content with much less.” Hannah too was working hard; “It is very fatiguing to copy from lofty ceilings where the things are mostly in the dark,” and Palmer "wrote away' for “a bootie of Macassar for her hair which has been coming off lately in spite of the lamp oil with which in our disconsolateness she was fain to anoint it.” Two years of all this and nothing but macaroni! And they returned to London to find not only a worsened relationship with the Ljnnells, but that Palmer’s brother had pawned all his paintings. Palmer’s son Thomas More was bom soon after their return to England. With his birth the story of the artist takes on a new and even frightening interest. Palmer set out to test his theories of family life. When his son is two and a half he writes to him like this: I am much obliged to you for the letter you sent me— and I take care of it — and suppose that you also will take care of my letters — for when you grow up to be a young man — I shall die and my body will be put in a hole and you will never see me again while you live in this world — and perhaps then you will like to look at some of the letters I have written to you. But if we love the Blessed God — and do what He has told us to do — we shall come to life again and so he continues. Thomas More Palmer as a three-year-old was reading the Bible and

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” as well as Blake’s poetry and other books. Palmer’s daughter Mary, two years younger than the boy, died at the age of three. Dr McKenzie had given Mary six drops of laudanum the night before, which Hannah thought had caused “the sad state of dear Mary this morning.” McKenzie was dismissed and Dr Mclntyre reinstated but too late. Mary was a beloved child in whom much potential had been seen. Hannah made a cushion of her clothes and plaster casts of her face and hands. Then the parents expended their grief on making arrangements for the six-year-old Thomas More’s education. Relationships within the family were strained as Linnell, whose wealth was increasing, set out to try to win his daughter back to nonconformist religion, while Samuel Palmer was finding it more and more hard to earn any money at all, and his family was financially dependent on Linnell. Palmer tried to find happiness in developing his son’s scholarly aptitude. Thomas More was beaten by his schoolfellows because of his youth and precocity, and this happened often when he was particularly weak after rheumatic fever. Thomas More’s only interest apart from study was the piano, which he played apparently remarkably for his age. The story of how Thomas won a scholarship from his school to university but how it was awarded posthumously after the boy died a gruelling death while resting — for the first time in his life — in the country, away from his father’s demands, is one which every parent, teacher and educational theorist should read. It gives admirers of Samuel Palmer’s art cause to think too.