Mysterious Wisdom (16 page)

But Palmer aimed at more than a literal transcription of God's creation. He wanted nothing less than ‘the much hoped and prayed for revival of art'.
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The way to achieve this, he decided, was not simply to go onwards, polishing techniques that could capture the physical world precisely; it was to evoke the transcendent atmosphere that pervaded the world. And to do this, he believed, he would have to double back, to recover the richness of an era of true faith. He determined to become once more ‘a pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth'.
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The Ancients

 

Brothers in art, brothers in love

from Samuel Calvert,
A Memoir of Edward Calvert

 

Palmer would have met several fellow pilgrims on his backward-looking path and by the beginning of 1824 a group of nine companions, with Palmer at their centre, had begun regularly gathering. By summer that year they were referring to themselves as the Ancients. Most of them were practising artists. Palmer's friends Francis Finch, Henry Walter and George Richmond were among the number, as well as an engraver Welby Sherman, a sculptor Frederick Tatham and Edward Calvert, an accomplished miniaturist. But Palmer's cousin John Giles, a stockbroker's clerk with strong religious convictions, and Tatham's brother Arthur, a Cambridge student, were also part of the brotherhood. Blake and Linnell were never actually members though the former was to become something between a mentor and a mascot while the latter, at least at the beginning, played host to their gatherings and was a trusted confidant.

Artistic fellowships, sprouting like weeds in the soil turned up by the French Revolution, would soon start playing an important role in European culture. The excluded had discovered a new way to make their presence felt. By banding together in the face of opposition they could find a new strength. The idea of ‘the movement' gathered pace as the century progressed and, from the mid-1850s, group after group emerged: the Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Cubists, the Futurists, the Surrealists. The baton would be passed with increasing rapidity down the decades as each new set of convictions found its followers and flourished, their ideas and improvisations driving Modernism forwards. But, when the Ancients were gathering, the idea of such groups still felt new. A couple of break­away cabals had sprung up briefly on the continent. Paris, at the end of the eighteenth century, had nurtured
Les Barbus
(‘the bearded ones'): quarrelsome outcasts from the studio of Jacques-Louis David who, rejecting the three-dimensional dramas advocated by their neo-classical master, looked to the simple linear motifs of Greek vase painting instead. And then there had been the Nazarenes. But the brotherhood of the Ancients was the first of such congregations to grow up in Britain and had, in consequence, a somewhat tentative, un-selfconfident feel. Members did not publish a resounding manifesto, establish a strict code of practice or follow a defined style. In fact, most of them were only part-timers. But they were bound broadly together by their spirituality, their shared belief in the purity of archaic culture and the deep sense of affection which they had for one another. ‘We were brothers in art, brothers in love, and brothers in that for which art and love subsist – the Ideal – the Kingdom within,'
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as Calvert would say.

 

 

Palmer's closest and most loyal friend among the Ancients was the artist George Richmond (1809–96). Barely fifteen when the group was founded, he was small, almost squat, with big hands and feet and long waving brown hair which, judging by a youthful self-portrait, he would have been constantly sweeping back from his high, clear brow. The son of a painter of miniatures, Richmond had right from the beginning, when he and Palmer first met in front of the marbles at the British Museum, an artistic facility which his friend, with his obsessive tendency to niggle, lacked. Richmond had gone on to enrol at the Royal Academy where the passions of the histrionic Fuseli would have prepared him for the erratic tempests of Blake, a figure whom, like all his fellow Ancients, he was to come deeply to admire. ‘Never have I known an artist so spiritual, so devoted, so single-minded or so full of vivid imagination,'
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he would tell the poet's future biographer Alexander Gilchrist; yet, at the same time, Gilchrist reported, he would also make so bold as to argue back against Blake.

Palmer and Richmond shared a genial disposition, a pleasure in debate and a delight in the ridiculous. They would often visit exhibitions together and, stumping up the shilling entrance fee, could frequently be found standing side by side in front of a canvas at Somerset House, or studying canvases in the ‘enchanted school'
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of the National Gallery which, from the moment of its foundation in 1824, was to become one of their favourite points of call. They both exulted in music and one of Richmond's earliest memories was of being crushed in the pit listening to Paganini play in a concert in which the audience had been roused to such a fever pitch of frenzy that they had risen almost as one to shake their fists in each other's face. Years later, Richmond would also hear Chopin play in Paris, in a concert for which the great maestro of Romance, wrapped in blankets and sweating in the last stages of consumption, had had to be carried to his piano stool; but as soon as he had touched the keys, Richmond remembered, his inspiration had returned.

Richmond, with his boyish vivacity, his conviviality and his wicked talent for mimicry, made a sympathetic and amusing companion. John Ruskin noted the kindness of his soft brown gaze while another friend described how, when part of a gathering, ‘he drew out those around him with the tenderest skill [and] . . . never allowed the humblest company to feel left out'. ‘Where others might see blemishes, Mr Richmond always saw beauties,'
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he said. But Richmond was also the most ambitious of the Ancients. While his fellows wasted time dithering about exactly which path to take, he was travelling in France trying to broaden an education which, if the impossible handwriting of letters littered with spelling mistakes is anything to go on, had been at best informal. While his friends were debating a communion of saints, he was in Calais exchanging pinches of snuff with the exiled Beau Brummell and, while they were living in rural retirement, he was building up a society portraitist's clientele. He never indulged the eccentricities that could jeopardise a career.

 

 

Edward Calvert (1799–1883) was to be another lifelong companion to Palmer. He was a committed fellow visionary as well as a faithful friend. The son of a naval officer, reared on England's rugged south-western coasts, he had been only six years old when wandering at sunset in his grandmother's garden he had had his first mystic experience, being suddenly possessed by a feeling which, as his son would later describe it, was ‘as of a loving spirit taking up his abode within him, and seating himself beside his own soul'.
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And yet Calvert was not some fey dreamer. He was a robust country lad who, at the age of seven, had rowed out alone to visit a fishing fleet trawling several miles from the shore and, at the age of fifteen, when his fellow Ancients were first picking up palette and brush, he had enlisted in the Navy to serve as a midshipman. He was wounded in 1816 during the bombardment of Algiers – the spectacular climax of a punitive British campaign intended to put a stop to piracy in the Mediterranean and prevent a thriving trade in European slaves – but though Calvert soon recovered and more than a thousand Christian captives were liberated, his closest friend, hit by a cannonball, was killed.

The harsher realities of a career which until that moment had seemed more like an exciting adventure were brought home. From then on the man of action faded and the thinker came to the fore. With several years still to go before he could obtain his certificate of release, Calvert found what must have seemed to his shipmates an eccentric way of filling them. He set about learning to draw, filling page after page with his sketches as, in the confines of his midshipman's cabin, he practised his draughtsman's skills by the lurching lamplight. Soon he was relishing a journey through the Aegean not for its seafaring opportunities but for the chance it afforded him to study the rocky landscapes of myth. Calvert had been presented with a copy of Virgil on his baptism and it had filled his mind with vivid imaginings of a pantheistic world. This voyage through the islands now brought them to fresh life. Pagan enthusiasms – or ‘naughty disobedient heresies'
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as Palmer would call them – would always compete with the Christian commitments of the man who would later build an altar to Pan at the bottom of his London garden.

As soon as Calvert had secured his release from the Navy – to the consternation of a family who feared he was abandoning a sound career – he started to study under an art teacher in Plymouth and, within a year or two, was producing accomplished miniatures. He met the ringleted Mary Bennell, a Londoner, on a visit to her family in the West Country, and after a brief courtship involving a great deal of poetic recitation, they married and moved to the capital in 1824. Calvert was admitted to the Royal Academy the next year. He had simply shown Fuseli his drawings and Fuseli had said: ‘That will do, we want more of this.'

One of the first people whom Calvert had met in London was Palmer's cousin, John Giles, with whom, in the course of negotiating the sale of some shares, he had discovered a mutual fascination for the art of an­­­tiquity. The two had quickly made friends and it was probably Giles who had told Calvert about Palmer and Richmond. He had certainly spoken of the sailor-turned-artist to these two and when Calvert spotted Richmond in the Somerset House Library he had come immediately across and, holding out a hand, said: ‘You must be Richmond,' to which Richmond replied: ‘And you Mr Calvert whom I have wished to see.'

Squarely built, with a broad forehead and an expression more contemplative than observant, Calvert had looked on first acquaintance, Palmer later remembered, like ‘a prosperous stalwart country gentleman . . . redolent of the sea and in white trousers'.
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Linnell thought that he resembled an Old Testament prophet and the young Ancients seem rather to have regarded him as such. One of Calvert's sons (he was to father six children, one of whom died in infancy) captured a sense of the role that he played in their circle: ‘His voice was subdued and impressive as his manner was dignified and unassuming, while his countenance, fair and almost unfurrowed, glowed with interest and simplicity. He would listen attentively to whoever was speaking, after which, when disposed to reply there would be noticed a slight movement in his features – an indication that he was about to say something – and those around would withhold further remark.'
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Calvert's home in Brixton, where he moved in 1826, became a meeting place for the Ancients. They ‘unceremoniously dropped in as impulse or convenience prompted', his son remembered, ‘reading . . . or comparing notes, aflame with earnest spiritual faith'.
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William Blake particularly liked him, Palmer said, for he had, ‘in no small degree' that ‘innocence and humility of heart'
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which Blake most loved to find. But purity of heart, as Calvert's family came to understand only too well, does not lead necessarily to fiscal profit and, for all that he was possessed of a modest private income, they often found themselves suffering for his art. ‘Oh Edward, you will never do anything to make yourself famous,' his frustrated wife had once cried after he had turned down an offer from the precociously successful animal painter Edwin Landseer to complete one of his equestrian portraits. Calvert's belief was that: ‘Painting must be a resource not a profession.'
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