Mysterious Wisdom (30 page)

 

 

The Ancients did not simply disband. ‘The little knot of friends remains united,' Palmer assured Frederick Tatham in 1837, ‘only if possible, more closely cemented than ever.'
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And, although this is most likely a wishful overstatement, a group of them did continue to meet once a month. This regular gathering, an excuse for a party which would often extend late into the night, was remembered as an occasion of great excitement by the artists' families. Richmond's children would wait, noses pressed to the window of their Marylebone nursery, watching for their visitors to arrive: the artist carrying his carefully wrapped burden – a painting fresh from the easel or a sheaf of new sketches – while wife and offspring tagged excitedly along behind. For the first few hours the men would go into retirement in the study or studio where, amid a gathering fug of pipe smoke, they would remain closeted in solemn judgment on one another's progress.

But then the meeting of the ‘blessed in council' would break up and it would be time for tea drinking and chatting and stories. The graceful Mrs Richmond, their ‘fair Hebe', would deal out bowl after bowl of the ‘oriental nectar' (green tea) while the children would crowd in excitedly to admire the Ancients' latest works. ‘How solemn and how beautiful those freshly painted pictures appeared to us,' Calvert's son remembered, ‘displayed in the light of candles . . . which were built up on books and pedestals in ecclesiastical fashion.'
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They would gaze in reverence. But there was also much laughter amid the discussion. Sometimes the wet paint on one of the pictures, despite careful measures, would get smudged: it would lead to ‘Turneresque subtleties', Palmer liked to joke. He was one of the merriest for, although Calvert's son commented on the amiability of Richmond, the modest reserve of Walter or Finch, the conscious twinkle in his father's eye, it was ‘the oddity and humour of Palmer' that struck him most pleasantly. He ‘interested and amused everybody' he said, especially at supper when he would find that the goose was too savoury or that the beer had too much froth.
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These gatherings would go on late into the night as the Ancients shared reminiscences about their Shoreham days, sipping drinks in between pinches from their snuff boxes. Finch would play the piano or Palmer his fiddle, while the rest would gather around to sing until at last, weaving a little, they would wend their way homewards, gazing up nostalgically at the stars and recalling the times they had wandered through the velvet Shoreham nights. ‘We seem individually to be the odd volumes, and when together we form the complete set,'
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Finch remarked.

And yet, for all that each of them dearly valued the company of his fellows, as artists their courses were diverging. Richmond was socialising doggedly to consolidate his portraitist's career. He was a charming addition to any polite gathering, not least when his attentive wife Julia was beside him, and although like Palmer he was a terrible hypochondriac – his diaries are peppered with records of indispositions and sniffles, cancelled appointments and suspended sittings – he still managed to complete several dozen portraits a year. He was never to be persuaded from his course again and though he was later to enjoy a friendship with John Ruskin who, for a brief while took quite an interest in the Ancients' lost dream, when Ruskin tried to lure him away from the comforts of commerce – ‘Give my love to George Richmond,' he wrote in a letter from Italy, ‘and ask him what the d he means by living in a fine house . . . painting English red-nosed puppets with black shoes and blue sashes when he ought to be over here living on grapes and copying everything properly' – Richmond was not to be convinced.

Richmond does not belong in the first rank of portraitists, but what his pictures lack in psychological acuity, they make up for with careful observation. He had a sharp eye. Once, spotting some frescos in a blacksmith's shop, he popped in to buy them, only discovering later that they came from Ovid's family tomb; while a small crayon sketch that he did of Charlotte Brontë captured her so vividly that she burst into tears when she saw it for it reminded her so nearly of her recently deceased sister Anne. It is now seen as the definitive image of the author.

Richmond must often have missed his more carefree Shoreham days. In 1845 he took a holiday in Kent with his family, revisiting many of the Ancients' favourite haunts. But he remained contentedly living in London, a good but strict father to a growing family who, for all that he would deliver many sound thrashings, remembered him with as much affection as respect. Many years later his eldest son Willie would tell the story of how, as a child, he had sneaked off to the zoo without telling his parents. It had been a Sunday and so, to punish him, his father had given him the biblical text of the day to read. It was a passage in which St Peter compares the devil to a lion. Willie, summoned before his father to be tested, had started to repeat the story but when it came to the part about the leonine devil he had piped up: ‘Papa, I have seen him today.' Richmond, unable to maintain his stern façade any longer, burst into laughter and his happy son was let off the hook. Richmond remained all his life a loyal supporter of Palmer. ‘Among the many mercies of my now long life,' he later wrote, ‘the friendship of Samuel Palmer was to my poor seeming . . . one of the greatest things that ever were given to me.'
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Palmer valued him equally in return. ‘You are fixed in my heart and it would want a very rough jerk to tumble you out,'
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he declared.

Calvert, with his independent means, could have continued clearing the tangles from the Ancients' archaic track. The spirited woodcuts that he made during Shoreham days are still considered his liveliest and most inspirational works. But the boldness of Calvert's vision soon faded, along with its pervasive erotic energy, as increasingly he succumbed to the mores of Victorian society. He built a studio in his garden and retiring through a secret door behind a bookcase to this refuge would while away long hours, formulating complicated colour theories or rearranging his extensive library of classical texts, withdrawing further and further from the dreams of his fellows.

Finch pursued his painting career quietly for the rest of his life. He had a modest reserve which served him well in the society circles into which he ventured after being commissioned to paint views of Lord Northwick's mansion. He was a kind and sensitive companion. ‘Whether grave or gay, he was always equal to the occasion endeavouring to understand and adapt himself to the feelings of those present,' it was later recorded; ‘where dancing was the order of the evening, he seldom sought, as partners, the most attractive of the fair ones within his reach, but rather those whom others of his own sex might feel disposed to pass over.'
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In 1837 he married Eliza, a fellow singer whom he had met through the Hatton Garden church choir, and from then on, undiscouraged by neglect or diverted by fashion, he continued to supply the annual exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society with a steady quota of poetic landscapes which, as one critic noted in 1835, never varied from year to year. Yet why should they when they were perfect of their kind, this critic asked? Finch supplemented his income by teaching and became a lecturer in later years. ‘Art, like a mountain, must rise from a broad base of general knowledge and acute observation, but it rises heavenward and should ever culminate in the “beauty of holiness”,'
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he informed his students. He believed that he could disprove atheism by logic. Blake, who detested such rationality, would no doubt have found matter for argument but by then Finch had lost faith with the ideals of this mentor. ‘He was not mad,' he would tell Blake's biographer, ‘but perverse and wilful; he reasoned correctly from arbitrary and often false premises.'
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The lives of the Finches and the Palmers diverged, yet Palmer was always to remember this calm, kindly creature with affection and respect.

Henry Walter had never really subscribed to the ideals of the Ancients, though his watercolour caricatures provide lively mementos of the group. Relatively little is recorded of his life after Shoreham except that he got married and moved to Torquay. Returning to the village one day with his wife, he didn't pause to chat as formerly with the simpleton who liked to loiter on the bridge. ‘He had a
woman
with him,' the mournful fellow sobbed.

The Tathams, too, went their own ways. As a movement the Ancients had manifestly failed. They had attracted no followers, found no patrons, received no critical acclaim or provoked much new thought. In fact, about the only published response to their project had been an expression of mild bemusement. They may not have been remembered by posterity at all had it not been for the rise of the Pre-Raphaelites later in the century. This band of brothers, with the help of Ruskin as a patron, would revive British interest in a medieval aesthetic and rediscover the until-then-forgotten figure of Blake. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter at the heart of this group, who encouraged Alexander Gilchrist to embark on a biography of the great visionary, thus providing the Ancients with an opportunity to recount their own part in his tale. But by the time this biography was published the erstwhile Ancients had all but abandoned their Shoreham beliefs. ‘We all wanted thumping when we thought in a dream of idealism that we were learning art,'
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declared Richmond. Palmer was more nostalgic. As a young man he had annotated his copy of Payne Knight's
Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste
with high-minded comments. Years later he added a far sadder note: ‘I knew the positive and eccentric young man who wrote the notes in these pages,' he penned. ‘He believed in art (however foolishly); he believed in men (as he read them in books). He spent years in hard study and reading and wished to do good with his knowledge . . . He has now lived to find out his mistake.'
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By the end of 1836, Palmer's father was also growing restless. Finding his gentlemanly existence increasingly unsatisfactory, he wanted to open an educational establishment in which he would be able to employ the now penurious William and, in January 1837, he signed a document agreeing for the annual sum of £30 to take premises in Speldhurst Street. For a further £18, he purchased the goodwill, the desks, forms and academy boards of a school. Palmer, concurring with an irate uncle Nathanial, thought it a ‘ruinous step'.
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To add to their worries Palmer's father once more professed a desire to remarry. ‘O! for a wife – the joy of my life,' he would sing, taunting his domineering brother who immediately threatened to withdraw all financial support. A spat ensued which Palmer, with effusive professions of gratitude to his uncle, tried desperately to soothe. Like most of his father's ‘sudden fancies', this one too, if left alone, would ‘die a natural death', he suggested.
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He was proved right. Before a year had passed the school had been abandoned, the second marriage had not materialised, and Palmer's father and Nathanial had been reconciled. But if once the father had been the provider of a home for the son, from now on it was the child who was going to have to take care of his parent.

Then, on 18 January 1837 – the nineteenth anniversary of Palmer's mother's death – Mary Ward died. For more than thirty years she had been a constant presence in Sam's life, accompanying the family wherever they moved, cooking and keeping house, mending clothes and admiring pictures. Palmer had used to play the piano to her in the evenings while she listened attentively through her battered ear-trumpet. Now, she was gone. Kissing her on her cold shrunken cheek, Palmer cut a lock of her hair and wrapped it in a slip of paper. He would keep it along with the treasured edition of Milton that she bequeathed him on her deathbed and a few other mementoes, including a pair of spectacles. Her loss was a final break with his youth.