Arcadian after the fall
John McEwen
Samuel Palmer's visionary paintings of Shoreham in Kent in the 1820s have long been acclaimed as perhaps the most perfect pictorial symbol of England before its industrial fall, but the work of his last forty years has generally been considered demonstrative of little more than hapless decline. 'After the Shoreham and Italian periods, the whole of my father's life became a dreadful tragedy,' wrote one of his sons. Now with 'Samuel Palmer. A Vision Recaptured: The etchings and related paintings for Virgil and Milton' (V & A till 6 May), the first major exhibition of the artist's work for fifty years, the William Blake Trust and the Victoria and Albert Museum bodly make an equally high claim for these unfinished projects of his later years.
The show opens with a selection of works from the Shoreham and middle years, by way of a reminder, before concentrating on the main theme: the preparatory studies, including a wailful of extremely detailed watercolours, and etchings, only three of them actually completed by Palmer himself, illustrating Virgil's Eclogues and The Shorter Poems of Milton.
Palmer did not begin to etch till he was middle-aged, but throughout his long life his most treasured possession remained the two proof sheets of Blake's woodcut illustrations for Thornton's translation of Virgil's Pastorals, signed in the margin and presented to him in his youth by the artist. Nor did he forget the first interview with his master when 'the copper of the first plate "Thus did Job continually" was lying on the table. .. How lovely it looked by lamplight.' Like all arcadians Palmer preferred the most secret, the least man-ridden times of the day, and it was then too that he found those subtle dawn and evening lights that were to become the preoccupation of so much of his best work. And, of course, he loved the night. Night strolls were such a feature of the life of 'The Ancients', the little fellowship of artists at Shoreham, that the habit earned them the name of the 'Extollagers'. 'All the kinds or art we are busy with depend, I think, for their hold on the eye, upon the right construction of lights and shadows,' he wrote. And etching, when he came to it, conformed well with Blake's admonition that the 'great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art.'
For Palmer crispness of line was the essence of the craft , and the fashionable technique of retroussage, in which a piece of muslin was drawn over the inked plate to soften its incisiveness, was absolute anathema to him. 'It seems to me that the charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows; so that almost everything either sparkles, or suggests sparkle. . . Well, retroussage, if not kept within narrow bounds, extinguishes those thousand little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching, and in those of Claude are moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade.'
Etching too had nothing to do with the 'dreadful death grapple with colour which makes every earnest artist's liver a pathological curiosity.' But, in the event, his. constant disappointment with the efforts of his printers, including those of his son A.H. Palmer, proved just as taxing. 'However much tempests may rage before, and after, the Hours of ART-WORK MUST BE QUIET HOURS, and printing like yours is art work,' he wrote to him on receiving yet another disappointing impression. 'Success in the printing of this etching — which printing is your interest as well as mine, depends on delight in solitude and locked doors, a contemplative mood, and intense concentration. Indeed these are the conditions of all high excellence. Men who have these enjoy society all the more by contrast. However much torn by business outside, the great men have been quiet in their proofs — Pray throw your brown ink into the dust-hole.'
This war between the artist and the artisan, the poetic ideal and the wellintentioned compromise is the story of the exhibition, admirably illustrated by the documentary evidence of Palmer's scrawled and exclamatory notes — their spontaneity emphasised by the small perfection of his more formal hand — and the number of different states of certain etchings shown, which all too convincingly demonstrate the difference between one impression and another. The result was that in thirty years of effort he only completed thirteen plates to his satisfaction, and only three from the Milton-Virgil series. As usual we find him despairing the quality of a commerciallyprinted edition even of one of these. 'So the deai old Etching Club revives on the 15th — 'love it, though it has quite smashed me, by the way my Lonely Tower has been printed. Full directions were sent to the printer and a model print but in vain.'
Palmer's father had been a bookseller and had imbued his son with an early and abiding taste for literature, strengthened in Samuel Palmer's childhood by his nurse Mary Ward to whom he owed his veneration of Milton. But it was the first sight of Blake's wood-cuts for Thornton's Virgil that ultimately inspired him as an artist when still only 19. 'The past is for poets; the present for pigs', was a favourite aphorism of which in time he often reminded his children. Secure with his parents in Kent, cosseted by his old nanny, surrounded by like-minded friends, inspired by the friendship of Blake, Shoreham for Palmer was not a melancholy search for a Miltonian arcadia, but its actuality. And the actuality in an odd way paralleled the historical reality. The riots of the agricultural labourers smashed the idyll of Shoreham for Palmer as much as the deaths of the much older people he was dependent upon. In the aftermath his only shelter was the support of the unpopular and inconsequential painter John Linnell. Palmer married Linnell's daughter, it would appear more from expediency then anything else.
It was not a success. He made little money from his art, and she was dominated by her father and quite uninterested in her husband's work except as a practicality or to the extend that it coincided with her own received opinions and ambitions as a painter. Spoilt by Mary Ward and his memories of the idyllic marriage of the Blakes, Palmer found his wife's lack of devotion chilling. His painting, as the relevant work at the V & &sadly demonstrates, became conventional. So when Linnell, now an increasingly successful academic painter, settled an income on the Palmers in 1861 and three years later Ruskin's solicitors, Leonard Valpy, commissioned the artist to do a series of watercolour illustrations from L'Allegro and 11 Pensoroso, it seemed a full cycle had been turned. And, to some degree, this proved to be the case. Palmer could afford to paint once more without too many distracting financial worries and blot out all thoughts of the Victorian ideal of progress which he so particularly detested, to go in search of arcadia once again. He did not find it, though something of its majesty is reborn in the etchings to which the overworked and too Ruskinian watercolours gave rise. It is good to see them reinstated to their proper place in the late Victorian pantheon, but one glimpse of the Shoreham sampling at the entrance makes nonsense of the worthy but academic attempt to make their sonorous prose the equal of the visions of his genius.
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