BLAKE, PALMER, LINNELL Various Ways of Painting God's Glory
Iain McKillop
(Titles in BOLD refer to the Powerpoint Slideshow illistrations)
If there’s one embracing theme for today it is to explore ways in which some people feel they can find or sense God’s presence through the natural world. We’ll be exploring three varying ways of viewing the physical things around us from a spiritual perspective through three artists’ work, life and ideas. William Blake, Samuel Palmer and John Linnell were friends though different ages, and their art and ideas relate to and were influenced by each other. They have close links to this area, but they came to rather different conclusions and artistic results.
BLAKE –FLOWER JERUSALEM CHAPTER 2
Blake’s was in essence a visionary way of living within nature, He wasn’t interested in close observation of natural objects and claimed never to draw from the figure. He believed that too careful observation of nature killed art. The power of nature could frighten him; he once wrote “I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it’. The greatest art, he believed took as its subject high themes of belief, not natural observation and artists should seek to link themselves with spiritual influences and forces at work within the world.
BLAKE - NEWTON
Blake, Linnell and Palmer considered art as a reflection of far greater spiritual powers in creation. But Blake considered that if you observed the minutiae of nature too closely or just copied the figure or landscape you only sat on the surface and could miss the glorious Spirit of God living within. Newton here is chained to observing the world and deriving scientific data from it. He’s missing the inner life of the Spirit, with which Blake felt he was in close touch.
PALMER - LULLINGSTONE OAKS
Palmer looked at nature more carefully, fascinated by the forms of growth that the forces within nature developed. He combined observation with suggesting the spiritual dimension within & behind the natural world. Reputedly Milton had studied this oak and Palmer sensed the presence of the spiritual poet viewing the tree and being inspired to conceive the descriptions of enormous majestic trees and glories of creation in Paradise Lost.
PALMER - THE BRIGHT CLOUD
Palmer also believed that God’s power in nature caused forms to reflect each other, so here in the Bright Cloud painting, the forms of clouds, trees, hills and sheep all reflect one another and like the gnarled Lullingstone oaks, suggest the unifying powers of the Creator behind and within the landscape.
PALMER - EARLY MORNING
Palmer’s visionary art, only lasted for a few years in his 20s (he lived until he was 76). He transformed his landscapes under the spiritual influence of Blake by observing nature then stylised the forms of trees, plants and figures, not just to reflect the powers that had formed them, but to suggest that the world has a magical, divine,. spiritual character. He believed that within the materialism of the world we could become reunited with God through pastoral living, being one within nature, as God intended us to live.
BLAKE THE SHEPHERD / PALMER THE SHEPHERD
This ideal of pastoral living found in Blake was common since classical philosophy in Virgil & many pastoral poets & philosophers since - Elizabethan poets’ ‘eclogues’ like Spencer’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’, the court of Marie Antoinette, playing at being a shepherdess in her Petit Trianon, Rousseau, & Pope’s Windsor Forest, which Linnell painted. It continues in the Organic movement today.
PALMER –WEALD OF KENT LANDSCAPE
In his later more naturalistic art, Palmer looked more particularly at detail & what gave places, trees, plants and objects individual identity, as in this painting of the Kent Weald.
LINNELL – KINGSEY LANDSCAPE OXON
Linnell, a much more traditional artist looked intently at the detail and the particular in nature.
LINNELL – LAST LOAD WALKER, LIVERPOOL
He often intensified the emotion or drama in the landscape to suggest the throb of spiritual life within the world, trying to show the glory or power of God shining through the particular details of nature or a dramatic vista. He didn’t make spiritual or moral generalisations in his art, like Blake, or stylise forms like Palmer. He aimed to record landscape as God had created it - the highest way, he thought, to celebrate & worship God for his creativity.
LINNELL PALMER BLAKE
Because it is easier to move from observing detail to forming more abstract principles, we’re going to look at the garden & surroundings through these artists out of chronological order today. As an art-historian this seems stupid, Blake influenced Linnell then Linnell introduced the young Palmer to Blake. So if you want to trace influences and developments in art we should look at Blake then Linnell & Palmer. But as we are spending today observing and sensitising ourselves to the nature around us more than studying the artists, it seems logical to look first through the lens of Linnell and work towards Blake.
LINNELL - NATURAL LANDSCAPE
Before we look at the artists, we need to consider for a while the ideas about whether it is possible to draw closer to the Creator through the created world. If there is a God, (as I believe there is), the divine spirit is invisible and beyond our comprehension or definition. We can’t even imagine God:
BLAKE ANCIENT OF DAYS /CLASSICAL GOD & MICHELANGELO
Blake’s images of God, rather like his hero Michelangelo’s, are based on classical imagery. He knew that God couldn’t be like this; in fact he criticised it as pagan and claimed that imagery in contemporary churches was blasphemous. The world had adopted a material idea of God, the Ancient of Days in this image, based on the Mediaeval idea of God as architect of the universe, but also recalling Blake’s image of Newton neglecting the transcendent dimension of spirituality.
BLAKE - ELOHIM BINDING ADAM
Elohim, one of a few Hebrew names for God in this image is binding humanity, not freeing us as the true ‘Eternal’ does, through the freeing work of Christ. Though Michelangelo was one of Blake’s artist-heroes, he preferred Gothic mediaeval religious imagery which he believed came from a more Christian source. The classical humanistic imagery for God derived from art, based on what he thought of as ‘paganism’, had culminated in Renaissance Christian art like Michelangelo’s Sistine ‘Creation of Adam’. But that way of understanding God (as depicted in Blake’s powerful ‘The Ancient of Days’) limited human perception of spiritual truth.
Blake believed the Church’s material idea of God was corrupt. He called the Church’s false idea of a repressive, physical God ‘Urizen’, based as its name suggests on ‘our reason’- the God humanity’s limited vision invents for itself, too much in our own image, not the immeasurable, loving Creator and sustainer who Jesus represented.
To Blake God’s spirit lives invisibly in everything & is beyond the limitations of human reasoning. The false, material God binds us by laws and commandments. Adherence to the True God would make us free, loving and at peace. Blake examines this in poems like ‘The Everlasting Gospel’. Only by returning to simple right-living within nature, responsive to God’s invisible Spirit and his revelation in scripture and in moral life can we find the true freedom for which we were designed. Faith for Blake should not be rationalised, as Church responses to the Enlightenment had done by their ‘Natural Religion’ arguments. His treatise ‘There is no Natural Religion’ explored the irrationality of trying to understand the spiritual dimension through humanistic apologetics.
It can be useful to imagine God not as a ‘being’ in the physical sense, but just open ourselves to recognising that there is a True Source of all things ‘visible and invisible’, the Truth within all & a longing for which many yearn, the source of true spiritual ideas and longings in human minds when we seek to make sense of dimensions we cannot see. But even this is too limited. Mystics often emphasise that God is indescribable and unknowable, while at the same time recognising that our Source is loving, caring an can bring us peace not fear.
A recurrent theme throughout the Bible is that though invisible and beyond us, God wants to communicate to the world - guiding Abraham into a relationship with him, guiding his People to follow ways of life that could bring them spirituality alive and help them relate to God through the Tabernacle, the Temple, the Synagogue then the Church. Yearly festivals often based around the seasons linked faith to the natural order of the year- sowing, planting, harvesting. Even Pentecost was originally a harvest celebration. So for the Jews the rhythm of the seasons was linked into exploring the nature of God and actions in history, just as it is in the Christian liturgical year. Festivals reminded them of significant events where God had looked after and communicated to the world. Yet they recognised that other things restrict communication: sin, self-centredness, materialism, false beliefs, over-busy lives, over- concern with other matters.
LOS SEARCHING FOR TRUTH - Jerusalem illustration
Throughout history prophetic voices called people back to spiritual truth and to return to lifestyles where God and truth could be more perceivable or tangible in daily life. Blake saw himself and his art and poetry as prophetic in that tradition, calling people to change.
LINNELL & PALMER SKIES
Linnell a Baptist and Palmer from a Non-Conformist family background turned High Anglican regarded it as his calling too.
God may be invisible and intangible but St Paul in Romans 1:19-20 suggested that aspects of God’s character and nature are detectable through the created world. St. Paul there saw God’s revelation in nature particularly in ethical issues especially – the conscience and the moral issues that are apparent within the way the world interacts. William Blake viewed the moral nature of God’s requirements as echoed in the world and nature too, as is especially shown in the contrasting poems in ‘The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience’. Mystics through time have suggested that nature reflects the character, love, interest in particular detail and the values of God. He is not to be found in a ‘pantheistic’ attitude to nature, (the belief that gods inhabit their creation) but in the recognition that Creation contains qualities that reflect their source. Most nearly ‘Christ’ reflects God and if we attain true lives, we as what Blake called ‘Eternal Man’ have the potential of reflecting and enjoying our Creator and all the benefits that living in his image can confer.
BLAKE- THE LAMB
Blake saw it particularly in the character of the innocent Lamb and the Shepherd guide. If we lived the peasant life, rather than out of touch with nature as in urban life, Blake and Palmer believed, we would be more in touch with God.
There are two different ideas at work in seeking God in nature: God as Transcendent and God as Immanent. Theologically both are true: Transcendent implies that God cannot be found in any complete way, perhaps not tangibly at all, because God is in an entirely different dimension. Immanent suggests that God has interacted within our dimension by creating, by communicating through scripture, people and prophetic voices, by living in Christ and by his Spirit’s involvement in human life: The idea of the ‘immanent’ implies that God CAN be found in this world by those who open themselves to develop spiritual discernment, to look & think and live rightly.
BLAKE PALMER LINNELL PORTRAITS
Blake Palmer & Linnell had very different attitudes to spiritual discernment from which I hope that we can learn today:
Blake was a revolutionary, committed to following the true God and imitating Jesus Christ imaginatively. He was critical of the institutional Church and contemporary religion because he believed it didn’t follow Christ, was far too materialistic, legalistic, static, and supported the political and social status-quo rather than seeking Christian revolution and social justice. He used art to convey his ideas about the spiritual forces behind the earth and encourage revolutionary thought & change of life to be in harmony with God’s good spiritual forces. But his Christianity is far from Orthodox, particularly in his doctrine of the nature of Christ. We shouldn’t take our theology from him, but we CAN follow many of his ethical ideas.
Linnell was baptised into the Baptist Church at Keppel Street, Russell Square in 1812 at the age of 20 and became obsessively non-conformist. He considered Anglican services blasphemous, false and spiritually degrading and was averse to priests, priestly authority & church hierarchy as contrary to Christ’s priesthood, However, as a professional artist he took commissions for portraits of several bishops. He was excluded from Keppel Street communion due to lack of attendance and briefly considered joining the Quakers in 1830. In 1843 he temporally joined the Plymouth Brethren who, he believed, took the original Hebrew and Greek text of scripture more seriously and had no paid ministers, which appealed to his self-taught faith. He and his family left in 1848 after a dispute over the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and he continued his faith independently, using his own translation of the Bible. He used art to praise God and reflect how God’s glory is displayed in nature.
Palmer came from a Non-Conformist family, but became committed to the higher side of The Church of England from youth attracted by the sacramental liturgy, formality and music. He married Linnell’s eldest daughter, though Linnell opposed his Anglican leanings and gradually turned against his son-in -law. Palmer used art to imagine and convey the spiritual life within the nature that he was portraying.
JOHN LINNELL 16 June 1792– 20 Jan. 1882
SELF PORTRAIT WITH LANDSCAPE
We’re starting by looking at the landscape through the eyes of John Linnell, because, though he is the middle of our 3 artists chronologically, he is the most conventional landscape painter, the successor of Constable and Gainsborough, and I hope that his work will encourage us to initially observe what is around us in detail. Linnell moved to live in this area, building his huge villa at the top of this hill and owning between 75 & 95 acres around us. He was brought up in a poor area of London; his father was a picture framer, carver and gilder who regularly failed as he had little business sense. Linnell didn’t attend school, taught himself to read & between the age of 8 &12 developed his artistic skills early by reproducing paintings by others, especially the popular genre painter George Morland for his father to sell.
He was encouraged by the landscape artist John Varley to whom he became apprenticed at the age of 12, though his father kept him indentured to him from 1806-1813 to make sure his art would support the family.
1806 LANDSCAPES & TREE
These were painted at the age of 14. Varley taught John to ‘Go to Nature for everything”, which is why Linnell became so intent on careful observation and why I’d like us first today to open our eyes to what is around us... to really look at the shapes of plants, trees, colours & light, the vistas through the trees & the sky.
BIRDS NEST HUNT /
Linnell became close friends with another of Varley’s pupils William Henry Hunt (‘Birds-nest Hunt’) who painted from close attention all his career. When Hunt approached death, Linnell advised him: “The future is within your reach, only act in the manner you have done successfully in your art – go to the fountain-head, study there. As you have studied and faithfully copied nature, the work of God, now study God himself. Be his disciple..” Through Varley the young Linnell also met many important artists including Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy who took him to his house and critiqued his drawings.
WILLIAM MULREADY Perhaps he learned most from an Academy friend William Mulready an Irish artist six years older than Linnell, who was at the time committed to realist landscape painting before he later turned to Romantic genre painting. Linnell enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 13.
COPY OF TITIAN’S ENTOMBMENT
He studied hard, read voraciously, drew & copied academic art like Raphael, Michelangelo, and here Titian, revered at the Academy. He also continued to copy nature, which encouraged his detailed painting style.
DRAWING OF LINNELL AT ACADEMY
In 1807 at the age of 15 he won the Academy’s drawing prize. By the age of 16 he was selling his paintings yearly at Academy exhibitions and by the age of 17 winning 50 guinea prizes at the British Institution.
EARLY LINNELL
Linnell’s father’s financial difficulties as a craftsman & gilder led John to be astute in his accounts & he saved carefully on every sale from an early age. He bought shares &property to support himself & his family. He demanded deposits before accepting commissions, preferred cash and never exchanged paintings for cheques, even from friends, until the cheque was cleared.
LANDSCAPE/ PORTRAIT / SACRIFICE OF JOB
Unlike academicians he always referred to his art as a ‘trade’ rather than a ‘profession’. He painted pictures that he knew he could sell, working with the tastes of the time, where Blake and Palmer were far more independent and sold little.
Linnell developed skills in all media: watercolour, oil, engraving, miniatures, landscapes portraits and genre pictures (images of daily working life). He even won a competition for sculpture at the Academy. He or his sons engraved his work, which gave him control, finance and copyright over his images. He was more socially and financially adept than both Blake and Palmer, cultivated social & artistic contacts & made a substantial living as a painter, despite having to support a family of 9 children.
BAPTIST MINISTER & CORNELIUS VARLEY DRAWING
In 1812, the year before he graduated at the Academy & set up as an independent artists, Linnell converted to the Baptist faith through his friendship with Cornelius, brother of John Varley. Varley was as astronomer & was convinced that the presence & nature of God could be seen & proved from nature & the universe, which influenced Linnell’s aims in his landscapes. The portrait is of another spiritual influence, the Baptism minister Revd. Dr. Jenkins.
SKY & HARVEST
The skies and light in his paintings especially suggest the presence of divine power, and the harvest God’s rich provision. At the Baptist chapel he met a coal-merchant, bookseller & scholar of Greek & Hebrew, Thomas Palmer (no relation to Samuel) and he married Palmer’s daughter Mary. Thomas influenced Linnell’s ambition to translate the Bible himself because he realised that the Authorised translation has many mistakes. He revised this throughout his life & in 1864 wrote a tract on the translation of scripture as well as two other religious tracts on the title of The Old and New Covenants. (1856) and rejecting Sabbath observance (1859),
PORTRAITS
Linnell made his living as a professional painter first by portraiture, painting many from the Baptist church and producing engravings of ministers for the Baptist Times.
LANDSCAPE
But landscape was his real love. By July 1851, when Linnell moved from Bayswater to Redhill at the age of 59 he was hailed as one of the foremost landscape painters in oil in Britain. Linnell was never elected as a Royal Academician, though he applied for 20 years between 1821-42. Later in life he felt slighted by the academy & wrote a tract calling for its reform. His Non-Conformist background & religious ideas probably influenced their decision as well as his insistence that he painted as a ‘trade craftsman’, not the Academicians’ higher social standing. But there were few years when he didn’t exhibit successfully at the academy & the public loved his work.
LANDSCAPES WITH GENRE FIGURES
In academic circles landscape painting was not regarded as of equal importance to history or portrait-painting. It was accepted where it included figures working in the landscape, as this was genre painting, like Dutch art, which was highly collected. British genre painting and landscape only began to be valued highly from the 2nd quarter of the C19th and artists like Linnell and Constable were largely responsible for that change. By the 1850s Linnell’s landscape painting gradually became more sought after than his portraits. He met the younger Samuel Palmer in the early 1820s, taught him techniques and encouraged him to use the landscape as his theme, visiting him in Shoreham several times.
SURREY
Partly for his health, Linnell decided to move to the countryside from Bayswater (then a poor area) where in 1830 he had designed & built a house 38 Porchester Terrace. He considered buying a site for a home at Edenbridge or to stay there for the summer, & came to Redhill as he changed trains in May 1849. Between trains he walked up Redstone Hill & was struck by the views in all directions. He found that 11 acres of Redstone Wood were for sale from a London stockbroker. This was where he decided to settle. He bought the land for £1295 then within 2 years expanded the estate to 43 acres. In 1862 he added another 32 acre adjoining estate with Chart Lodge.
REDSTONE
He supervised every stage of the design and building of his house, Redstone, himself, basing the whole design around his painting work, the views and terraced gardens. He was no longer worried about the window tax, as he was with the design of his Bayswater house. The tax had recently been abolished, so he made the windows as large as possible to benefit from the views and light. At first the house was just large enough for his family, but he enlarged it with two huge painting studios that took up the entire 1st floor, with a lobby of plaster casts between them. One studio was for himself, the other for his sons who he was training as ‘Linnell & Co.’ to carry on a painting dynasty rather like a business. Downstairs was a 60 foot drawing room and a spacious library positioned, like the studios so he could watch the sunset and changing sky effects, such an important feature in his work. (Most artists before him, even Turner, relied on quick watercolours painted on the spot and worked up in the studio, or invented the sky effects.) He built this cottage at the cost of £110 for John Bell his handyman and general assistant and his wife who did Redstone Wood’s laundry.
Linnell was apparently a ferocious neighbour, fenced in the wood that locals had regularly used & fought a long battle to keep the local hunt off his land. Like many self-made business-people & religious people who feel they are always right, he could be a bully. He kept his family well disciplined (his youngest daughter Phoebe, who was more wayward nicknamed him “The President”. He controlled the work of his sons and their art-prices and tried to control Samuel Palmer’s life as his son-in-law, partly because of his rigid strict ethics and Baptist Christianity, which opposed Palmer’s more aesthetically susceptible Anglicanism.
FOUR LANDSCAPES
Linnell was a workaholic; he exemplified or exaggerated the Protestant Work Ethic, working in the studio form 6.30 am till late into the night. Often he worked on 6 or 7 canvases at the same time and because he battled illness for large parts of his life he inhaled bottles of Oxygen and took long walks to strengthen his weak body. Though his schedule was foolhardy health-wise, his business acumen is how he could afford to buy an estate.
SURREY LANDSCAPE – BOLTON ART GALLERY
Surrey was still fairly poor rural area at the time. Land and building in this vicinity was relatively cheap compared to now. But the railway opened to here in 1841, attracting increasing building in this area, and land prices were rising. Properties weren’t the extortionate prices they are today and Linnell moved here just before the huge increase in building in the Reigate and Redhill a decade later in the late 1850s and 60s.
Linnell could be very generous. He morally supported the young Pre-Rephaelites when their work was being disparaged by critics. He financially supported Blake and Blake’s widow and Samuel Palmer because he believed in their work. But his letters show that he was quite rigid and controlling in his financial dealings with them. He kept the work ethic of his craftsman roots and expected others to work as hard. When his eldest daughter Hannah married Samuel Palmer he was concerned. He admired his ideas and talent, and they had been good friends, but right from their honeymoon in Italy Linnell tried to control their itinerary making them work for him. He made family jokes which put Palmer down and arrogantly ‘improved’ or touched up Palmer’s works before they went to exhibition, as he did his sons’ & other artists. Samuel did not object to this but it must have seemed demeaning. Palmer would not compromise his work. He worked far more slowly than Linnell and as a watercolourist couldn’t support his family financially in the manner in which Linnell felt his daughter should be accustomed. He turned against Palmer when it was obvious that he wouldn’t follow his advice to make a more substantial living. Blake & his widow were also rather naïve about the ways of the world and particularly business matters. Blake survived largely on people who admired his ideas, like Linnell feeling sorry for him and giving him commissions, like the Job and Dante series which Linnell commissioned & financed for other collectors to buy.
PORTRAIT OF BAPTIST PREACHER
As can be seen in this simple early portrait Linnell especially admired the naturalism of Van Eyck over the idealism of Michelangelo and Reynolds. Reynolds’ discourses, central to Academy teaching, encouraged artists to improve on nature. Where they saw disfigurements in a tree or a face they should beautify it as Classical Art did. Here he was observing carefully, not idealising the sitter’s image for vanity purposes. In fact several of his engravings of Baptist ministers for the Baptist Times seem deliberately dour and over-serious.
OLD TREE
Linnell believed that as God made nature the highest thing an artist could do was to praise God by copying nature. Linnell was 13 years older than Palmer when they first met. He was 30, making a good living by his art and building a house in Bayswater. Palmer was 17 and just starting an artistic career and very impressionable and idealistic. He copied art as the Academicians did but soon wanted to go further in putting his faith into his art. Palmer wrote that Linnell’s aims saved him from “ modern art” ie. the academic style. Linnell taught Palmer to be more visionary, to look at nature more than idealise it as academic art did, and to reach beyond the surface to the spiritual content within & beyond nature.
Linnell wrote to Palmer on his honeymoon: “I am persuaded that there is no departing from truth anywhere in poetry or in painting without losing by it, and here I do not lose sight of imaginative art, for where for the sake of a more full expression of the grandest qualities of nature, some exaggerations are indulged in or allegorical figures made use of, it is evidently to obtain more truth thereby than can be expressed by the mechanical transcript of nature, which in many cases would be unintelligible.”
SHEPHERD & HARVEST GENRE SCENE
The introduction of people into Linnell’s scenes, therefore, was to add to what the picture said about nature: God nurturing the harvest, providing rest, the sacredness of human toil, the joy to be found in God’s creation. Palmer introduced figures to give similar meanings to his landscapes. But Linnell didn’t like Palmer’s turn to most visionary stylised works because he believed that they moved too far from celebrating nature as God made it, which was Linnell’s aim.
SUPPER AT EMMAUS & JOB’S SACRIFICE
Linnell painted several biblical pictures, but they are usually not his best works. His first began in 1817/8 with St John Preaching in the Wilderness but he didn’t manage to finish it until the mid1830s. History painting was not his main forté.
He also published religious poems in a magazine ‘The Bouquet’ under the pseudonym ‘Larkspur’.
ROAD TO EMMAUS
Samuel Palmer had posed for one of Christ’s companions in The Road to Emmaus 1835.
BIBLICAL PAINTING THE EVE OF THE DELUGE
These are what the Academy called ‘history paintings. Subjects from ancient history, mythology or the Bible were seen as the highest form of art, way above portraiture & landscape. They made artist’s names at the Academy & achieved highest prices. (Noah on the Eve of the Deluge 5ftx7½ft. fetched £1000 when his landscapes were sold from £100-£300 and portraits 20-100 guineas.) Religious subjects in history painting were intended to raise people’s aspirations & remind us of God’s guidance through past faith events, which is probably why Linnell painted them, as well as showing that he could master academic subjects. They are not his best works as landscape painting was his real love.
JOHN MARTIN
The dramatic background, which would have drawn attention to the work in an Academy exhibition, emulates Turner &John Martin and relates to the idea of the ‘Sublime’ in art.
PASTORAL / SUBLIME / PICTURESQUE
There were three basic ways in which 18th & 19th Century artists felt that they might sense God in nature and reflect it in art: The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Pastoral .
SUBLIME The idea behind ‘sublime ‘ subjects was to express awe at the power of God in nature. Turner’s dramatic alpine mountainscapes, sunsets and storms and the light of Venetian lagoons epitomise this. Sometimes dramatic settings overwhelm you as Wordsworth felt in the Lake District, as described in his ‘Preface’. Believers and philosophers felt that you were recognising God’s greatness and majesty in the strong forces that formed the earth, where nature overpowers you and you feel tiny, spiritually challenged or enervated in the presence of the power of God within creation. Gerard Manly Hopkins, (the spirit in Hopkins’ poetry and drawings is often close to the spirit in Palmer’s painting) described it as: “The world is charged with the Grandeur of God...”
Emotive feelings could be triggered by dramatic mountain ranges, a snowstorm at sea, a glorious sunset or thunder-clouds, or breath-taking view from the top of a hill as Linnell experienced here at Redstone, with all its changes of light and dramatic weather effects.
PICTURESQUE
Picturesque landscapes were intentionally calmer. In them you were meant to recognise God through beauty in nature and the ways that God designed the world around us for our pleasure and nurture. Discerning travellers would walk around with a Claude glass - a blackened mirror which they would hold up to frame and reflect nature and make one feel at peace, content that nature is arranged for our delight & spiritual nourishment. Revd. William Gilpin had been as a particular advocate of this picturesque concept of nature, which you find in many watercolourists of the time, like Linnell’s teacher John Varley. You can recreate this idea of composing nature if you create a ‘composition frame’ and look at the landscape or nature around you as if composing it for a photograph or painting.
PASTORAL
The Pastoral is in a way an offshoot of the Picturesque. It admires ordinary working- people’s lives and how they interact with nature. Eclogues or ‘shepherd poems’ spoke of this.
Simple living alongside and dependent on nature was thought by philosophers and aesthetes to bring people in touch with God through living closely with his world as he intended. This partly derived from the Psalms and Virgil but is often over- idealistic. Life on the land was hard and became harder as the industrial revolution drew starving families from the land into urban slum living and factory work. The idea of godly pastoral living fills Linnell & Palmer’s landscapes and Blake’s poems, showing God’s bounty in nature sustaining peasant life. But it was largely the invention of idealists painting for a comfortable wealthy elite. The political unrest in the countryside as a result of the Corn Laws and Enclosures Acts was driving the poor from the land; it was hard to scrape a living as a shepherd or tenant farmer. The farmer who rented a field off Linnell said that the artist earned substantially more from painting the field & him working in it than, as a farmer, he did from his backbreaking working on the land.
SURREY LANDSCAPE
Noah on the Eve on the Deluge when shown at the Academy brought Linnell fame, commissions and dealers viewing for his work as they did for the rest of his career. After 1847 as a successful artist, Linnell was able to select his subjects more and devoted more time to landscapes, only taking commissions for a few portraits for friends. He was attracted to this area by the ease of travel into the city by train and the health benefits of country air. Like Palmer in Shoreham, it was far enough from the city to be regarded as a rural idyll where he felt able to find God, live at peace, raise his family and create both sublime & picturesque artworks.
The concept of the Sublime in nature was important to Linnell as to many C18th & C19th artists and writers. Picturesque landscapes explored how God composed nature to make one feel at peace. The Sublime, by contrast was more dramatic. The views from Redstone Hill combined the picturesque with the Sublime. While many of Linnell’s paintings might today be considered ‘chocolate-boxy’ he didn’t intend them to be saccharine. He’s exploring God’s presence in the Picturesque, the Pastoral AND the Sublime. Many of his compositions are as well-and-orderly composed as picturesque landscapes, but charged with sublime forces like sunsets or bright spring light.
LATER LINNELL IMPRESIONIST LANDSCAPE
From 1849 to the mid1860s some of his landscapes are less detailed in finish, impressionistically capturing atmosphere. It is interesting that Linnell’s work went out of fashion as Impressionism rose in popularity, though he observed nature far more intensely.
DRAMATIC SKIES
Many of his skies were directly observed from the large windows at Redstone and recorded in watercolour or oil sketches. As his eyesight failed in later years he also used the new medium of photography to supply details of nature like the form of trees.
Linnell survived 6 months longer than Palmer, dying at the age of 89 in January 1882. In his late years he became increasingly vehement about proselytising his faith. Holman Hut remembered visiting him and Linnell questioning him with his own translation of the Bible in hand and grilling him on his beliefs throughout the visit. As his eyesight was failing and he was too fragile to stand at his easel he gave up painting in 1879. He spent much of his time studying scripture and its translation, assuring himself of his faith, as he had encouraged \William Henry Hunt to do.
GRAVE
He was buried in the same churchyard in Reigate as Palmer. He was famous, so it was a public ceremony; shops closed, carriages came from London, the funerary chapel was so full that the doors had to be locked. He was buried with his first wife. Other members of his family are buried to the right and left.
The Times obituary called him “the most powerful landscape painter since Turner... A glory seems to have faded from the domain of British Art.” But like Palmer, his art became forgotten as the taste for modernism grew, only to be re-evaluated in the mid-C20th by Sutherland, Nash, Piper and the Neo-Romantics, then again in the early 1970s by the Brotherhood of Ruralists.
2 LANDSCAPES OF VISTA FROM REDSTONE HILL
In the light of Linnell’s love of this area, let’s explore the garden and surrounding hill with its views beyond, and see how it might inspire our thoughts or make us in touch with nature & sensitive to the beauty & possible meanings within it.
SAMUEL PALMER 20 Jan 1805- 24 May 1881
WORKS BY PALMER, RICHMOND & CALVERT
While he was still living in London, in 1824 Linnell had introduced a group of nine similar-thinking friends and artists to each other, who initially met at his home and talked late into the night about religion, art, philosophy, books or sang and played music together. They included the artists Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Edward Calvert and called themselves “the Blessed in Council”, then later ‘The Ancients’. (others were Francis Oliver Finch, Frederick & Arthur Tatham, Henry Waller, Welby Sherman and John Giles). Later they met in a more organised way each month in each other’s houses, particularly Calvert’s and discussed what it was to be Christian artists & writers in the contemporary world.
Their hero was William Blake, to whom Linnell introduced them. Blake was by then an old man & they revered his home as they passed it. Blake occasionally joined their gatherings.
PALMER SELF-PORTRAIT c 1826 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Like Linnell Palmer had been rather a child prodigy. You can see some of his sensitivity in the quality of this self-portrait. He trained by observing nature, and copying the art of others; particularly engraving. By 1819 at the age of 14 he was exhibiting landscapes and pictured of churches at the British Institution, and at the Royal Academy at the age of 15.
It was his meeting at the age of 17 with Linnell, Mulready and others who wanted to go beyond academic art that started him on a revised course. His relationship with Linnell lasted 60 years, though soured after Palmer became Linnell’s son-in-law.
As a young man Linnell took him on oil-sketching trips into the countryside and around Dulwich and introduced him to artists like William Mulready and George Richmond. He encouraged him to observe trees and other details of nature carefully, not to generalise or idealise, as many Academicians did.
1824 SKETCHBOOK
His surviving 1824 sketchbook shows that he was a voracious and imaginative drawer. He drew from the imagination, as well as from stuffed animals and from classical sculptures in the British Museum.
SHEPHERD & SLEEPING SHEPHERD (Classical)
One of his favourite works was a late C2nd CE sculpture of a sleeping shepherd boy in the Townley Gallery. He later introduced the pose in a more realist setting, as a shepherd lying in the sunshine across the doorway of a Kent Barn.
OAKS AT LULLINGSTONE
Palmer looked with extreme precision as encouraged by Linnell, but he was more interested in the life within natural forms than making lifeless, exact replicas of nature. Of drawing these trees wrote: “ I have been drawing the Natural Fact till I am cold in the extremities... I am desperately resolves to try what can be got by drawing from nature....Tho’ I am making studies for Mr. Linnell, I will, God help me, never be a naturalist by profession.” Palmer was fascinated by the suggestion that Milton, one of the Ancients’ spiritual heroes had connections with this park and he felt a spiritual connection with him there. He wrote: “the poet’s tree is larger than any in the park.. its moss & rifts & barky furrows ... [I want to capture its inner life}, the grasp & grapple of the roots, the muscular belly and shoulders, the twisted sinews. The arms of the old rotten tree [are to me] more curious than the brawny arms of Michelangelo’s Moses, they come alive.”
MOONLIGHT
He was also fascinated by moonlight, no doubt influenced by the Ancients’ nightly walks together in thecountryside discussing the stars. To him the moon suggested the spirituality of the night. “The Moon is the planet of poetry” he wrote, which is why it recurs so often as a motif in his paintings.
THE BRIGHT CLOUD
Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, and Linnell’s ideas, Palmer sensed the presence of God in the nature around. He wrote: “The motley clouding, the fine meshes, the aerial tissues that dapple the skies of Spring, the rolling volumes and piled mountains of light.. the purple sunset blazoned with gold, the translucent amber...all seem to me a manifestation of the divine presence in the world.”
EARLY MORNING
In October 1824, Linnell first introduced Palmer aged 19 to William Blake, when Blake was confined to bed with a scalded foot. Palmer described his first vision of Blake as “an Antique Patriarch or Dying Michelangelo”, with “brilliant.. clear.. intent eyes” ‘piercing him and searching out falsehood.’ ‘He was “energy itself”... “Full of the ideal”. The older artist was to influence Palmer’s emphasis on painting visionary landscapes.
BLAKE’S JOB
Blake was then working on the engravings for Job, which Linnell commissioned as a way of supporting the old artist. Blake took Palmer to exhibitions and introduced him to the work of Durer, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, mediaeval art, and other artists who moved him away from just copying nature and produced more idealised images. Palmer wrote that walking and discussing his non-conformist faith with Blake was like “walking with Isaiah”.
SHOREHAM
In 1825 Palmer moved from London to Shoreham in Kent, where one of his older cousins had been vicar 30 years before.
He was able to afford the move because his grandfather had died and left him £3,000 legacy, which he determined not to waste by living simply. Between 1831 and 1834 he bought 4 more properties in Shoreham and supported himself as an artist on the rental. The move from the pollution of the city was largely for health reasons, as in London he suffered persistently from respiratory complaints. But the rural setting appealed to his pastoral aspirations, feeling that life integrated peacefully with nature is the ideal for human beings, not the increasing urban squalor, which he, like Blake, condemned. As a young man he had swaggered around in rather dapper clothes. In the country he grew a beard and dressed more modestly – canvas jacket with a big cloak to cover him when working in the fields and to shelter him and his work from the rain.
SHOREHAM
The Ancients who also settled nearby or visited rose early and worked hard from dawn till dusk with the integrity of artisans - (again under the Protestant work ethic that drove Linnell). Shoreham also had a paper-mill, which supplied them with good quality, thick rag paper which they filled with images and writing.
In the evenings they’d discuss poetry, read books and religious pamphlets aloud, argue about faith and non-conformism and gave concerts. Palmer played the fiddle and piano and had a good tenor singing voice. They’d often went for walks in the moonlight, which led the locals to nickname them the “Extollagers” – ie. strange gentlemen who extolled faith and sat watching the stars at night like astrologers.
NAZARINE PAINTING
Palmer had been introduced to the Nazarines through Linnell, a group of German Catholic artists who worked communally in Rome and Germany. The Ancients developed a similar ideal of communal living: Palmer’s father moved to living nearby and many of his artist friends, visited. George Richmond rented a house there. Calvert valued the simplicity of the valley of Shoreham, which he called ‘innocent’ ‘as though “the Devil had never found it out”. They were delighted to discover that John Wesley had preached in the village.
BRIGHT CLOUD & REST ON THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT c1824/5
Some of Palmer’s paintings show figures like the Holy Family in an English rural setting, suggesting the holiness the Ancients recognised or sensed in the landscape around them: Considering the number of English artists and travellers who visited and brought back records and illustrations of the Holy Land, Palmer’s ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ seems especially incongruous in interpreting the Middle East as an English countryside scene. The artist know that the setting was not topographically correct; he’s more intent on creating an allegorical presence of the Holy Family in the midst of England. The sentiment is similar to Blake’s idea of ‘building Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land.’
BARNS c1828
He observed the barns and byres of the village observing their textures, colours and forms, using thickly textured tempera water-based paints. Sometimes he used too much gum Arabic to create the textures or deepen glazes and shadows so in time the paintings cracked. During his time in Shoreham Palmer experimented with a wide variety of media and techniques, including miniatures on ivory, just as Blake, Linnell and Varley had experimented.
LULLINGSTONE OAKS
His studies of the oaks in the nearby park carefully scrutinised the natural forms and textures. This is very different from the designs and composition of picturesque painting or natural history art of the time. It is about looking and recording; something John Ruskin would encourage 20 years later in advocating ‘truth to nature’ in ‘Modern Painters’ and ‘The Elements of Drawing.’.
Blake, came to visit the Shoreham community, which resembled his social idealism. A few scholars have suggested that the long poem ‘Jerusalem’ was inspired by his visit to the valley, but Blake died within a year of Palmer moving to Shoreham and the idea of his major prophetic masterpiece must have developed far earlier. George Richmond was with Blake at his death and closed his eyes. Linnell paid for Blake’s funeral, the Ancients followed his coffin though Palmer couldn’t be there. He may have been afraid of the sentiment of funerals, as he did not attend the funerals of either of his two children who predeceased him.
Linnell had originally tried to dissuade Palmer from moving to Shoreham because lack of contact with London’s art market wouldn’t bring him financial security but Linnell was delighted by the village when he visited and he continued to support him: Linnell’s father made the frames for Palmer’s yearly submission of 8 paintings to the Royal Academy & Linnell tried to persuade him to make his studies from nature into more commercial pastoral landscape scenes, which would fetch a good price. But Palmer did not want to succumb to the commercial tastes or fashion. He wrote: “I will not become one of the housepainters, sky-sloppers and brush blotters” .
IN A SHOREHAM GARDEN
In experimenting Palmer used bright colour as much as muted tones. Here he used thick tempera in impasto to suggest the masses of blossom.
MAGIC APPLE TREE
Palmer also experimented with bright and translucent colour, in perhaps his most magical visionary coloured picture. Here he’s possibly closest to Blake’s vision of nature as a glowing effulgence of divine forces. It’s almost as though the landscape is on fire with Autumn fecundity.
VISIONARY LANDSCAPES
Most people today relate to Palmer’s visionary works, which only occupied a few years in his output. They are not so interested in his naturalistic landscape watercolours, which is a shame because he valued them, and felt that he had moved on from his idealised landscapes to images that were core to suggesting God’s creativity in nature. Palmer never exhibited in public these most visionary paintings for which he is now most known. They were kept in what he called his ‘Curiosity Portolio’.
One of his favourite quotes, which he told George Richmond he ‘believed in his heart’ was from the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion”. He wrote in 1834 “All the very finest original pictures... have a certain quaintness by which they partly affect us – not the quaintness of bungling – the queer doing of a common thought – but a curiosity in their beauty – a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them, [while the sublime eagles and big birds of the French Academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections].” It is this ‘curiosity’ and ‘quaintness’ which makes the visionary landscapes so intriguing.
COMING FROM EVENING CHURCH - 1830
‘Coming from Evening Church’ reflects Palmer’s beliefs at this time. Here the landscape and spiritual world merge: The congregation processes from the ivy-covered church by moonlight. The hills and arched trees protect them, as a natural continuation of their compline prayers, as they go from church, a place of security, to the lighted windows of their homes, another place of security. The church spire lifts the cross heavenwards. It is lit by the moon, which is radiant, providing a magic illumination. Remember Palmer’s quote: “The Moon is the planet of poetry” Nature, like the Cross and Church, is shining God’s blessing on the people. At this time some scholars believed that the form of Gothic vaults had developed from the form of trees, so the landscape, with the trees arching above them, and the architecture are both to be regarded as sacred. The pointed forms of the spire, church gables, the houses, yew tree and hills all reflect each other. They suggest that faith, architecture, the home and nature are all in harmony, pointing people to God. They are communally protected by the Church, as well as God.
It is significant that this is signed and dated prominently - few of Palmer’s works are. 1830 saw the beginnings of rural unrest in Shoreham. Leading up to the General Enclosure Act in 1845. Peasants were beginning to be evicted from lands they had tenanted for centuries and were moving to cities like London or becoming labourers. The Poor Laws caused many farmers to only pay their workers at subsistence levels, expecting the parish to maintain them. The Corn Laws meant that many in the countryside couldn’t afford grain for bread, In the year of this painting William Cobbet was petitioning Parliament to recognise the workers’ case, reduce tithes and reform the Corn Laws and Poor Law that allowed workers to be auctioned and treated almost as slaves. He encourage farmers to be more equitable. The Great Reform Act of 1832 helped a little but didn’t bring universal suffrage as still only 18% of the male population became eligible to vote.
In 1830 rural rebellion broke out in Kent with the destruction of threshing machines that had taken labourer’s jobs, rather like the Luddite rebellion of 1811. Riots soon spread to Sussex and Hampshire. One of Samuel Palmer’s friends, a farmer, Samuel Love was among the first to have his farm torched.
Here Palmer is advocating the rural idyll of pastoral life continuing as before, with simple piety, under the protection of God and the local pastor. This ideal was rapidly disappearing in the British countryside if it ever existed.
2 CHURCH PICTURES
Despite his pastoral sensibility and rural life Palmer was a Tory who distrusted revolution. He and the Ancients lived carefully, but didn’t experience the pangs of poverty like many workers in the countryside apart from as short period in the early 1830s. The harvests were not the “pretty pictures” that he describes. He didn’t properly understand the plight of working people or the poor. He idealised them and wasn’t ever as politically astute or politically active as Blake. This is possibly the painting in which he most clearly expressed political and social ideas as Blake did in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Palmer supported the tithe system, the tax by which the people supported the Church. He wrote a pamphlet supporting his local Tory M.P., writing against revolution & valuing the Church and political status quo. (His candidate came last in the election.)
One of Palmer’s few surviving poem ‘The Shepherd Home’ idealised the peasant and peasant life:
“A little village safe and still
Where pain and vice full seldom come...
Trim cottage gardens
Intricate with fruit-bent boughs
And sweet young maidens
Fairer than the milky lilies do appear.”
A few of the people in this procession seem personalised; they may be people he knew in the village. Yet it is unreal; they are all in harmony, smartly dressed in their ‘church best’ not the ragged peasants of Blake’s Little Lost Boy or Chimney Sweep. They are upright, a community without apparent problems because they have the blessing of God, the Church and Nature. That seems to be how Palmer saw his neighbours. In a letter to George Richmond Palmer wrote that one of the most important principles of Christian teaching was to ‘divert attention from the vile all-absorbing self to the plight of the impoverished’. Though he and the Ancients mixed well with the villagers and even befriended a local mentally handicapped boy, Palmer, a home-owner, with the vote and a simple income, didn’t fully recognise the needs of the impoverished who he idealised in his work not because of indifference but because rather than seeing true reality he was engaged in religious ideals about nature.
THE VALLEY THICK WITH CORN
This painting celebrates the sense of a pastoral idyll. The poet Spencer reclines at leisure writing his eclogues, blessed by the abundance of God, as his poems emphasise. Shepherds and flocks are suggestive of contentment with the soil and with life. Palmer wasn’t as discontent with the world as Blake. It didn’t always treat him well, but he seems more content a person. The idea of the Pastoral idyll is that both those who work the land & those who contemplate nature are in touch with God through the rhythm of life. Shepherds leading flocks, boys guarding the fold, farmers tilling the land, the ox drawing the plough are all close to God through to, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems glorifying a labouror’s muscles: the “thew of him” or the plough-share: “sheer plod makes plough through sillion shine”. Hard physical work is regarded as sacred, as Linnell intended the artist’s work to be.
ANCIENTS LONDON
The idealism of the Ancients didn’t last long. They’d been young and idealistic. Less than 10 years after their founding most had moved up in their lives and careers. They remained friends but met less as a community. Richmond married and become a prosperous portrait painter in the city with a growing family. Most of the others remained in London and Palmer felt increasingly isolated as well as not making a living from his art.
TINTERN ABBEY & BRITISH LANDSCAPES
In 1834 with another legacy he bought a house in London as a base for teaching watercolour & continued to meet with the ancients as friends. He set off on short yearly tours of dramatic & picturesque scenery in Devon, the West Country and Wales and started painting in a more naturalistic style. But his studies sometimes didn’t prove to include enough detail to work up into realistic paintings after he returned home broke. This increasingly irritated the business-minded Linnell.
ITALIAN LANDSCAPES
In 1837, after a 4 year courtship, Palmer married Linnell’s eldest daughter Hannah aged 19, when he was 32. He was an Anglican and wanted a church wedding but Linnell’s strict non-conformism insisted that they marry in Marylebone courthouse through a registrar. The law allowing registry weddings was just 2 months old. For a honeymoon they set off on the Grand Tour. Rome especially attracted them and Palmer painted some of his best landscape paintings in Tivoli and the Umbrian hills. He spent 2 months studying the art in Florence and vowed to paint naturalistically and never return to his old style again.
Hannah had her work cut out in Rome as her father over-controlled the honeymoon by commissioning her to copy Italian works of art for him, particularly the arduous task of meticulously colouring from the original, a series of engravings of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling panels. This caused much trouble for the young couple..
They stayed in Italy for nearly 2 years but ran out of money, as Palmer failed to sell any of his paintings there, due to his lack of social contacts and social graces.
BRIGHT WATERCOLOUR
On their return from Italy they settled in Lisson Green and he determined to paint in the Victorian manner to support his family. He produced large bright conventional watercolours but they didn’t find a market and he was often criticised for the garishness of his colours. For a while in the mid-1840s he was admired by Ruskin who praised his work in the 1846 edition of Modern Painters but dropped him 2 years later when promoting the Pre-Raphaelites. Fortunately Palmer was elected as an associate of the Old Watercolour Society, which gave him credentials to sell more work and teach high society students. Teaching became his main source of income. He made a short sketching tour each summer or early autumn to provide him with painting subjects but he still struggled to sell and it took 11 years before the Old Watercolour Society elected him a full member, which enabled him tosell his work more regularly.
Linnell became rather overbearing and didn’t help Palmer’s confidence. Linnell had become one of the most celebrated British landscape painters selling oil paintings for thousands. Watercolours would always fetch lower prices. Linnell was obviously worried about his daughter, and her financial stability, but he treated Palmer like a ne’er-do-well, keeping a watch on his finances and interfering by touching up Palmer’s paintings before sale. One dealer insulted him by only buying Palmer’s works if Linnell had worked on them.
MOON LANDSCAPE
The friendships of the Ancients continued though their contact was less than before. Palmer’s first child Thomas More was born in 1842. 2 years later their daughter Mary Elizabeth was born but died three months before her 4th birthday & Palmer’s father died a year later. Hannah had several miscarriages before another boy Alfred Herbert was born in 1853. He was a sickly child & frequently in danger so his mother took him to Linnell’s home at Redhill for recuperation, where Linnell regularly further undermined her confidence and respect for Palmer as her husband. She had social aspirations to which Samuel couldn’t aspire to or aim at. She spent increasing time at Redhill where she hero-worshipped her father.
The sadness of their daughter’s death caused them to move
twice in a few years to South Kensington, then a growing village outside London. But Palmer’s health declined through the 1850s. He became fascinated by homeopathy and would self-medicate.
THE LONELY TOWER (Leith Hill)
The whole family went into further melancholy when their first son Thomas More died in a farm near Abinger at the age of just 19 shortly after he had graduated from Kingston Grammar School. He is buried in Abinger churchyard.
LANDSCAPE DRAWING
Two weeks later the Palmers moved to a cottage on Redhill Common then lodgings in Reigate. Palmer only got strength again in the early Summer if 1862, when he helped the widow of Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, to complete the Biography. Gilchrist had died the previous November and Palmer supported his widow to complete and publish the memoirs to which Palmer had contributed. It was publishing in November 1863. Linnell felt slighted because he felt that he should have been given more credit in the memoir.
ETCHINGS INCLUDINGTHE WEARY PLOUGHMAN
Palmer took up etching in 1850 & joined the Old Etching Club. It took a long time to perfect the technique: He only completed 13 plates in his lifetime. Some of his prints were worked on for years. The Weary Ploughman took from 1858 to 1865 to perfect the marks and tones, which helps to demonstrate Palmer’s commitment to perfectionism. .
In May 1862, Palmer moved to his last home, Furze Hill House, in Mead Vale, Redhill (now called ‘The Chantry’ in Cronk’s Hill. The upper-middle-class area & his neighbours embarrassed him, as it was so different from the pastoral idyll he advocated in his paintings and had lived in Shoreham. The home was chosen by his wife and much closer to Linnell’s daughter’s aspirations of a successful social life, just down the road from her father. Palmer, declining in health became increasingly reclusive.
MILTON & VIRGIL ETCHINGS
Yet, despite depression over his son’s death and feeling socially uncomfortable in his home he produced some of his most profound works in Reigate – a series of 8 commissioned paintings of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, etchings based on them, and a series of etchings for his own translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, which Blake had also engraved. His son Herbert to whom he had taught etching completed and published these works after his father had died. These watercolours and prints are a culmination of Palmer’s artistic output. They show him reaching to express the spiritual heart that he sensed in some key poetic texts. The colours and tones are among his most sensitive works, exploring inner meanings in the poems without illustrating too literally.
Like Linnell Palmer is buried in Reigate cemetery though more modestly than his father-in-law.
As we go outside let’s try to sensitise ourselves to the nature around us, as seen through Samuel Palmer’s eyes and imagine the forces and processes which are behind and within nature. Palmer was contemplating God’s qualities and priorities and giving them visual form. He also saw the nature to which he was attracted as an expression of the spiritual forces within God’s Creation.
WILLIAM BLAKE 28 Nov.1757 – 12 Aug. 1827
BLAKE PORTRAIT
William Blake was an inspiration behind both Linnell and Palmer though their later work diverted from his ideas. He wouldn’t have approved of how Linnell pandered to Victorian society taste to make a living. He would have regarded their naturalistic styles as too reliant on the surface appearance of nature. Blake’s vision for art was closer to Palmer’s visionary work of his Shoreham period, which he directly influenced. Blake looked within nature to understand the spiritual world, not on surface appearances.
ANGELIC FIGURES
He was regularly ‘looking for angels’ and aiming to explore the spirit of God’s truth within his subjects. Blake would be easier to understand if all his poems were as easy to interpret as the Songs of Innocence and Experience, though they too are more complicated than they at first appear.
BOOKS OF URIZEN & JERUSALEM BOUND FIGURES
Blake’s allegorical imagery, particularly in his longer poems is far too complex to explain in this session and the meaning of characters altered between poems. The main thing to remember is that he worked in the tradition of C18th poetry and earlier, using mythological characters as parallels for modern issues. Elizabethan sonneteers, Milton & Alexander Pope all used allegorical or mythological characters and spirits to present a spiritual state that existed beyond the natural world. Most poets referred back to names and symbolic figures from classical mythology, as artists did in Academic History Paintings. But Blake invented personal mythologies to represent what he believed was happening with in the physical, material and spiritual world.
SPIRITUAL FIGURE OF NELSON
England was politically unstable. Revolution abounded abroad. England was especially worried about influences from France and America. British society was unstable and politicians & the monarchy were suspicious of political and religious radicals like Blake & the dissenters he admired. Some scholars think he made his allegories deliberately obscure so that only his radical readers would wrestle to interpret them and he would not be understood and charged with dissent. Yet his radicalism is obvious even on surface reading. I personally suspect that he may have deliberately cultivated the impression of being an ‘eccentric’ so that the establishment would not worry about his radicalism.
Basically Blake believed that humanity had corrupted the world not just through mismanagement but spiritual misguidance by an out-of touch, materialistic Church. He wrote to change society and religion. Blake’s symbolic prophecies and social comments were a commentary on the world using Christian imagery with integrity. He invented symbols that had roots not in the foreign, pagan or classical mythology used by most poets, but invented names that related to old British and Christian legends.
URIZEN
So his most famous character Urizen - the false idea of God - is based on the name ‘your reason’ not on spiritual revelation. Urizen was a vindictive giant who pretended he was God to mislead human beings.
BOOK OF URIZEN
He is the God invented by the human mind and Church materialism, not the Eternal, loving God of peace that Jesus spoke about. Blake said that most people, even the Church worshipped him, not the real Eternal God. His false religion bound human beings, rather than made them free as Christ can.
LOS
The name ‘Los’, a central figure of Blake’s mythology, is ‘Sol’ (sun) backwards. A creative blacksmith, he forged life for the world. But his life-giving potential has been usurped by Urizen the materialistic false-God. Los represents various things as Blake’s books developed: the poetic genius, the imagination, the sun-like father, the true priest who can free human beings, the blacksmith who is able to re-forge life for a lifeless world and rejuvenate life enslaved by Urizen.
LOS IN JERUSALEM
In Jerusalem Los is the ruler who brings order to time and space. By his hard work, forging the fire of life, he keeps the process of human and cultural evolution alive and in motion. He is an example for all human beings to become perfect, creative, active and live with integrity - the type lost by Adam’s Fall.
ENITHARMON
Enitharmon, based on the words ‘Eve’, ‘Earth’ and ‘harmony’, is a weaver, Los’s female counterpart – his ‘Emanation’. She is the inspiring mother of the Universe, weaver of the senses and human passions rather than the imagination, which Blake regarded as a more ‘male’ attribute (That of course was C18th & C19th sexism, not contemporary understanding!).
ENITHARMON IN JERUSALEM
In Jerusalem, Enitharmon represents liberty but in passionately driving for liberty and justice she also causes disharmony, revolution and war. Blake recognised that radical, creative thinking an creative activity to being change causes disharmony, just as, at that time, Britain feared the American & French revolutions and internal social, religious and agricultural rebellions which threatened the country.
SPIRIT SPREADING PESTILENCE
I’m not sure how real Blake imagined these allegorical figure to be. He certainly believed that spiritual powers guided the world. Part of his obsession with angels & spirits came through the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg who encouraged people to believe in angelic guidance and presences. Blake later rejected Swedenborg’s teachings.
THE BLOSSOM
But Blake maintained that he saw visions of angels from an early age. At the age four he had imagined he saw God looking at him through a window and about age nine remembered seeing in Peckham a vision of "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" (presumably a flowering tree!) Later watching haymakers at work he thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.
ANGEL SPEAKING TO HIM IN COTTAGE GARDEN
He believed that the spiritual world spoke to him and that he had conversed with historical and biblical figures like Gabriel & Mary. He spoke as if his prophecies were personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels and claimed that his poetry and images came to him by direct revelation. That can’t have been the whole truth because his few surviving sketchbooks and notebooks show that he made many changes in the process of creating his art. Whether Blake’s were literal encounters with the spiritual, we can’t be sure. He fantasised over his spiritual understanding. I hope that we won’t be tempted to look for too many angels or fairies in the bushes this afternoon. That’s not the purpose of the spiritual in nature. Yet the world of spirits and dreams is made physical in Blake's poetry, imagery and allegories and I hope that we can reach into the nature around us and consider ways in which it might reflects spiritual truths.
LONDON Blake was brought up in London yet used his imagination to lift him beyond its ugliness & corruption.
His art & prophetic poetry to speak out against the unnaturalism of the urban environment. His patron, William Hayley, encouraged him to move to the country, to Felpham in Sussex, which he felt would speak to his spiritual, pastoral temperament.
BLAKE’S COTTAGE
Blake accepted William Hayley’s invitation to move to the Felpham in Sussex, to find peace for creativity. In a letter to John Flaxman, dated 21 September 1800, Blake wrote: “ (The town of) Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.... I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels."
In Felpham, he said that he saw & conversed with his angel in the cottage garden, but the idyll didn’t last. He found that even there you couldn’t escape from social hierarchy and corruption. Blake was notoriously argumentative and was prosecuted for insulting a soldier who drunkenly encroached on his garden.
LONDON
He returned to London, realising that in his home city, ugly and corrupt as it was, he found his truest calling and prophetic messages. On 25 April 1803 Blake wrote to Thomas Butts: "... I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals..."
Blake looked for the spiritual within the physical & particular:
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
He wanted us to open our minds to things beyond the visual world, not just to look on the surface and the material. He wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."
We shouldn’t be too shackled by the physical world; the spiritual world allows both growth, movement and flight of the imagination:
"He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity's sun rise."
CHIMNEY SWEEP
Blake questioned the priorities and conventions of his day that kept human beings and the world static and stopped growth. He attacked hypocrisy in conventional religion, wanted freedom in society, politics, faith and sexuality, even advocated naturism (though we’ll avoid that in the garden today).
He defended the innocent: neglected children, slaves, women, exploited workers, children mistreated in factories, sent down mines or up chimneys. Today I’m sure he’d condemn zero-hour contracts, a minimal wage none can live on, social inequity, the temporary short-term-solutions of politicians, commercialism and the greed, corruption of big businesses. He particularly condemned hypocritical institutions, political or religious that maintained a corrupt society in a hypocritical guise.
HOLY THURSDAY contrasting Innocence & Experience
He showed up false charity in his contrasting poems of Holy Thursday in Songs of Innocence and Experience. The world, created and designed to flourish in innocence, with all supporting each other has been ruined. Nature and the innocent are meant to be nurtured by godly people imitating God and recognising him in nature. He reflected on this in Songs of Innocence: The Lamb, where the child in their innocence cannot yet fully recognise or understand God and is dependent on us to set a good example and introduce them to the truth of who they are in the image of God:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child & thou a lamb.
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
By contrast in the ‘Songs of Experience’, created nature also includes violence & injustice. Could the same God who nurtures the Lamb make the brutal killing machine, the Tyger? Unfortunately Blake’s illustration of the Tyger is rather too ‘pussy-like’, with little of the power described so alliteratively in the words of his poem. But the illustration demonstrates the deliberate ‘innocence’ of Blake’s vision, while the words reflect the ‘experience’ of the violent world:
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: THE TYGER
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire!
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand! & what dread feet!
What the hammer! what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain
What the anvil, what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spear
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry!
The poem explores dichotomies about the nature of evil and belief in a good God that have obsessed human minds, philosophy and theology for centuries. Blake was probably not just writing about real Lambs and Tygers as a challenge to conventional understandings or contradictions to understanding of God: He may have been using these as ways of exploring other dichotomies in faith, understanding and human behaviour - referring to human innocence and violence. How had people, born humble like Lambs become such violent creatures? What sort of God are people following if they are so violent. When we look around nature today we see innocence and violence working together: the butterfly and the wasp, the moth and the venomous spider, the leaf and the leaf-killing insect, the tree and the fungal disease. We recognise today that some predators, pests and diseases are necessary for life.. Blake saw duality in the world and his spiritual allegorical poems tried to understand it. Particularly his poems The Everlasting Gospel and The Divine Image:
SONGS OF INNOCENCE: THE DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Blake wrestled with how he might form an ideal society without bias, sin and injustice. He sought ‘Jerusalem’, ‘city of God’s peace’, where creation & society would enjoy the peace, joy & innocence that God intended. In his poem ‘The Human Abstract’, which is the Songs of Experience contrast to the Divine Image poem in the Songs of Innocence, Blake expressed belief that human cruelty, sin and disfunctionality have spread their damage to the natural world - the caterpillar eating foliage, the fly spreading disease, the predatory raven
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: THE HUMAN ABSTRACT
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.
Blake believed that as we bear the divine image, the potential for good and innocence are in the human brain alongside the capacity for sin. In the poem "The Divine Image" in the Songs of Innocence Blake attributed all virtues that we possess - Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love to God’s presence in & among us & in nature: Wherever these virtues exist "there God is dwelling too” wrote Blake, suggesting that if God is allowed to live in & influence each of us, racism, poverty, cruelty, injustice & moral & physical pollution could be banished.
But "The Human Abstract" suggests that we cause people to suffer when we reject or work against the divine image in us. He believed, false religion with its false teachings created "holy fears" (like fear of hell & punishment), encouraged false humility where humans should recognise their high potential, and created darkness, deceit and superstition. Neither the true God or Nature are the source of cruel beliefs and actions but the "Human Brain," invents bad or inadequate theology, uncompassionate, unjust religions and unjust society. He believed that we can still learn pity and practice mercy if we recognise how we have hurt others.
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION1793
Blake expanded these ideas in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion, where he defended love & freedom against the Church’s double standards that denied people self-fulfilment in love, encouraged chastity and lack of physical fulfilment in relationships, and forced people to stay in marriages without love. (His own marriage to Catherine was fraught with difficulties, though she was a real practical support to him in creating, printing and colouring his works.) Organized religion & the restrictions of Georgian society, he believed, had erected a "Thou shalt not" sign over the garden of earthly love. Victorian repressive religious ideas were to do so even more):
THE GARDEN OF LOVE
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to be chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
THE ECOING GREEN
This destructiveness of happiness is a huge contrast to ‘The Echoing Green’ in the Songs of innocence where children, men and women play & live in harmony, innocence and total fulfilment through freedom, love and harmony with nature.
THE SICK ROSE
Blake wrestled with similar dichotomies in The Sick Rose where he looks at a natural plant, as we might this afternoon, and wonders why there need be pain and destruction in a life that could be so beautiful:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
This is far more than a description of a bud rotting from the inside because an insect has damaged it. The Sick Rose comments on human society and institutions that damage us from the inside. The rose is partly a metaphor for Blake’s revulsion at how beauty and innocence are often destroyed by life’s experiences and corruption.
PREFACE TO MILTON
In the introduction to Milton he uses a similar metaphor for corruption – clouded [polluted] hills and dark satanic mills to describe how industrialism and materialism damage society:
“And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?”
AH! SUNFLOWER
In ‘Ah Sunflower’ Blake used another plant to discuss nature wearily searching for life-bringing truth as the sunflower turns towards the sun to search for light. The youth longing for love & the virgin cold with frustration both die from lack of the heat & light that God and loving living could offer:
Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
Blake believed a cure could be found if we combine spiritual revelation, human innocence and wise, right thinking and living, following Christ’s true example. Christ, he believed could bring our imaginations alive to what we could be if we followed God’s Spirit. He could help us re-learn compassion and love if we commit to hard, active work for good. A garden is a place of harmony for growing life if we disciplining and cut out wrong growth so that better growth can flourish.
THE ECHOING GREEN
‘The Echoing Green’ is the ideal garden of delight, with harmony between nature and human life from birth to death. As a romantic idealist Blake longed for radical social change. Jerusalem ‘city of peace’ was his Utopia; Christ is in his imagination the potential of what a perfect human & spiritual being should be. He encouraged us to break away from the "mind-forged manacles" of traditional religion, politics and social order to create the ideal Jerusalem.
PREFACE TO MILTON
Blake called both his writing and painting ‘prophesy’ because like Isaiah he was committed to social and religious change.
Blake felt that the Western world was in its corrupt condition mostly because of human sin, its enslavement to "reason" and being closed to the free flight of the imagination, which Christ represented. Blake was fired by his spiritual life and poetic imagination. Our enslavement to ‘Reason’ accepted the enslavement of others through slavery, pollution, the social damage of the Industrial Revolution and the restrictions of organized religion. Freedom, tolerance, joy & free imagination were essential for growth. He used the abuse of nature as a metaphor for the damaged world in ‘Auguries of Innocence’:
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions
A dog starv’d at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State ...
That poem begins with one of Blake’s most memorable and often misquoted verses:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
He’s not saying what most people think, when read it out of
context that we can read the complexity of the whole cosmos in each detail of nature. He’s saying that if we think innocently, spiritually & incisively, we can see truth through the details of nature like the wonder and beauty of petals and
stamens or our sensitivity to the ethical wrongness of a caged robin. He believed
that in microcosm nature is teaching details of what is wrong or right in the world and giving us examples of how to live.
Blake believed God could be found in all things; that he acts and “IS” in all aspects of the world. He wrote: “It is the God in all that is our companion and friend…
God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes; for he is become a
worm that he may nourish the weak... everything on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God”.
This isn’t pantheism but Blake’s belief that if we experience & view life around with enlightened eyes we can be close to God. “The Eternal Man” he said-
meaning us all in our spiritual potential:
“…looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatter’d portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental forms of everything that grows.…
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the Universe: wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, The Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient bliss.”
Our responsibility is to become “The Eternal Man” (male & female – we should
be undifferentiated & united according to Blake) by living rightly & following
Christ’s example.
BOOK OF VALA
At the end of the gloomy Book of Vala, or the Four Zoas [1795-1804] Los and Enitharmon, working together day and night (Los represents the day, Enitharmon is characterised by the night) build the ideal society, Jerusalem. Through a struggle heaven triumphs over hell and rulers lose their oppressive powers, the poor are raised higher than their oppressors, slaves& victims of injustice are freed, intellectual & physical innocence triumph over bitter negative experiences.
MILTON OPENING JERUSALEM
Blake’s poem Milton foretells that in Jerusalem God’s people will eventually be a totally free society, free from slavery, the dominion of oppressive evil, spiritual & legal powers, the tyranny of selfishness, & the negative dominance of ‘reason’.
All these prevent “Eternal Man” from being free. In the true Jerusalem for Blake people will in live by mutual love, moral purity, sexual fulfilment, communal support and forgiveness, ethical and social freedom. He believed this could one day come into effect on earth through God uniting human beings with the good spiritual forces in the cosmos. His famous hymn vowing to build Jerusalem, which opens Milton [1804-1808] is Blake’s commitment to this social, political, ethical and intellectual struggle of forming Jerusalem in our society:
“Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.”
JERUSALEM A PROPHECY
At the end of Jerusalem: A Prophesy [1820] the oppression caused the Church and State and human sin is cast away. Redeemed humanity achieves its divine potential, living in love, peace & unity, with no more gender division or oppression by the law. Eternal Man is consummated by receiving the Divine Image:
CHRIST
Blake didn’t just see Jesus as a divine Saviour but the example for us to follow,
the universal eternal Mind, or Spirit, which he called ‘The Imagination’. His
theology of Jesus is unorthodox in Christian doctrinal terms, but his idea of him
being the ‘Imagination’ of what we could be is spiritually inspiring. He wrote in Jerusalem:
“All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the
Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, TheHuman Imagination”.
Like a vine Christ, the Divine Body branches throughout all Creation:
“all Animals and Vegetations, the Earth and Heaven… contain’d in the All
Glorious Imagination.”
Though God’s truth could be seen in all created things, to Blake he is most
clearly visible in and through Jesus & should be able to be recognised through
“Human nature in the image of God”.
For Blake the traditional belief that human beings were the centre of the universe could only be true when God is present in us to bring us spiritually alive as
“Eternal Man”. Our Creator is able to do this through Christ and the Spirit
forming us to achieve our full potential
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
Blake talked of those who reduced or disclaimed their spiritual nature by
rationalism as “Cavern’d Man...a Worm seventy
inches long” like Nebuchadnezzar in this image, who from his
glorious heights of power reduced himself to the level of a beast:
“I am your Rational Power, O Albion, and that Human Form
You call Divine is but a Worm seventy inches long
That creeps forth in a night and is dried in the morning sun,
In fortuitous concourse of memorys accumulated and lost.”
PLATE FROM JERUSALEM,
Blake aimed to do what he could to raise people to Eternity:
“To open the immortal Eyes/Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity”.
GLAD DAY
This figure of ‘Glad Day’ represents the Eternal Man, brought to fulfilment by
Christ. Blake dedicated himself to inspiring people’s imaginations to what they
could be. He wrote in Jerusalem:
“… I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”
Iain McKillop
(Titles in BOLD refer to the Powerpoint Slideshow illistrations)
If there’s one embracing theme for today it is to explore ways in which some people feel they can find or sense God’s presence through the natural world. We’ll be exploring three varying ways of viewing the physical things around us from a spiritual perspective through three artists’ work, life and ideas. William Blake, Samuel Palmer and John Linnell were friends though different ages, and their art and ideas relate to and were influenced by each other. They have close links to this area, but they came to rather different conclusions and artistic results.
BLAKE –FLOWER JERUSALEM CHAPTER 2
Blake’s was in essence a visionary way of living within nature, He wasn’t interested in close observation of natural objects and claimed never to draw from the figure. He believed that too careful observation of nature killed art. The power of nature could frighten him; he once wrote “I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it’. The greatest art, he believed took as its subject high themes of belief, not natural observation and artists should seek to link themselves with spiritual influences and forces at work within the world.
BLAKE - NEWTON
Blake, Linnell and Palmer considered art as a reflection of far greater spiritual powers in creation. But Blake considered that if you observed the minutiae of nature too closely or just copied the figure or landscape you only sat on the surface and could miss the glorious Spirit of God living within. Newton here is chained to observing the world and deriving scientific data from it. He’s missing the inner life of the Spirit, with which Blake felt he was in close touch.
PALMER - LULLINGSTONE OAKS
Palmer looked at nature more carefully, fascinated by the forms of growth that the forces within nature developed. He combined observation with suggesting the spiritual dimension within & behind the natural world. Reputedly Milton had studied this oak and Palmer sensed the presence of the spiritual poet viewing the tree and being inspired to conceive the descriptions of enormous majestic trees and glories of creation in Paradise Lost.
PALMER - THE BRIGHT CLOUD
Palmer also believed that God’s power in nature caused forms to reflect each other, so here in the Bright Cloud painting, the forms of clouds, trees, hills and sheep all reflect one another and like the gnarled Lullingstone oaks, suggest the unifying powers of the Creator behind and within the landscape.
PALMER - EARLY MORNING
Palmer’s visionary art, only lasted for a few years in his 20s (he lived until he was 76). He transformed his landscapes under the spiritual influence of Blake by observing nature then stylised the forms of trees, plants and figures, not just to reflect the powers that had formed them, but to suggest that the world has a magical, divine,. spiritual character. He believed that within the materialism of the world we could become reunited with God through pastoral living, being one within nature, as God intended us to live.
BLAKE THE SHEPHERD / PALMER THE SHEPHERD
This ideal of pastoral living found in Blake was common since classical philosophy in Virgil & many pastoral poets & philosophers since - Elizabethan poets’ ‘eclogues’ like Spencer’s ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’, the court of Marie Antoinette, playing at being a shepherdess in her Petit Trianon, Rousseau, & Pope’s Windsor Forest, which Linnell painted. It continues in the Organic movement today.
PALMER –WEALD OF KENT LANDSCAPE
In his later more naturalistic art, Palmer looked more particularly at detail & what gave places, trees, plants and objects individual identity, as in this painting of the Kent Weald.
LINNELL – KINGSEY LANDSCAPE OXON
Linnell, a much more traditional artist looked intently at the detail and the particular in nature.
LINNELL – LAST LOAD WALKER, LIVERPOOL
He often intensified the emotion or drama in the landscape to suggest the throb of spiritual life within the world, trying to show the glory or power of God shining through the particular details of nature or a dramatic vista. He didn’t make spiritual or moral generalisations in his art, like Blake, or stylise forms like Palmer. He aimed to record landscape as God had created it - the highest way, he thought, to celebrate & worship God for his creativity.
LINNELL PALMER BLAKE
Because it is easier to move from observing detail to forming more abstract principles, we’re going to look at the garden & surroundings through these artists out of chronological order today. As an art-historian this seems stupid, Blake influenced Linnell then Linnell introduced the young Palmer to Blake. So if you want to trace influences and developments in art we should look at Blake then Linnell & Palmer. But as we are spending today observing and sensitising ourselves to the nature around us more than studying the artists, it seems logical to look first through the lens of Linnell and work towards Blake.
LINNELL - NATURAL LANDSCAPE
Before we look at the artists, we need to consider for a while the ideas about whether it is possible to draw closer to the Creator through the created world. If there is a God, (as I believe there is), the divine spirit is invisible and beyond our comprehension or definition. We can’t even imagine God:
BLAKE ANCIENT OF DAYS /CLASSICAL GOD & MICHELANGELO
Blake’s images of God, rather like his hero Michelangelo’s, are based on classical imagery. He knew that God couldn’t be like this; in fact he criticised it as pagan and claimed that imagery in contemporary churches was blasphemous. The world had adopted a material idea of God, the Ancient of Days in this image, based on the Mediaeval idea of God as architect of the universe, but also recalling Blake’s image of Newton neglecting the transcendent dimension of spirituality.
BLAKE - ELOHIM BINDING ADAM
Elohim, one of a few Hebrew names for God in this image is binding humanity, not freeing us as the true ‘Eternal’ does, through the freeing work of Christ. Though Michelangelo was one of Blake’s artist-heroes, he preferred Gothic mediaeval religious imagery which he believed came from a more Christian source. The classical humanistic imagery for God derived from art, based on what he thought of as ‘paganism’, had culminated in Renaissance Christian art like Michelangelo’s Sistine ‘Creation of Adam’. But that way of understanding God (as depicted in Blake’s powerful ‘The Ancient of Days’) limited human perception of spiritual truth.
Blake believed the Church’s material idea of God was corrupt. He called the Church’s false idea of a repressive, physical God ‘Urizen’, based as its name suggests on ‘our reason’- the God humanity’s limited vision invents for itself, too much in our own image, not the immeasurable, loving Creator and sustainer who Jesus represented.
To Blake God’s spirit lives invisibly in everything & is beyond the limitations of human reasoning. The false, material God binds us by laws and commandments. Adherence to the True God would make us free, loving and at peace. Blake examines this in poems like ‘The Everlasting Gospel’. Only by returning to simple right-living within nature, responsive to God’s invisible Spirit and his revelation in scripture and in moral life can we find the true freedom for which we were designed. Faith for Blake should not be rationalised, as Church responses to the Enlightenment had done by their ‘Natural Religion’ arguments. His treatise ‘There is no Natural Religion’ explored the irrationality of trying to understand the spiritual dimension through humanistic apologetics.
It can be useful to imagine God not as a ‘being’ in the physical sense, but just open ourselves to recognising that there is a True Source of all things ‘visible and invisible’, the Truth within all & a longing for which many yearn, the source of true spiritual ideas and longings in human minds when we seek to make sense of dimensions we cannot see. But even this is too limited. Mystics often emphasise that God is indescribable and unknowable, while at the same time recognising that our Source is loving, caring an can bring us peace not fear.
A recurrent theme throughout the Bible is that though invisible and beyond us, God wants to communicate to the world - guiding Abraham into a relationship with him, guiding his People to follow ways of life that could bring them spirituality alive and help them relate to God through the Tabernacle, the Temple, the Synagogue then the Church. Yearly festivals often based around the seasons linked faith to the natural order of the year- sowing, planting, harvesting. Even Pentecost was originally a harvest celebration. So for the Jews the rhythm of the seasons was linked into exploring the nature of God and actions in history, just as it is in the Christian liturgical year. Festivals reminded them of significant events where God had looked after and communicated to the world. Yet they recognised that other things restrict communication: sin, self-centredness, materialism, false beliefs, over-busy lives, over- concern with other matters.
LOS SEARCHING FOR TRUTH - Jerusalem illustration
Throughout history prophetic voices called people back to spiritual truth and to return to lifestyles where God and truth could be more perceivable or tangible in daily life. Blake saw himself and his art and poetry as prophetic in that tradition, calling people to change.
LINNELL & PALMER SKIES
Linnell a Baptist and Palmer from a Non-Conformist family background turned High Anglican regarded it as his calling too.
God may be invisible and intangible but St Paul in Romans 1:19-20 suggested that aspects of God’s character and nature are detectable through the created world. St. Paul there saw God’s revelation in nature particularly in ethical issues especially – the conscience and the moral issues that are apparent within the way the world interacts. William Blake viewed the moral nature of God’s requirements as echoed in the world and nature too, as is especially shown in the contrasting poems in ‘The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience’. Mystics through time have suggested that nature reflects the character, love, interest in particular detail and the values of God. He is not to be found in a ‘pantheistic’ attitude to nature, (the belief that gods inhabit their creation) but in the recognition that Creation contains qualities that reflect their source. Most nearly ‘Christ’ reflects God and if we attain true lives, we as what Blake called ‘Eternal Man’ have the potential of reflecting and enjoying our Creator and all the benefits that living in his image can confer.
BLAKE- THE LAMB
Blake saw it particularly in the character of the innocent Lamb and the Shepherd guide. If we lived the peasant life, rather than out of touch with nature as in urban life, Blake and Palmer believed, we would be more in touch with God.
There are two different ideas at work in seeking God in nature: God as Transcendent and God as Immanent. Theologically both are true: Transcendent implies that God cannot be found in any complete way, perhaps not tangibly at all, because God is in an entirely different dimension. Immanent suggests that God has interacted within our dimension by creating, by communicating through scripture, people and prophetic voices, by living in Christ and by his Spirit’s involvement in human life: The idea of the ‘immanent’ implies that God CAN be found in this world by those who open themselves to develop spiritual discernment, to look & think and live rightly.
BLAKE PALMER LINNELL PORTRAITS
Blake Palmer & Linnell had very different attitudes to spiritual discernment from which I hope that we can learn today:
Blake was a revolutionary, committed to following the true God and imitating Jesus Christ imaginatively. He was critical of the institutional Church and contemporary religion because he believed it didn’t follow Christ, was far too materialistic, legalistic, static, and supported the political and social status-quo rather than seeking Christian revolution and social justice. He used art to convey his ideas about the spiritual forces behind the earth and encourage revolutionary thought & change of life to be in harmony with God’s good spiritual forces. But his Christianity is far from Orthodox, particularly in his doctrine of the nature of Christ. We shouldn’t take our theology from him, but we CAN follow many of his ethical ideas.
Linnell was baptised into the Baptist Church at Keppel Street, Russell Square in 1812 at the age of 20 and became obsessively non-conformist. He considered Anglican services blasphemous, false and spiritually degrading and was averse to priests, priestly authority & church hierarchy as contrary to Christ’s priesthood, However, as a professional artist he took commissions for portraits of several bishops. He was excluded from Keppel Street communion due to lack of attendance and briefly considered joining the Quakers in 1830. In 1843 he temporally joined the Plymouth Brethren who, he believed, took the original Hebrew and Greek text of scripture more seriously and had no paid ministers, which appealed to his self-taught faith. He and his family left in 1848 after a dispute over the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and he continued his faith independently, using his own translation of the Bible. He used art to praise God and reflect how God’s glory is displayed in nature.
Palmer came from a Non-Conformist family, but became committed to the higher side of The Church of England from youth attracted by the sacramental liturgy, formality and music. He married Linnell’s eldest daughter, though Linnell opposed his Anglican leanings and gradually turned against his son-in -law. Palmer used art to imagine and convey the spiritual life within the nature that he was portraying.
JOHN LINNELL 16 June 1792– 20 Jan. 1882
SELF PORTRAIT WITH LANDSCAPE
We’re starting by looking at the landscape through the eyes of John Linnell, because, though he is the middle of our 3 artists chronologically, he is the most conventional landscape painter, the successor of Constable and Gainsborough, and I hope that his work will encourage us to initially observe what is around us in detail. Linnell moved to live in this area, building his huge villa at the top of this hill and owning between 75 & 95 acres around us. He was brought up in a poor area of London; his father was a picture framer, carver and gilder who regularly failed as he had little business sense. Linnell didn’t attend school, taught himself to read & between the age of 8 &12 developed his artistic skills early by reproducing paintings by others, especially the popular genre painter George Morland for his father to sell.
He was encouraged by the landscape artist John Varley to whom he became apprenticed at the age of 12, though his father kept him indentured to him from 1806-1813 to make sure his art would support the family.
1806 LANDSCAPES & TREE
These were painted at the age of 14. Varley taught John to ‘Go to Nature for everything”, which is why Linnell became so intent on careful observation and why I’d like us first today to open our eyes to what is around us... to really look at the shapes of plants, trees, colours & light, the vistas through the trees & the sky.
BIRDS NEST HUNT /
Linnell became close friends with another of Varley’s pupils William Henry Hunt (‘Birds-nest Hunt’) who painted from close attention all his career. When Hunt approached death, Linnell advised him: “The future is within your reach, only act in the manner you have done successfully in your art – go to the fountain-head, study there. As you have studied and faithfully copied nature, the work of God, now study God himself. Be his disciple..” Through Varley the young Linnell also met many important artists including Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy who took him to his house and critiqued his drawings.
WILLIAM MULREADY Perhaps he learned most from an Academy friend William Mulready an Irish artist six years older than Linnell, who was at the time committed to realist landscape painting before he later turned to Romantic genre painting. Linnell enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 13.
COPY OF TITIAN’S ENTOMBMENT
He studied hard, read voraciously, drew & copied academic art like Raphael, Michelangelo, and here Titian, revered at the Academy. He also continued to copy nature, which encouraged his detailed painting style.
DRAWING OF LINNELL AT ACADEMY
In 1807 at the age of 15 he won the Academy’s drawing prize. By the age of 16 he was selling his paintings yearly at Academy exhibitions and by the age of 17 winning 50 guinea prizes at the British Institution.
EARLY LINNELL
Linnell’s father’s financial difficulties as a craftsman & gilder led John to be astute in his accounts & he saved carefully on every sale from an early age. He bought shares &property to support himself & his family. He demanded deposits before accepting commissions, preferred cash and never exchanged paintings for cheques, even from friends, until the cheque was cleared.
LANDSCAPE/ PORTRAIT / SACRIFICE OF JOB
Unlike academicians he always referred to his art as a ‘trade’ rather than a ‘profession’. He painted pictures that he knew he could sell, working with the tastes of the time, where Blake and Palmer were far more independent and sold little.
Linnell developed skills in all media: watercolour, oil, engraving, miniatures, landscapes portraits and genre pictures (images of daily working life). He even won a competition for sculpture at the Academy. He or his sons engraved his work, which gave him control, finance and copyright over his images. He was more socially and financially adept than both Blake and Palmer, cultivated social & artistic contacts & made a substantial living as a painter, despite having to support a family of 9 children.
BAPTIST MINISTER & CORNELIUS VARLEY DRAWING
In 1812, the year before he graduated at the Academy & set up as an independent artists, Linnell converted to the Baptist faith through his friendship with Cornelius, brother of John Varley. Varley was as astronomer & was convinced that the presence & nature of God could be seen & proved from nature & the universe, which influenced Linnell’s aims in his landscapes. The portrait is of another spiritual influence, the Baptism minister Revd. Dr. Jenkins.
SKY & HARVEST
The skies and light in his paintings especially suggest the presence of divine power, and the harvest God’s rich provision. At the Baptist chapel he met a coal-merchant, bookseller & scholar of Greek & Hebrew, Thomas Palmer (no relation to Samuel) and he married Palmer’s daughter Mary. Thomas influenced Linnell’s ambition to translate the Bible himself because he realised that the Authorised translation has many mistakes. He revised this throughout his life & in 1864 wrote a tract on the translation of scripture as well as two other religious tracts on the title of The Old and New Covenants. (1856) and rejecting Sabbath observance (1859),
PORTRAITS
Linnell made his living as a professional painter first by portraiture, painting many from the Baptist church and producing engravings of ministers for the Baptist Times.
LANDSCAPE
But landscape was his real love. By July 1851, when Linnell moved from Bayswater to Redhill at the age of 59 he was hailed as one of the foremost landscape painters in oil in Britain. Linnell was never elected as a Royal Academician, though he applied for 20 years between 1821-42. Later in life he felt slighted by the academy & wrote a tract calling for its reform. His Non-Conformist background & religious ideas probably influenced their decision as well as his insistence that he painted as a ‘trade craftsman’, not the Academicians’ higher social standing. But there were few years when he didn’t exhibit successfully at the academy & the public loved his work.
LANDSCAPES WITH GENRE FIGURES
In academic circles landscape painting was not regarded as of equal importance to history or portrait-painting. It was accepted where it included figures working in the landscape, as this was genre painting, like Dutch art, which was highly collected. British genre painting and landscape only began to be valued highly from the 2nd quarter of the C19th and artists like Linnell and Constable were largely responsible for that change. By the 1850s Linnell’s landscape painting gradually became more sought after than his portraits. He met the younger Samuel Palmer in the early 1820s, taught him techniques and encouraged him to use the landscape as his theme, visiting him in Shoreham several times.
SURREY
Partly for his health, Linnell decided to move to the countryside from Bayswater (then a poor area) where in 1830 he had designed & built a house 38 Porchester Terrace. He considered buying a site for a home at Edenbridge or to stay there for the summer, & came to Redhill as he changed trains in May 1849. Between trains he walked up Redstone Hill & was struck by the views in all directions. He found that 11 acres of Redstone Wood were for sale from a London stockbroker. This was where he decided to settle. He bought the land for £1295 then within 2 years expanded the estate to 43 acres. In 1862 he added another 32 acre adjoining estate with Chart Lodge.
REDSTONE
He supervised every stage of the design and building of his house, Redstone, himself, basing the whole design around his painting work, the views and terraced gardens. He was no longer worried about the window tax, as he was with the design of his Bayswater house. The tax had recently been abolished, so he made the windows as large as possible to benefit from the views and light. At first the house was just large enough for his family, but he enlarged it with two huge painting studios that took up the entire 1st floor, with a lobby of plaster casts between them. One studio was for himself, the other for his sons who he was training as ‘Linnell & Co.’ to carry on a painting dynasty rather like a business. Downstairs was a 60 foot drawing room and a spacious library positioned, like the studios so he could watch the sunset and changing sky effects, such an important feature in his work. (Most artists before him, even Turner, relied on quick watercolours painted on the spot and worked up in the studio, or invented the sky effects.) He built this cottage at the cost of £110 for John Bell his handyman and general assistant and his wife who did Redstone Wood’s laundry.
Linnell was apparently a ferocious neighbour, fenced in the wood that locals had regularly used & fought a long battle to keep the local hunt off his land. Like many self-made business-people & religious people who feel they are always right, he could be a bully. He kept his family well disciplined (his youngest daughter Phoebe, who was more wayward nicknamed him “The President”. He controlled the work of his sons and their art-prices and tried to control Samuel Palmer’s life as his son-in-law, partly because of his rigid strict ethics and Baptist Christianity, which opposed Palmer’s more aesthetically susceptible Anglicanism.
FOUR LANDSCAPES
Linnell was a workaholic; he exemplified or exaggerated the Protestant Work Ethic, working in the studio form 6.30 am till late into the night. Often he worked on 6 or 7 canvases at the same time and because he battled illness for large parts of his life he inhaled bottles of Oxygen and took long walks to strengthen his weak body. Though his schedule was foolhardy health-wise, his business acumen is how he could afford to buy an estate.
SURREY LANDSCAPE – BOLTON ART GALLERY
Surrey was still fairly poor rural area at the time. Land and building in this vicinity was relatively cheap compared to now. But the railway opened to here in 1841, attracting increasing building in this area, and land prices were rising. Properties weren’t the extortionate prices they are today and Linnell moved here just before the huge increase in building in the Reigate and Redhill a decade later in the late 1850s and 60s.
Linnell could be very generous. He morally supported the young Pre-Rephaelites when their work was being disparaged by critics. He financially supported Blake and Blake’s widow and Samuel Palmer because he believed in their work. But his letters show that he was quite rigid and controlling in his financial dealings with them. He kept the work ethic of his craftsman roots and expected others to work as hard. When his eldest daughter Hannah married Samuel Palmer he was concerned. He admired his ideas and talent, and they had been good friends, but right from their honeymoon in Italy Linnell tried to control their itinerary making them work for him. He made family jokes which put Palmer down and arrogantly ‘improved’ or touched up Palmer’s works before they went to exhibition, as he did his sons’ & other artists. Samuel did not object to this but it must have seemed demeaning. Palmer would not compromise his work. He worked far more slowly than Linnell and as a watercolourist couldn’t support his family financially in the manner in which Linnell felt his daughter should be accustomed. He turned against Palmer when it was obvious that he wouldn’t follow his advice to make a more substantial living. Blake & his widow were also rather naïve about the ways of the world and particularly business matters. Blake survived largely on people who admired his ideas, like Linnell feeling sorry for him and giving him commissions, like the Job and Dante series which Linnell commissioned & financed for other collectors to buy.
PORTRAIT OF BAPTIST PREACHER
As can be seen in this simple early portrait Linnell especially admired the naturalism of Van Eyck over the idealism of Michelangelo and Reynolds. Reynolds’ discourses, central to Academy teaching, encouraged artists to improve on nature. Where they saw disfigurements in a tree or a face they should beautify it as Classical Art did. Here he was observing carefully, not idealising the sitter’s image for vanity purposes. In fact several of his engravings of Baptist ministers for the Baptist Times seem deliberately dour and over-serious.
OLD TREE
Linnell believed that as God made nature the highest thing an artist could do was to praise God by copying nature. Linnell was 13 years older than Palmer when they first met. He was 30, making a good living by his art and building a house in Bayswater. Palmer was 17 and just starting an artistic career and very impressionable and idealistic. He copied art as the Academicians did but soon wanted to go further in putting his faith into his art. Palmer wrote that Linnell’s aims saved him from “ modern art” ie. the academic style. Linnell taught Palmer to be more visionary, to look at nature more than idealise it as academic art did, and to reach beyond the surface to the spiritual content within & beyond nature.
Linnell wrote to Palmer on his honeymoon: “I am persuaded that there is no departing from truth anywhere in poetry or in painting without losing by it, and here I do not lose sight of imaginative art, for where for the sake of a more full expression of the grandest qualities of nature, some exaggerations are indulged in or allegorical figures made use of, it is evidently to obtain more truth thereby than can be expressed by the mechanical transcript of nature, which in many cases would be unintelligible.”
SHEPHERD & HARVEST GENRE SCENE
The introduction of people into Linnell’s scenes, therefore, was to add to what the picture said about nature: God nurturing the harvest, providing rest, the sacredness of human toil, the joy to be found in God’s creation. Palmer introduced figures to give similar meanings to his landscapes. But Linnell didn’t like Palmer’s turn to most visionary stylised works because he believed that they moved too far from celebrating nature as God made it, which was Linnell’s aim.
SUPPER AT EMMAUS & JOB’S SACRIFICE
Linnell painted several biblical pictures, but they are usually not his best works. His first began in 1817/8 with St John Preaching in the Wilderness but he didn’t manage to finish it until the mid1830s. History painting was not his main forté.
He also published religious poems in a magazine ‘The Bouquet’ under the pseudonym ‘Larkspur’.
ROAD TO EMMAUS
Samuel Palmer had posed for one of Christ’s companions in The Road to Emmaus 1835.
BIBLICAL PAINTING THE EVE OF THE DELUGE
These are what the Academy called ‘history paintings. Subjects from ancient history, mythology or the Bible were seen as the highest form of art, way above portraiture & landscape. They made artist’s names at the Academy & achieved highest prices. (Noah on the Eve of the Deluge 5ftx7½ft. fetched £1000 when his landscapes were sold from £100-£300 and portraits 20-100 guineas.) Religious subjects in history painting were intended to raise people’s aspirations & remind us of God’s guidance through past faith events, which is probably why Linnell painted them, as well as showing that he could master academic subjects. They are not his best works as landscape painting was his real love.
JOHN MARTIN
The dramatic background, which would have drawn attention to the work in an Academy exhibition, emulates Turner &John Martin and relates to the idea of the ‘Sublime’ in art.
PASTORAL / SUBLIME / PICTURESQUE
There were three basic ways in which 18th & 19th Century artists felt that they might sense God in nature and reflect it in art: The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Pastoral .
SUBLIME The idea behind ‘sublime ‘ subjects was to express awe at the power of God in nature. Turner’s dramatic alpine mountainscapes, sunsets and storms and the light of Venetian lagoons epitomise this. Sometimes dramatic settings overwhelm you as Wordsworth felt in the Lake District, as described in his ‘Preface’. Believers and philosophers felt that you were recognising God’s greatness and majesty in the strong forces that formed the earth, where nature overpowers you and you feel tiny, spiritually challenged or enervated in the presence of the power of God within creation. Gerard Manly Hopkins, (the spirit in Hopkins’ poetry and drawings is often close to the spirit in Palmer’s painting) described it as: “The world is charged with the Grandeur of God...”
Emotive feelings could be triggered by dramatic mountain ranges, a snowstorm at sea, a glorious sunset or thunder-clouds, or breath-taking view from the top of a hill as Linnell experienced here at Redstone, with all its changes of light and dramatic weather effects.
PICTURESQUE
Picturesque landscapes were intentionally calmer. In them you were meant to recognise God through beauty in nature and the ways that God designed the world around us for our pleasure and nurture. Discerning travellers would walk around with a Claude glass - a blackened mirror which they would hold up to frame and reflect nature and make one feel at peace, content that nature is arranged for our delight & spiritual nourishment. Revd. William Gilpin had been as a particular advocate of this picturesque concept of nature, which you find in many watercolourists of the time, like Linnell’s teacher John Varley. You can recreate this idea of composing nature if you create a ‘composition frame’ and look at the landscape or nature around you as if composing it for a photograph or painting.
PASTORAL
The Pastoral is in a way an offshoot of the Picturesque. It admires ordinary working- people’s lives and how they interact with nature. Eclogues or ‘shepherd poems’ spoke of this.
Simple living alongside and dependent on nature was thought by philosophers and aesthetes to bring people in touch with God through living closely with his world as he intended. This partly derived from the Psalms and Virgil but is often over- idealistic. Life on the land was hard and became harder as the industrial revolution drew starving families from the land into urban slum living and factory work. The idea of godly pastoral living fills Linnell & Palmer’s landscapes and Blake’s poems, showing God’s bounty in nature sustaining peasant life. But it was largely the invention of idealists painting for a comfortable wealthy elite. The political unrest in the countryside as a result of the Corn Laws and Enclosures Acts was driving the poor from the land; it was hard to scrape a living as a shepherd or tenant farmer. The farmer who rented a field off Linnell said that the artist earned substantially more from painting the field & him working in it than, as a farmer, he did from his backbreaking working on the land.
SURREY LANDSCAPE
Noah on the Eve on the Deluge when shown at the Academy brought Linnell fame, commissions and dealers viewing for his work as they did for the rest of his career. After 1847 as a successful artist, Linnell was able to select his subjects more and devoted more time to landscapes, only taking commissions for a few portraits for friends. He was attracted to this area by the ease of travel into the city by train and the health benefits of country air. Like Palmer in Shoreham, it was far enough from the city to be regarded as a rural idyll where he felt able to find God, live at peace, raise his family and create both sublime & picturesque artworks.
The concept of the Sublime in nature was important to Linnell as to many C18th & C19th artists and writers. Picturesque landscapes explored how God composed nature to make one feel at peace. The Sublime, by contrast was more dramatic. The views from Redstone Hill combined the picturesque with the Sublime. While many of Linnell’s paintings might today be considered ‘chocolate-boxy’ he didn’t intend them to be saccharine. He’s exploring God’s presence in the Picturesque, the Pastoral AND the Sublime. Many of his compositions are as well-and-orderly composed as picturesque landscapes, but charged with sublime forces like sunsets or bright spring light.
LATER LINNELL IMPRESIONIST LANDSCAPE
From 1849 to the mid1860s some of his landscapes are less detailed in finish, impressionistically capturing atmosphere. It is interesting that Linnell’s work went out of fashion as Impressionism rose in popularity, though he observed nature far more intensely.
DRAMATIC SKIES
Many of his skies were directly observed from the large windows at Redstone and recorded in watercolour or oil sketches. As his eyesight failed in later years he also used the new medium of photography to supply details of nature like the form of trees.
Linnell survived 6 months longer than Palmer, dying at the age of 89 in January 1882. In his late years he became increasingly vehement about proselytising his faith. Holman Hut remembered visiting him and Linnell questioning him with his own translation of the Bible in hand and grilling him on his beliefs throughout the visit. As his eyesight was failing and he was too fragile to stand at his easel he gave up painting in 1879. He spent much of his time studying scripture and its translation, assuring himself of his faith, as he had encouraged \William Henry Hunt to do.
GRAVE
He was buried in the same churchyard in Reigate as Palmer. He was famous, so it was a public ceremony; shops closed, carriages came from London, the funerary chapel was so full that the doors had to be locked. He was buried with his first wife. Other members of his family are buried to the right and left.
The Times obituary called him “the most powerful landscape painter since Turner... A glory seems to have faded from the domain of British Art.” But like Palmer, his art became forgotten as the taste for modernism grew, only to be re-evaluated in the mid-C20th by Sutherland, Nash, Piper and the Neo-Romantics, then again in the early 1970s by the Brotherhood of Ruralists.
2 LANDSCAPES OF VISTA FROM REDSTONE HILL
In the light of Linnell’s love of this area, let’s explore the garden and surrounding hill with its views beyond, and see how it might inspire our thoughts or make us in touch with nature & sensitive to the beauty & possible meanings within it.
SAMUEL PALMER 20 Jan 1805- 24 May 1881
WORKS BY PALMER, RICHMOND & CALVERT
While he was still living in London, in 1824 Linnell had introduced a group of nine similar-thinking friends and artists to each other, who initially met at his home and talked late into the night about religion, art, philosophy, books or sang and played music together. They included the artists Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Edward Calvert and called themselves “the Blessed in Council”, then later ‘The Ancients’. (others were Francis Oliver Finch, Frederick & Arthur Tatham, Henry Waller, Welby Sherman and John Giles). Later they met in a more organised way each month in each other’s houses, particularly Calvert’s and discussed what it was to be Christian artists & writers in the contemporary world.
Their hero was William Blake, to whom Linnell introduced them. Blake was by then an old man & they revered his home as they passed it. Blake occasionally joined their gatherings.
PALMER SELF-PORTRAIT c 1826 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Like Linnell Palmer had been rather a child prodigy. You can see some of his sensitivity in the quality of this self-portrait. He trained by observing nature, and copying the art of others; particularly engraving. By 1819 at the age of 14 he was exhibiting landscapes and pictured of churches at the British Institution, and at the Royal Academy at the age of 15.
It was his meeting at the age of 17 with Linnell, Mulready and others who wanted to go beyond academic art that started him on a revised course. His relationship with Linnell lasted 60 years, though soured after Palmer became Linnell’s son-in-law.
As a young man Linnell took him on oil-sketching trips into the countryside and around Dulwich and introduced him to artists like William Mulready and George Richmond. He encouraged him to observe trees and other details of nature carefully, not to generalise or idealise, as many Academicians did.
1824 SKETCHBOOK
His surviving 1824 sketchbook shows that he was a voracious and imaginative drawer. He drew from the imagination, as well as from stuffed animals and from classical sculptures in the British Museum.
SHEPHERD & SLEEPING SHEPHERD (Classical)
One of his favourite works was a late C2nd CE sculpture of a sleeping shepherd boy in the Townley Gallery. He later introduced the pose in a more realist setting, as a shepherd lying in the sunshine across the doorway of a Kent Barn.
OAKS AT LULLINGSTONE
Palmer looked with extreme precision as encouraged by Linnell, but he was more interested in the life within natural forms than making lifeless, exact replicas of nature. Of drawing these trees wrote: “ I have been drawing the Natural Fact till I am cold in the extremities... I am desperately resolves to try what can be got by drawing from nature....Tho’ I am making studies for Mr. Linnell, I will, God help me, never be a naturalist by profession.” Palmer was fascinated by the suggestion that Milton, one of the Ancients’ spiritual heroes had connections with this park and he felt a spiritual connection with him there. He wrote: “the poet’s tree is larger than any in the park.. its moss & rifts & barky furrows ... [I want to capture its inner life}, the grasp & grapple of the roots, the muscular belly and shoulders, the twisted sinews. The arms of the old rotten tree [are to me] more curious than the brawny arms of Michelangelo’s Moses, they come alive.”
MOONLIGHT
He was also fascinated by moonlight, no doubt influenced by the Ancients’ nightly walks together in thecountryside discussing the stars. To him the moon suggested the spirituality of the night. “The Moon is the planet of poetry” he wrote, which is why it recurs so often as a motif in his paintings.
THE BRIGHT CLOUD
Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, and Linnell’s ideas, Palmer sensed the presence of God in the nature around. He wrote: “The motley clouding, the fine meshes, the aerial tissues that dapple the skies of Spring, the rolling volumes and piled mountains of light.. the purple sunset blazoned with gold, the translucent amber...all seem to me a manifestation of the divine presence in the world.”
EARLY MORNING
In October 1824, Linnell first introduced Palmer aged 19 to William Blake, when Blake was confined to bed with a scalded foot. Palmer described his first vision of Blake as “an Antique Patriarch or Dying Michelangelo”, with “brilliant.. clear.. intent eyes” ‘piercing him and searching out falsehood.’ ‘He was “energy itself”... “Full of the ideal”. The older artist was to influence Palmer’s emphasis on painting visionary landscapes.
BLAKE’S JOB
Blake was then working on the engravings for Job, which Linnell commissioned as a way of supporting the old artist. Blake took Palmer to exhibitions and introduced him to the work of Durer, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, mediaeval art, and other artists who moved him away from just copying nature and produced more idealised images. Palmer wrote that walking and discussing his non-conformist faith with Blake was like “walking with Isaiah”.
SHOREHAM
In 1825 Palmer moved from London to Shoreham in Kent, where one of his older cousins had been vicar 30 years before.
He was able to afford the move because his grandfather had died and left him £3,000 legacy, which he determined not to waste by living simply. Between 1831 and 1834 he bought 4 more properties in Shoreham and supported himself as an artist on the rental. The move from the pollution of the city was largely for health reasons, as in London he suffered persistently from respiratory complaints. But the rural setting appealed to his pastoral aspirations, feeling that life integrated peacefully with nature is the ideal for human beings, not the increasing urban squalor, which he, like Blake, condemned. As a young man he had swaggered around in rather dapper clothes. In the country he grew a beard and dressed more modestly – canvas jacket with a big cloak to cover him when working in the fields and to shelter him and his work from the rain.
SHOREHAM
The Ancients who also settled nearby or visited rose early and worked hard from dawn till dusk with the integrity of artisans - (again under the Protestant work ethic that drove Linnell). Shoreham also had a paper-mill, which supplied them with good quality, thick rag paper which they filled with images and writing.
In the evenings they’d discuss poetry, read books and religious pamphlets aloud, argue about faith and non-conformism and gave concerts. Palmer played the fiddle and piano and had a good tenor singing voice. They’d often went for walks in the moonlight, which led the locals to nickname them the “Extollagers” – ie. strange gentlemen who extolled faith and sat watching the stars at night like astrologers.
NAZARINE PAINTING
Palmer had been introduced to the Nazarines through Linnell, a group of German Catholic artists who worked communally in Rome and Germany. The Ancients developed a similar ideal of communal living: Palmer’s father moved to living nearby and many of his artist friends, visited. George Richmond rented a house there. Calvert valued the simplicity of the valley of Shoreham, which he called ‘innocent’ ‘as though “the Devil had never found it out”. They were delighted to discover that John Wesley had preached in the village.
BRIGHT CLOUD & REST ON THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT c1824/5
Some of Palmer’s paintings show figures like the Holy Family in an English rural setting, suggesting the holiness the Ancients recognised or sensed in the landscape around them: Considering the number of English artists and travellers who visited and brought back records and illustrations of the Holy Land, Palmer’s ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ seems especially incongruous in interpreting the Middle East as an English countryside scene. The artist know that the setting was not topographically correct; he’s more intent on creating an allegorical presence of the Holy Family in the midst of England. The sentiment is similar to Blake’s idea of ‘building Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land.’
BARNS c1828
He observed the barns and byres of the village observing their textures, colours and forms, using thickly textured tempera water-based paints. Sometimes he used too much gum Arabic to create the textures or deepen glazes and shadows so in time the paintings cracked. During his time in Shoreham Palmer experimented with a wide variety of media and techniques, including miniatures on ivory, just as Blake, Linnell and Varley had experimented.
LULLINGSTONE OAKS
His studies of the oaks in the nearby park carefully scrutinised the natural forms and textures. This is very different from the designs and composition of picturesque painting or natural history art of the time. It is about looking and recording; something John Ruskin would encourage 20 years later in advocating ‘truth to nature’ in ‘Modern Painters’ and ‘The Elements of Drawing.’.
Blake, came to visit the Shoreham community, which resembled his social idealism. A few scholars have suggested that the long poem ‘Jerusalem’ was inspired by his visit to the valley, but Blake died within a year of Palmer moving to Shoreham and the idea of his major prophetic masterpiece must have developed far earlier. George Richmond was with Blake at his death and closed his eyes. Linnell paid for Blake’s funeral, the Ancients followed his coffin though Palmer couldn’t be there. He may have been afraid of the sentiment of funerals, as he did not attend the funerals of either of his two children who predeceased him.
Linnell had originally tried to dissuade Palmer from moving to Shoreham because lack of contact with London’s art market wouldn’t bring him financial security but Linnell was delighted by the village when he visited and he continued to support him: Linnell’s father made the frames for Palmer’s yearly submission of 8 paintings to the Royal Academy & Linnell tried to persuade him to make his studies from nature into more commercial pastoral landscape scenes, which would fetch a good price. But Palmer did not want to succumb to the commercial tastes or fashion. He wrote: “I will not become one of the housepainters, sky-sloppers and brush blotters” .
IN A SHOREHAM GARDEN
In experimenting Palmer used bright colour as much as muted tones. Here he used thick tempera in impasto to suggest the masses of blossom.
MAGIC APPLE TREE
Palmer also experimented with bright and translucent colour, in perhaps his most magical visionary coloured picture. Here he’s possibly closest to Blake’s vision of nature as a glowing effulgence of divine forces. It’s almost as though the landscape is on fire with Autumn fecundity.
VISIONARY LANDSCAPES
Most people today relate to Palmer’s visionary works, which only occupied a few years in his output. They are not so interested in his naturalistic landscape watercolours, which is a shame because he valued them, and felt that he had moved on from his idealised landscapes to images that were core to suggesting God’s creativity in nature. Palmer never exhibited in public these most visionary paintings for which he is now most known. They were kept in what he called his ‘Curiosity Portolio’.
One of his favourite quotes, which he told George Richmond he ‘believed in his heart’ was from the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion”. He wrote in 1834 “All the very finest original pictures... have a certain quaintness by which they partly affect us – not the quaintness of bungling – the queer doing of a common thought – but a curiosity in their beauty – a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them, [while the sublime eagles and big birds of the French Academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections].” It is this ‘curiosity’ and ‘quaintness’ which makes the visionary landscapes so intriguing.
COMING FROM EVENING CHURCH - 1830
‘Coming from Evening Church’ reflects Palmer’s beliefs at this time. Here the landscape and spiritual world merge: The congregation processes from the ivy-covered church by moonlight. The hills and arched trees protect them, as a natural continuation of their compline prayers, as they go from church, a place of security, to the lighted windows of their homes, another place of security. The church spire lifts the cross heavenwards. It is lit by the moon, which is radiant, providing a magic illumination. Remember Palmer’s quote: “The Moon is the planet of poetry” Nature, like the Cross and Church, is shining God’s blessing on the people. At this time some scholars believed that the form of Gothic vaults had developed from the form of trees, so the landscape, with the trees arching above them, and the architecture are both to be regarded as sacred. The pointed forms of the spire, church gables, the houses, yew tree and hills all reflect each other. They suggest that faith, architecture, the home and nature are all in harmony, pointing people to God. They are communally protected by the Church, as well as God.
It is significant that this is signed and dated prominently - few of Palmer’s works are. 1830 saw the beginnings of rural unrest in Shoreham. Leading up to the General Enclosure Act in 1845. Peasants were beginning to be evicted from lands they had tenanted for centuries and were moving to cities like London or becoming labourers. The Poor Laws caused many farmers to only pay their workers at subsistence levels, expecting the parish to maintain them. The Corn Laws meant that many in the countryside couldn’t afford grain for bread, In the year of this painting William Cobbet was petitioning Parliament to recognise the workers’ case, reduce tithes and reform the Corn Laws and Poor Law that allowed workers to be auctioned and treated almost as slaves. He encourage farmers to be more equitable. The Great Reform Act of 1832 helped a little but didn’t bring universal suffrage as still only 18% of the male population became eligible to vote.
In 1830 rural rebellion broke out in Kent with the destruction of threshing machines that had taken labourer’s jobs, rather like the Luddite rebellion of 1811. Riots soon spread to Sussex and Hampshire. One of Samuel Palmer’s friends, a farmer, Samuel Love was among the first to have his farm torched.
Here Palmer is advocating the rural idyll of pastoral life continuing as before, with simple piety, under the protection of God and the local pastor. This ideal was rapidly disappearing in the British countryside if it ever existed.
2 CHURCH PICTURES
Despite his pastoral sensibility and rural life Palmer was a Tory who distrusted revolution. He and the Ancients lived carefully, but didn’t experience the pangs of poverty like many workers in the countryside apart from as short period in the early 1830s. The harvests were not the “pretty pictures” that he describes. He didn’t properly understand the plight of working people or the poor. He idealised them and wasn’t ever as politically astute or politically active as Blake. This is possibly the painting in which he most clearly expressed political and social ideas as Blake did in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Palmer supported the tithe system, the tax by which the people supported the Church. He wrote a pamphlet supporting his local Tory M.P., writing against revolution & valuing the Church and political status quo. (His candidate came last in the election.)
One of Palmer’s few surviving poem ‘The Shepherd Home’ idealised the peasant and peasant life:
“A little village safe and still
Where pain and vice full seldom come...
Trim cottage gardens
Intricate with fruit-bent boughs
And sweet young maidens
Fairer than the milky lilies do appear.”
A few of the people in this procession seem personalised; they may be people he knew in the village. Yet it is unreal; they are all in harmony, smartly dressed in their ‘church best’ not the ragged peasants of Blake’s Little Lost Boy or Chimney Sweep. They are upright, a community without apparent problems because they have the blessing of God, the Church and Nature. That seems to be how Palmer saw his neighbours. In a letter to George Richmond Palmer wrote that one of the most important principles of Christian teaching was to ‘divert attention from the vile all-absorbing self to the plight of the impoverished’. Though he and the Ancients mixed well with the villagers and even befriended a local mentally handicapped boy, Palmer, a home-owner, with the vote and a simple income, didn’t fully recognise the needs of the impoverished who he idealised in his work not because of indifference but because rather than seeing true reality he was engaged in religious ideals about nature.
THE VALLEY THICK WITH CORN
This painting celebrates the sense of a pastoral idyll. The poet Spencer reclines at leisure writing his eclogues, blessed by the abundance of God, as his poems emphasise. Shepherds and flocks are suggestive of contentment with the soil and with life. Palmer wasn’t as discontent with the world as Blake. It didn’t always treat him well, but he seems more content a person. The idea of the Pastoral idyll is that both those who work the land & those who contemplate nature are in touch with God through the rhythm of life. Shepherds leading flocks, boys guarding the fold, farmers tilling the land, the ox drawing the plough are all close to God through to, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems glorifying a labouror’s muscles: the “thew of him” or the plough-share: “sheer plod makes plough through sillion shine”. Hard physical work is regarded as sacred, as Linnell intended the artist’s work to be.
ANCIENTS LONDON
The idealism of the Ancients didn’t last long. They’d been young and idealistic. Less than 10 years after their founding most had moved up in their lives and careers. They remained friends but met less as a community. Richmond married and become a prosperous portrait painter in the city with a growing family. Most of the others remained in London and Palmer felt increasingly isolated as well as not making a living from his art.
TINTERN ABBEY & BRITISH LANDSCAPES
In 1834 with another legacy he bought a house in London as a base for teaching watercolour & continued to meet with the ancients as friends. He set off on short yearly tours of dramatic & picturesque scenery in Devon, the West Country and Wales and started painting in a more naturalistic style. But his studies sometimes didn’t prove to include enough detail to work up into realistic paintings after he returned home broke. This increasingly irritated the business-minded Linnell.
ITALIAN LANDSCAPES
In 1837, after a 4 year courtship, Palmer married Linnell’s eldest daughter Hannah aged 19, when he was 32. He was an Anglican and wanted a church wedding but Linnell’s strict non-conformism insisted that they marry in Marylebone courthouse through a registrar. The law allowing registry weddings was just 2 months old. For a honeymoon they set off on the Grand Tour. Rome especially attracted them and Palmer painted some of his best landscape paintings in Tivoli and the Umbrian hills. He spent 2 months studying the art in Florence and vowed to paint naturalistically and never return to his old style again.
Hannah had her work cut out in Rome as her father over-controlled the honeymoon by commissioning her to copy Italian works of art for him, particularly the arduous task of meticulously colouring from the original, a series of engravings of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling panels. This caused much trouble for the young couple..
They stayed in Italy for nearly 2 years but ran out of money, as Palmer failed to sell any of his paintings there, due to his lack of social contacts and social graces.
BRIGHT WATERCOLOUR
On their return from Italy they settled in Lisson Green and he determined to paint in the Victorian manner to support his family. He produced large bright conventional watercolours but they didn’t find a market and he was often criticised for the garishness of his colours. For a while in the mid-1840s he was admired by Ruskin who praised his work in the 1846 edition of Modern Painters but dropped him 2 years later when promoting the Pre-Raphaelites. Fortunately Palmer was elected as an associate of the Old Watercolour Society, which gave him credentials to sell more work and teach high society students. Teaching became his main source of income. He made a short sketching tour each summer or early autumn to provide him with painting subjects but he still struggled to sell and it took 11 years before the Old Watercolour Society elected him a full member, which enabled him tosell his work more regularly.
Linnell became rather overbearing and didn’t help Palmer’s confidence. Linnell had become one of the most celebrated British landscape painters selling oil paintings for thousands. Watercolours would always fetch lower prices. Linnell was obviously worried about his daughter, and her financial stability, but he treated Palmer like a ne’er-do-well, keeping a watch on his finances and interfering by touching up Palmer’s paintings before sale. One dealer insulted him by only buying Palmer’s works if Linnell had worked on them.
MOON LANDSCAPE
The friendships of the Ancients continued though their contact was less than before. Palmer’s first child Thomas More was born in 1842. 2 years later their daughter Mary Elizabeth was born but died three months before her 4th birthday & Palmer’s father died a year later. Hannah had several miscarriages before another boy Alfred Herbert was born in 1853. He was a sickly child & frequently in danger so his mother took him to Linnell’s home at Redhill for recuperation, where Linnell regularly further undermined her confidence and respect for Palmer as her husband. She had social aspirations to which Samuel couldn’t aspire to or aim at. She spent increasing time at Redhill where she hero-worshipped her father.
The sadness of their daughter’s death caused them to move
twice in a few years to South Kensington, then a growing village outside London. But Palmer’s health declined through the 1850s. He became fascinated by homeopathy and would self-medicate.
THE LONELY TOWER (Leith Hill)
The whole family went into further melancholy when their first son Thomas More died in a farm near Abinger at the age of just 19 shortly after he had graduated from Kingston Grammar School. He is buried in Abinger churchyard.
LANDSCAPE DRAWING
Two weeks later the Palmers moved to a cottage on Redhill Common then lodgings in Reigate. Palmer only got strength again in the early Summer if 1862, when he helped the widow of Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, to complete the Biography. Gilchrist had died the previous November and Palmer supported his widow to complete and publish the memoirs to which Palmer had contributed. It was publishing in November 1863. Linnell felt slighted because he felt that he should have been given more credit in the memoir.
ETCHINGS INCLUDINGTHE WEARY PLOUGHMAN
Palmer took up etching in 1850 & joined the Old Etching Club. It took a long time to perfect the technique: He only completed 13 plates in his lifetime. Some of his prints were worked on for years. The Weary Ploughman took from 1858 to 1865 to perfect the marks and tones, which helps to demonstrate Palmer’s commitment to perfectionism. .
In May 1862, Palmer moved to his last home, Furze Hill House, in Mead Vale, Redhill (now called ‘The Chantry’ in Cronk’s Hill. The upper-middle-class area & his neighbours embarrassed him, as it was so different from the pastoral idyll he advocated in his paintings and had lived in Shoreham. The home was chosen by his wife and much closer to Linnell’s daughter’s aspirations of a successful social life, just down the road from her father. Palmer, declining in health became increasingly reclusive.
MILTON & VIRGIL ETCHINGS
Yet, despite depression over his son’s death and feeling socially uncomfortable in his home he produced some of his most profound works in Reigate – a series of 8 commissioned paintings of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, etchings based on them, and a series of etchings for his own translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, which Blake had also engraved. His son Herbert to whom he had taught etching completed and published these works after his father had died. These watercolours and prints are a culmination of Palmer’s artistic output. They show him reaching to express the spiritual heart that he sensed in some key poetic texts. The colours and tones are among his most sensitive works, exploring inner meanings in the poems without illustrating too literally.
Like Linnell Palmer is buried in Reigate cemetery though more modestly than his father-in-law.
As we go outside let’s try to sensitise ourselves to the nature around us, as seen through Samuel Palmer’s eyes and imagine the forces and processes which are behind and within nature. Palmer was contemplating God’s qualities and priorities and giving them visual form. He also saw the nature to which he was attracted as an expression of the spiritual forces within God’s Creation.
WILLIAM BLAKE 28 Nov.1757 – 12 Aug. 1827
BLAKE PORTRAIT
William Blake was an inspiration behind both Linnell and Palmer though their later work diverted from his ideas. He wouldn’t have approved of how Linnell pandered to Victorian society taste to make a living. He would have regarded their naturalistic styles as too reliant on the surface appearance of nature. Blake’s vision for art was closer to Palmer’s visionary work of his Shoreham period, which he directly influenced. Blake looked within nature to understand the spiritual world, not on surface appearances.
ANGELIC FIGURES
He was regularly ‘looking for angels’ and aiming to explore the spirit of God’s truth within his subjects. Blake would be easier to understand if all his poems were as easy to interpret as the Songs of Innocence and Experience, though they too are more complicated than they at first appear.
BOOKS OF URIZEN & JERUSALEM BOUND FIGURES
Blake’s allegorical imagery, particularly in his longer poems is far too complex to explain in this session and the meaning of characters altered between poems. The main thing to remember is that he worked in the tradition of C18th poetry and earlier, using mythological characters as parallels for modern issues. Elizabethan sonneteers, Milton & Alexander Pope all used allegorical or mythological characters and spirits to present a spiritual state that existed beyond the natural world. Most poets referred back to names and symbolic figures from classical mythology, as artists did in Academic History Paintings. But Blake invented personal mythologies to represent what he believed was happening with in the physical, material and spiritual world.
SPIRITUAL FIGURE OF NELSON
England was politically unstable. Revolution abounded abroad. England was especially worried about influences from France and America. British society was unstable and politicians & the monarchy were suspicious of political and religious radicals like Blake & the dissenters he admired. Some scholars think he made his allegories deliberately obscure so that only his radical readers would wrestle to interpret them and he would not be understood and charged with dissent. Yet his radicalism is obvious even on surface reading. I personally suspect that he may have deliberately cultivated the impression of being an ‘eccentric’ so that the establishment would not worry about his radicalism.
Basically Blake believed that humanity had corrupted the world not just through mismanagement but spiritual misguidance by an out-of touch, materialistic Church. He wrote to change society and religion. Blake’s symbolic prophecies and social comments were a commentary on the world using Christian imagery with integrity. He invented symbols that had roots not in the foreign, pagan or classical mythology used by most poets, but invented names that related to old British and Christian legends.
URIZEN
So his most famous character Urizen - the false idea of God - is based on the name ‘your reason’ not on spiritual revelation. Urizen was a vindictive giant who pretended he was God to mislead human beings.
BOOK OF URIZEN
He is the God invented by the human mind and Church materialism, not the Eternal, loving God of peace that Jesus spoke about. Blake said that most people, even the Church worshipped him, not the real Eternal God. His false religion bound human beings, rather than made them free as Christ can.
LOS
The name ‘Los’, a central figure of Blake’s mythology, is ‘Sol’ (sun) backwards. A creative blacksmith, he forged life for the world. But his life-giving potential has been usurped by Urizen the materialistic false-God. Los represents various things as Blake’s books developed: the poetic genius, the imagination, the sun-like father, the true priest who can free human beings, the blacksmith who is able to re-forge life for a lifeless world and rejuvenate life enslaved by Urizen.
LOS IN JERUSALEM
In Jerusalem Los is the ruler who brings order to time and space. By his hard work, forging the fire of life, he keeps the process of human and cultural evolution alive and in motion. He is an example for all human beings to become perfect, creative, active and live with integrity - the type lost by Adam’s Fall.
ENITHARMON
Enitharmon, based on the words ‘Eve’, ‘Earth’ and ‘harmony’, is a weaver, Los’s female counterpart – his ‘Emanation’. She is the inspiring mother of the Universe, weaver of the senses and human passions rather than the imagination, which Blake regarded as a more ‘male’ attribute (That of course was C18th & C19th sexism, not contemporary understanding!).
ENITHARMON IN JERUSALEM
In Jerusalem, Enitharmon represents liberty but in passionately driving for liberty and justice she also causes disharmony, revolution and war. Blake recognised that radical, creative thinking an creative activity to being change causes disharmony, just as, at that time, Britain feared the American & French revolutions and internal social, religious and agricultural rebellions which threatened the country.
SPIRIT SPREADING PESTILENCE
I’m not sure how real Blake imagined these allegorical figure to be. He certainly believed that spiritual powers guided the world. Part of his obsession with angels & spirits came through the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg who encouraged people to believe in angelic guidance and presences. Blake later rejected Swedenborg’s teachings.
THE BLOSSOM
But Blake maintained that he saw visions of angels from an early age. At the age four he had imagined he saw God looking at him through a window and about age nine remembered seeing in Peckham a vision of "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" (presumably a flowering tree!) Later watching haymakers at work he thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.
ANGEL SPEAKING TO HIM IN COTTAGE GARDEN
He believed that the spiritual world spoke to him and that he had conversed with historical and biblical figures like Gabriel & Mary. He spoke as if his prophecies were personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels and claimed that his poetry and images came to him by direct revelation. That can’t have been the whole truth because his few surviving sketchbooks and notebooks show that he made many changes in the process of creating his art. Whether Blake’s were literal encounters with the spiritual, we can’t be sure. He fantasised over his spiritual understanding. I hope that we won’t be tempted to look for too many angels or fairies in the bushes this afternoon. That’s not the purpose of the spiritual in nature. Yet the world of spirits and dreams is made physical in Blake's poetry, imagery and allegories and I hope that we can reach into the nature around us and consider ways in which it might reflects spiritual truths.
LONDON Blake was brought up in London yet used his imagination to lift him beyond its ugliness & corruption.
His art & prophetic poetry to speak out against the unnaturalism of the urban environment. His patron, William Hayley, encouraged him to move to the country, to Felpham in Sussex, which he felt would speak to his spiritual, pastoral temperament.
BLAKE’S COTTAGE
Blake accepted William Hayley’s invitation to move to the Felpham in Sussex, to find peace for creativity. In a letter to John Flaxman, dated 21 September 1800, Blake wrote: “ (The town of) Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.... I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels."
In Felpham, he said that he saw & conversed with his angel in the cottage garden, but the idyll didn’t last. He found that even there you couldn’t escape from social hierarchy and corruption. Blake was notoriously argumentative and was prosecuted for insulting a soldier who drunkenly encroached on his garden.
LONDON
He returned to London, realising that in his home city, ugly and corrupt as it was, he found his truest calling and prophetic messages. On 25 April 1803 Blake wrote to Thomas Butts: "... I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals..."
Blake looked for the spiritual within the physical & particular:
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
He wanted us to open our minds to things beyond the visual world, not just to look on the surface and the material. He wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."
We shouldn’t be too shackled by the physical world; the spiritual world allows both growth, movement and flight of the imagination:
"He who binds to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity's sun rise."
CHIMNEY SWEEP
Blake questioned the priorities and conventions of his day that kept human beings and the world static and stopped growth. He attacked hypocrisy in conventional religion, wanted freedom in society, politics, faith and sexuality, even advocated naturism (though we’ll avoid that in the garden today).
He defended the innocent: neglected children, slaves, women, exploited workers, children mistreated in factories, sent down mines or up chimneys. Today I’m sure he’d condemn zero-hour contracts, a minimal wage none can live on, social inequity, the temporary short-term-solutions of politicians, commercialism and the greed, corruption of big businesses. He particularly condemned hypocritical institutions, political or religious that maintained a corrupt society in a hypocritical guise.
HOLY THURSDAY contrasting Innocence & Experience
He showed up false charity in his contrasting poems of Holy Thursday in Songs of Innocence and Experience. The world, created and designed to flourish in innocence, with all supporting each other has been ruined. Nature and the innocent are meant to be nurtured by godly people imitating God and recognising him in nature. He reflected on this in Songs of Innocence: The Lamb, where the child in their innocence cannot yet fully recognise or understand God and is dependent on us to set a good example and introduce them to the truth of who they are in the image of God:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child & thou a lamb.
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
By contrast in the ‘Songs of Experience’, created nature also includes violence & injustice. Could the same God who nurtures the Lamb make the brutal killing machine, the Tyger? Unfortunately Blake’s illustration of the Tyger is rather too ‘pussy-like’, with little of the power described so alliteratively in the words of his poem. But the illustration demonstrates the deliberate ‘innocence’ of Blake’s vision, while the words reflect the ‘experience’ of the violent world:
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: THE TYGER
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire!
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand! & what dread feet!
What the hammer! what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain
What the anvil, what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spear
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry!
The poem explores dichotomies about the nature of evil and belief in a good God that have obsessed human minds, philosophy and theology for centuries. Blake was probably not just writing about real Lambs and Tygers as a challenge to conventional understandings or contradictions to understanding of God: He may have been using these as ways of exploring other dichotomies in faith, understanding and human behaviour - referring to human innocence and violence. How had people, born humble like Lambs become such violent creatures? What sort of God are people following if they are so violent. When we look around nature today we see innocence and violence working together: the butterfly and the wasp, the moth and the venomous spider, the leaf and the leaf-killing insect, the tree and the fungal disease. We recognise today that some predators, pests and diseases are necessary for life.. Blake saw duality in the world and his spiritual allegorical poems tried to understand it. Particularly his poems The Everlasting Gospel and The Divine Image:
SONGS OF INNOCENCE: THE DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Blake wrestled with how he might form an ideal society without bias, sin and injustice. He sought ‘Jerusalem’, ‘city of God’s peace’, where creation & society would enjoy the peace, joy & innocence that God intended. In his poem ‘The Human Abstract’, which is the Songs of Experience contrast to the Divine Image poem in the Songs of Innocence, Blake expressed belief that human cruelty, sin and disfunctionality have spread their damage to the natural world - the caterpillar eating foliage, the fly spreading disease, the predatory raven
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE: THE HUMAN ABSTRACT
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.
Blake believed that as we bear the divine image, the potential for good and innocence are in the human brain alongside the capacity for sin. In the poem "The Divine Image" in the Songs of Innocence Blake attributed all virtues that we possess - Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love to God’s presence in & among us & in nature: Wherever these virtues exist "there God is dwelling too” wrote Blake, suggesting that if God is allowed to live in & influence each of us, racism, poverty, cruelty, injustice & moral & physical pollution could be banished.
But "The Human Abstract" suggests that we cause people to suffer when we reject or work against the divine image in us. He believed, false religion with its false teachings created "holy fears" (like fear of hell & punishment), encouraged false humility where humans should recognise their high potential, and created darkness, deceit and superstition. Neither the true God or Nature are the source of cruel beliefs and actions but the "Human Brain," invents bad or inadequate theology, uncompassionate, unjust religions and unjust society. He believed that we can still learn pity and practice mercy if we recognise how we have hurt others.
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION1793
Blake expanded these ideas in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion, where he defended love & freedom against the Church’s double standards that denied people self-fulfilment in love, encouraged chastity and lack of physical fulfilment in relationships, and forced people to stay in marriages without love. (His own marriage to Catherine was fraught with difficulties, though she was a real practical support to him in creating, printing and colouring his works.) Organized religion & the restrictions of Georgian society, he believed, had erected a "Thou shalt not" sign over the garden of earthly love. Victorian repressive religious ideas were to do so even more):
THE GARDEN OF LOVE
I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.
Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to be chaste.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
THE ECOING GREEN
This destructiveness of happiness is a huge contrast to ‘The Echoing Green’ in the Songs of innocence where children, men and women play & live in harmony, innocence and total fulfilment through freedom, love and harmony with nature.
THE SICK ROSE
Blake wrestled with similar dichotomies in The Sick Rose where he looks at a natural plant, as we might this afternoon, and wonders why there need be pain and destruction in a life that could be so beautiful:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
This is far more than a description of a bud rotting from the inside because an insect has damaged it. The Sick Rose comments on human society and institutions that damage us from the inside. The rose is partly a metaphor for Blake’s revulsion at how beauty and innocence are often destroyed by life’s experiences and corruption.
PREFACE TO MILTON
In the introduction to Milton he uses a similar metaphor for corruption – clouded [polluted] hills and dark satanic mills to describe how industrialism and materialism damage society:
“And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?”
AH! SUNFLOWER
In ‘Ah Sunflower’ Blake used another plant to discuss nature wearily searching for life-bringing truth as the sunflower turns towards the sun to search for light. The youth longing for love & the virgin cold with frustration both die from lack of the heat & light that God and loving living could offer:
Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
Blake believed a cure could be found if we combine spiritual revelation, human innocence and wise, right thinking and living, following Christ’s true example. Christ, he believed could bring our imaginations alive to what we could be if we followed God’s Spirit. He could help us re-learn compassion and love if we commit to hard, active work for good. A garden is a place of harmony for growing life if we disciplining and cut out wrong growth so that better growth can flourish.
THE ECHOING GREEN
‘The Echoing Green’ is the ideal garden of delight, with harmony between nature and human life from birth to death. As a romantic idealist Blake longed for radical social change. Jerusalem ‘city of peace’ was his Utopia; Christ is in his imagination the potential of what a perfect human & spiritual being should be. He encouraged us to break away from the "mind-forged manacles" of traditional religion, politics and social order to create the ideal Jerusalem.
PREFACE TO MILTON
Blake called both his writing and painting ‘prophesy’ because like Isaiah he was committed to social and religious change.
Blake felt that the Western world was in its corrupt condition mostly because of human sin, its enslavement to "reason" and being closed to the free flight of the imagination, which Christ represented. Blake was fired by his spiritual life and poetic imagination. Our enslavement to ‘Reason’ accepted the enslavement of others through slavery, pollution, the social damage of the Industrial Revolution and the restrictions of organized religion. Freedom, tolerance, joy & free imagination were essential for growth. He used the abuse of nature as a metaphor for the damaged world in ‘Auguries of Innocence’:
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions
A dog starv’d at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State ...
That poem begins with one of Blake’s most memorable and often misquoted verses:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
He’s not saying what most people think, when read it out of
context that we can read the complexity of the whole cosmos in each detail of nature. He’s saying that if we think innocently, spiritually & incisively, we can see truth through the details of nature like the wonder and beauty of petals and
stamens or our sensitivity to the ethical wrongness of a caged robin. He believed
that in microcosm nature is teaching details of what is wrong or right in the world and giving us examples of how to live.
Blake believed God could be found in all things; that he acts and “IS” in all aspects of the world. He wrote: “It is the God in all that is our companion and friend…
God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes; for he is become a
worm that he may nourish the weak... everything on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God”.
This isn’t pantheism but Blake’s belief that if we experience & view life around with enlightened eyes we can be close to God. “The Eternal Man” he said-
meaning us all in our spiritual potential:
“…looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatter’d portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental forms of everything that grows.…
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the Universe: wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, The Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient bliss.”
Our responsibility is to become “The Eternal Man” (male & female – we should
be undifferentiated & united according to Blake) by living rightly & following
Christ’s example.
BOOK OF VALA
At the end of the gloomy Book of Vala, or the Four Zoas [1795-1804] Los and Enitharmon, working together day and night (Los represents the day, Enitharmon is characterised by the night) build the ideal society, Jerusalem. Through a struggle heaven triumphs over hell and rulers lose their oppressive powers, the poor are raised higher than their oppressors, slaves& victims of injustice are freed, intellectual & physical innocence triumph over bitter negative experiences.
MILTON OPENING JERUSALEM
Blake’s poem Milton foretells that in Jerusalem God’s people will eventually be a totally free society, free from slavery, the dominion of oppressive evil, spiritual & legal powers, the tyranny of selfishness, & the negative dominance of ‘reason’.
All these prevent “Eternal Man” from being free. In the true Jerusalem for Blake people will in live by mutual love, moral purity, sexual fulfilment, communal support and forgiveness, ethical and social freedom. He believed this could one day come into effect on earth through God uniting human beings with the good spiritual forces in the cosmos. His famous hymn vowing to build Jerusalem, which opens Milton [1804-1808] is Blake’s commitment to this social, political, ethical and intellectual struggle of forming Jerusalem in our society:
“Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.”
JERUSALEM A PROPHECY
At the end of Jerusalem: A Prophesy [1820] the oppression caused the Church and State and human sin is cast away. Redeemed humanity achieves its divine potential, living in love, peace & unity, with no more gender division or oppression by the law. Eternal Man is consummated by receiving the Divine Image:
CHRIST
Blake didn’t just see Jesus as a divine Saviour but the example for us to follow,
the universal eternal Mind, or Spirit, which he called ‘The Imagination’. His
theology of Jesus is unorthodox in Christian doctrinal terms, but his idea of him
being the ‘Imagination’ of what we could be is spiritually inspiring. He wrote in Jerusalem:
“All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the
Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, TheHuman Imagination”.
Like a vine Christ, the Divine Body branches throughout all Creation:
“all Animals and Vegetations, the Earth and Heaven… contain’d in the All
Glorious Imagination.”
Though God’s truth could be seen in all created things, to Blake he is most
clearly visible in and through Jesus & should be able to be recognised through
“Human nature in the image of God”.
For Blake the traditional belief that human beings were the centre of the universe could only be true when God is present in us to bring us spiritually alive as
“Eternal Man”. Our Creator is able to do this through Christ and the Spirit
forming us to achieve our full potential
NEBUCHADNEZZAR
Blake talked of those who reduced or disclaimed their spiritual nature by
rationalism as “Cavern’d Man...a Worm seventy
inches long” like Nebuchadnezzar in this image, who from his
glorious heights of power reduced himself to the level of a beast:
“I am your Rational Power, O Albion, and that Human Form
You call Divine is but a Worm seventy inches long
That creeps forth in a night and is dried in the morning sun,
In fortuitous concourse of memorys accumulated and lost.”
PLATE FROM JERUSALEM,
Blake aimed to do what he could to raise people to Eternity:
“To open the immortal Eyes/Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity”.
GLAD DAY
This figure of ‘Glad Day’ represents the Eternal Man, brought to fulfilment by
Christ. Blake dedicated himself to inspiring people’s imaginations to what they
could be. He wrote in Jerusalem:
“… I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”