BIOGRAPHY

It was also the case that Octavia shamefully neglected her own children, causing deep family rifts. Her son blamed her for allowing the religion to break up their home, and her daughter, who also suffered from mental illness, was unable to escape, living miserably with the Society.

There are many similarities between the Panaceas and Theosophy, which also appealed to educated middleclass women dissatisfied by the Church, claimed direct communication with God, and confidently expected to see the second coming. Unlike the Theosophists, however, Octavia’s inward-looking cult never really took off. After Octavia’s death in 1934, the Society began a gentle decline. It had nowhere to go once it had lost its charismatic leader.

The Panaceas never threw anything away – it was all kept for the second coming – and Shaw discovered a vast, chaotic archive of exercise books and parcels wrapped in brown paper. This has enabled her to chart their history in meticulous, sometimes excessive, detail. The Panaceas have been extraordinar ily fortunate in their biographer. Jane Shaw is an insightful, shrewd and humorous writer. She is never sarcastic or judgemental, and I ended the book admiring the indomitable Octavia who, for all her dottiness, was no charlatan but a genuinely religious figure. To order this book for £15.19, see LR bookshop on page 16

PAUL JOHNSON

‘O! THIS GRINDING WORLD’

MYSTERIOUS WISDOM: THE LIFE AND

WORK OF SAMUEL PALMER

★

By Rachel Campbell-Johnston

(Bloomsbury 382pp £25)

She tells in detail the story of his long and often sad personal life, skilfully interweaving it with the many changes in his professional interests and outlook, and in the process illuminating hitherto obscure aspects of his career. This is a valuable study, which sent me back to Palmer’s work with renewed zest and insights, and I salute her industry and perception. My only complaint is that there are far too few illustrations, and it would have been better if her admirable text had gone to a leading art publisher such as Phaidon or Yale.

As a young man, Palmer lived in Shoreham in the Darent Valley in Kent. There he became convenor of a group of Romantic artists, including George Richmond and Edward Calver t , who ca l l ed t hemselves ‘ t he Ancients’ and produced poetic interpretations of the ravishing countryside they found there. Palmer’s contri-

SAMUEL PALMER (1805–81) is the quintessential English Romantic painter, even more so than William Blake. Like Blake he loved poetry, especially Milton. But whereas Blake worked out his images in sinuous, weaving figures, Palmer expressed his feelings in weird, loaded and luminous landscapes. Many English art lovers pref e r h im t o Tur ner and Constable. But while those two have provoked countless volumes and a lbums (my bookshelves contain over s i x t y books on Tur ner), comparatively little has been written about Palmer. His son d i d h i s best with a memoir and an (unreliable) Life and Letters. But the first cr i t ical biog raphy had to wait until 1947, when the combative Geoffrey Grigson published Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years, an influential book but essentially one that dealt with his early work. A quarter century later, in 1974, Raymond Lister produced a more balanced biography, and an edition of Palmer’s excellent letters. A book appreciating every aspect of Palmer’s work was badly needed, however, and Rachel Campbell-Johnston, art critic of The Times, has now supplied it.

but i on was e a s i l y t he weightiest and most sophisticated and, to many, has an almost mesmerising appeal – comparable only to the images of his German contemporary, Caspar David Friedrich. But it is highly mannered and Pa lmer moved on, for a variety of reasons but chiefly because he had exhausted this particular seam.

‘Opening the Fold’, etching, 1880

The Shoreham works are the basis of Palmer’s fame, dat i ng f rom a rev iva l o f i n t e re s t i n t he i n t e rwar years under the vigorous sponsorship of the young Kenneth Clark. Palmer’s impact on practising painters was enormous, beginning with Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Piper, followed by a second wave of Ivon Hitchens, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, John Craxton and Michael Ayrton, and culminating in the work of the tragic Eric Ravilious, the greatest of modern English watercolourists. None of

LITERARY REVIEW June 2011

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them was interested in Palmer’s work outside his Shoreham years.

Yet when Palmer abandoned mannered Romanticism, he still had fifty years of professional life and a living to earn. He went to Italy for two years, and on his return began to display hugely improved professional skills in painting large naturalistic landscapes of the type which the Victorians loved, and which afterwards fell completely out of favour, until a few years ago. He also became an etcher and produced some superb examples. I remember my father, who collected etchings, saying: ‘This man is better than Whistler and even James McBey.’

Campbell-Johnston deals very thoroughly and sensitively with these aspects of his work. Personally I prefer the big exhibition landscapes with their often sinister glows and brazen colours, and their haunting depths, to his Shoreham output, and I think she too has feelings in this direction. But she is pr imar ily concerned with Palmer’s struggles to earn money and a reputation, and his uneasy relationship with his father-in-law, the painter John Linnell. This man, who had been a pupil of John Varley, was a competent performer and an industrious operator. He had not a spark of Palmer’s genius but he had great skill in earning, saving and investing money, and became a wealthy patriarch in the art world, though his noisy and unorthodox religious views prevented his election to the Royal Academy. By marrying Varley’s daughter, Hannah, Palmer committed himself to a life of toil, for she had social pretensions and required amplitude and comfort in her style of life; her father was always surveying Palmer’s work and sales with a critical eye to ensure his daughter got a square deal. Linnell was important in getting Palmer started, introducing him to William Blake, and at one stage was refer red to by Palmer as an ‘angel from heaven’. Later, however, he was cold, sometimes hostile, sneering at Palmer’s failure to become a rich and successful artist, and contemptuous of his painstaking and conscientious efforts.

There were also personal tragedies in Palmer’s family, especially the death of his beloved son Thomas More, and some felt it might have been better if he had never married and remained a free spirit. The author tells this poignant story well and with sympathy. There is no doubt that Palmer found life hard. ‘O! this gr inding world, there is no leisure for anything,’ he wrote. ‘I could go quietly like a poor sheep under the first hedge and lie down and die.’ To a fellow artist he pictured himself as ‘a crushed worm’. A haunting self-portrait, done when Palmer was young and bought by the shrewd Kenneth Clark for the Ashmolean in 1933 when he was its curator, shows all his apprehension at the prospect of his long and disappointing life to come. Rachel Campbell-Johnston rightly chose it for the cover of her excellent book. To order this book for £20, see LR bookshop on page 16

CHARLES J ESDAILE

Th e G r e a t e s t G e n e r a l o f A l l Ti me ? RADETZKY: IMPERIAL VICTOR AND

MILITARY GENIUS

★

By Alan Sked (I B Tauris 262pp £25)

IS IT POSSIBLE to discover a new military genius? It is with this question that Alan Sked, a well-known specialist on the Habsburg Empire, opens his account of the life and career of Johann Radetzky, the long-serving general who stood at the heart of the military affairs of Austr i a for the whole of the Restoration era and beyond. As few readers will have heard of him, it would probably be as well to begin this review with an account of his life and career.

Born into a family of the Bohemian nobility on 2 November 1766, Radetzky enlisted in the Austr ian army as an officer cadet in 1785 and first saw action as a cavalry officer in the Austro-Turkish War of 1788–91. There soon followed the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1801, a conflict in which Radetzky experienced much fighting in northern Italy, participating in the siege of Mantua, the great Austro-Russian counteroffensive that temporarily drove out the French in 1799 and, finally, the Battle of Marengo. Promoted to the rank of major-general in 1805, he again fought in Italy in the War of the Third Coalition, and in 1809 served as a divisional commander in IV Corps at the Battle of Wagram, taking part in the fierce fighting that raged around the village of Markgrafneuseidl. By now he was an experienced veteran with a reputation for considerable organisational ability, careful staff work, and much courage and daring – between 1788 and 1809 he had been wounded seven times and had nine horses killed under him. Following the armistice of Znaim he was made chief of the Austrian general staff, and, as such, played an important role in the campaigns that overthrew Napoleon in 1813–14.

After the war came a series of garrison and administrative roles, and in 1831 he was appointed to the most prestigious command that the Austrian service could at this time offer, namely the command of the large army that at this point garrisoned Habsburg-ruled Lombardy and Venetia. It was a fateful moment: still in post in Milan when Europe was gr ipped by revolt in 1848, Radetzky found himself facing not just bands of enthusiastic, barricade-building civilians, but also the troops of

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LITERARY REVIEW June 2011