The Art of "The Ancients"

The Art of "The Ancients"Author(s): Morton D. PaleySource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 97-124Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817553 .

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The Art of "The Ancients" by Morton D. Paley

In the mid-1820s a group of young men gathered around the aged William Blake. They called themselves "The Ancients" and took as their motto "Poetry and Sentiment."' Meeting sometimes in London and sometimes in the village of Shoreham, Kent, they kept their artistic identity as a group for a little over a decade, although personal friendships among them continued long afterward. Three of their number-Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, and George Richmond-established indepen- dent artistic reputations, while the works of others such as Francis Oliver Finch and Frederick Tatham are little known, and two (Samuel Palmer's brother William and the stockbroker John Giles) were not artists at all. Art-historical scholarship has designated the group as "Followers of William Blake," beginning with Laurence Binyon's book of that name and continuing through other studies and exhibition catalogues.2 Actually, as Binyon himself cautioned, these artists were far from mere imitators, but the label has tended to stick and to obscure their individual qualities. My purpose here is to define those qualities in Calvert, Palmer, and Rich- mond, and also to re-examine their artistic relationship to Blake-a relationship that was also, of course, a personal one.

The Ancients' devotion to Blake has often been described. He was com- pared by them to a biblical patriarch and to the prophet Isaiah; his two rooms in#Fountain Court, Strand, were Bunyan's "House of the Inter- preter." The view of Blake that they publicly advanced is epitomized in the famous statement given to Alexander Gilchrist by Samuel Palmer: "He was a man without a mask; his aims simple, his path straightfor- wards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. "3 Similarly, Francis Oliver Finch saw Blake as "a new kind of man, wholly original, and in all things."4 Edward Calvert's son Samuel crystallized the Ancients' at-

97



98 THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

titude in a memorable image: "Blake to their imagination, was as an altarpiece, set in the sanctuary of the Fountain Court window."5

Inhabitants of a more analytical age, we cannot help examining the An- cients' need to present such a Blake, and the further we do so the more we find the inescapable and perhaps even necessary counterpart of such idealizations: fear of and hostility toward certain aspects of what Blake represented. Take, for instance, Blake's supposed irritability. Palmer later wrote of "some strange passages in his Descriptive Catalogue, written in irritation, and probably in haste....."6 Again, urging Anne Gilchrist to censor what he considered blasphemies and indecencies in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Palmer remarked "Blake at some times wrote under irritation."7 There seems an echo here of the genus irritabile vatum, as if by a double entendre Palmer could excuse the vatic aspect of Blake while in effect erasing it. Francis Oliver Finch, in response to the question of whether Blake was mad or not, could only say "He was not mad, but per- verse and wilful; he reasoned correctly, from arbitrary, and often false premises."8 "While adoring the simple side of Blake's nature," Samuel Calvert tells us, "and always loving the genuineness of the natural man, Edward Calvert had comparatively less sympathy we may say with the ungovernable mysticisms of Blake's imagination-the Gothic phantasms of a SPIRITUAL cosmos."9

Far from being oblivious to the ambivalence of his young friends, Blake appears have accommodated himself to it, as he also did toward other puzzled but sympathetic listeners in his late years. Far from being a man without a mask, he took on for the Ancients the benign, patriarchal per- sona of the Interpreter, who, like his namesake in Bunyan had "mar- vellous things" to show these young pilgrims on their journey into art.

Why "Ancients"? It has been suggested that the name came from Sam- uel Palmer's cousin John Giles, who constantly used to assert the supe- riority of the ancients in all things.10 Be that as it may, "Ancient" was a key word in Blake's own vocabulary, and we must assume that among his admirers he used it characteristically. "And did those feet in antient time/ Walk upon Englands mountains green" appears on the first page of text in Milton1" (95); on the title page of The Four Zoas Albion is called "the Ancient Man" (300), and on its last page "Urthona rises from the ru- inous walls/ In all his antient strength . . ." (139). Perhaps the most important instance is The Descriptive Catalogue, in which the word occurs thirteen times, including the subtitle-"Being the Ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored." These are among many instances in which Blake uses "ancient" to suggest a primal state of harmony and power, one that can be recovered through the agency of art.

Furthermore, during the period that the Ancients knew Blake an "ancient" project in which he had part was ongoing: George Cumber-



THE ART OF ''THE ANCIENTS'' 99

land's Outlines from the Ancients (figure 18). This sequel to the Cumberland-Blake Thoughts on Outline of 1796 had been planned for a very long time, but in 1824 negotiations were being carried on with the publisher Septimus Prowett;12 and on 17 June Cumberland informed his son George Jr., who acted as his agent, that four of the plates that Blake had executed for the earlier book had been sent to him to be repaired for wear.13 "He understands me," Cumberland added, "and how to keep a free hand and equal outline which is always best." This suggests that in their early meetings with Blake the young artists may well have seen the four plates at Fountain Court. These are far superior to the others in the published book and appear to have influenced Edward Calvert's Bac- chante (figure 19) as well as the version Welby Sherman executed under Calvert's tutelage. They also no doubt heard about the ideas concerning the ancients that Cumberland and Blake shared, as expressed at the end of Cumberland's introduction:

All that he insists on is, that without we follow the principles of the Ancients in composition (not confining ourselves merely to their exact manner of execution, or precise character of heads) we can never attain to harmony or just expression; for this branch of their art, we may easily see, they became only complete masters after ages of contemplation and research; and the gradual steps by which they ascended to it are before our eyes in the examples of the early schools of Egypt and Greece, both in gems, bas-relievos, and statues. Neither could they have ever advanced to the summit they ob- tained in executing groups of magnitude scientifically but by making those previously severe studies in balancing and adjusting single figures. How long they were in attaining the power of ex- pressing the passions is also evident, from an attentive examination of ancient coins and gems; let us therefore be allowed to feel all the importance of these necessary studies, and by adding to them all the advantages to be procured from a strict examination of nature, we may hope, if not to surpass, at least to be able to move on the same plane with these learned ancients, with honour to ourselves and im- mortal reputation to our country.14

The Ancients' name thus suggests a program of recuperation or re- newal of an artistic golden age somewhere in the past. This is a motive shared by other nineteenth-century movements that found centers of value in earlier periods of art, including the French Primitifs of the beginning of the century, the Nazarenes who were then working in Rome, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is not, of course, a matter of influence: the Ancients were certainly unaware of the first group and possibly of the




second as well, while the third formed a generation later. All four movements may be seen as manifesting a desire to purify art by returning to more ancient springs, however differently "ancient" may be defined for each. For the artists considered here, its meaning was derived from Blake and Cumberland. As Blake expressed it in the Descriptive Catalogue, "Painting and Sculpture as it exists in the remains of Antiquity and in the works of more modern genius, is Inspiration, and cannot be surpassed" (544).

In taking Blake as an artistic cynosure, the Ancients were, however, faced with two dilemmas. Blake's idea of the "wonderful originals"15 of subsequent masterpieces is consistently human-centered, and his art is an heroic art focused upon the human form. Although the Ancients-and particularly Richmond -would attempt at times to realize such an ideal, it was not really theirs and their particular strengths lay elsewhere. Sec- ond, Blake's art was related to a mythical structure that his major works rendered in symbolic form. To say this is not to reduce Jerusalem or Job to mere iconographical programs, but it is important that Blake considered his art "Allegory Address'd to the Intellectual Powers" and that there was a degree of consistency in the symbolism of his Giant Forms. This too was alien to the Ancients' sensibilities. In "following" Blake, then, they had to be carefully selective. At the time they met him he had completed the etching of Jerusalem, the unique colored copy of which was still in his possession; and during the brief years of their association he published the Job engravings and embarked on the Dante series. Yet for the Ancients (once more with the partial exception of Richmond), the po- tent Blakean influences were not these but the minor wood engravings on pastoral subjects that are usually called designs for Thornton's Virgil. (They are actually rather close illustrations of a poem by Ambrose Phill- ips, but it seems too late to change the nomenclature here). Even here their interpretation was highly selective. Something like the Picturesque Traveller who used a "Claude glass" and found the English landscape very like the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Calvert and Palmer re- visualized Blake's designs in order to find what they needed in them. A brief examination of these "Virgil" wood-engravings will show how the Ancients creatively misconstrued them in the service of their own art.

Blake's designs were executed and engraved for a school book edited by Dr. Robert John Thornton.16 Dr. Thornton did not believe that trans- lations were helpful for students, so he gave them, in addition to the an- notated Latin text, pictures and poetic imitations. The imitations were also illustrated, and Blake rendered seventeen scenes for Ambrose Phill- ips' fine poem loosely based on Virgil's First Eclogue. Samuel Palmer el- oquently characterized Blake's wood engravings in a passage that has become so familiar that its emphasis is seldom questioned:




They are visions of little dells and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. . . . There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the in- most soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist's works the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, and of that rest which remains to the people of God.17

Actually, the Virgil series presents a vision of life that is on the whole pes- simistic and far from paradisal, as a brief but close examination will bring out. Here Phillips' text is also important, as Blake followed it very closely,18 whether by his own inclination or Dr. Thornton's.

The first design (figure 20) is a headpiece larger than the others, showing Colinet "in woful plight," looking melancholy in contrast to the dawn in the background- "unseemly, now the sky so bright appears." He complains to an older shepherd Strephon, who will give him temporary relief by inviting him in to supper at the end. Both figures may be seen as aspects of Blake himself: Colinet, who suffers in the course of his wandering through life, and Strephon, who in age has found peace.19 In the following illustrations, comprising four sets of four designs each, Colinet's vi- cissitudes are the subject until the last picture of the third set. The generally melancholic cast of the series is reinforced by the prevailing blackness in these wood engravings, which are largely printed in white line and which therefore require large dark areas in order to make the sun or the moon shine.20

The first sheet of four small designs (figure 21) begins with Colinet, still looking dismal, telling how he wakes at midnight and mourns. The next design on the sheet (3) illustrates Thenot's trope for aging-"As trees beneath their fruit in Autumn bends." Next (4) the suitably depicted Light- foot appears, to guard Thenot's flock so the older shepherd can listen further to the lament of Colinet. In 5 the latter's "piteous plight" is depicted in another tree-image -"the riven trunk feels not the approach of spring; / nor birds amid the leafless branches sing.. . ." So far, what is depicted is not so much a dell of paradise as a vale of tears or at least of soul- making, and this is true of the next sheet of four designs (figure 22) as well. When Thenot speculates about the "hapless hour" of Colinet's birth, "when blighting mildews spoil the rising corn," Blake represents the wheat bent over as in plate 9 of America, where Albion's Angel wishes his Demons could "smite the wheat" and "quench the fatness of the earth" (54). In 7, to illustrate the sententia that "against ill luck, alas! all forecast fails," Blake shows the shepherd vainly gesturing at the beast that has killed his sheep. Design 8 shows the river ("Sabrina fair") and




sod-covered hut that Colinet regrets having left in an "unhappy hour." This is followed by the most famous design in the series, Blake's image of the Traveller, a variant of one he had used as early as 1793 for "The Traveller hasteth in the Evening" in The Gates of Paradise. The text is "With wand'ring feet unblest, and fond of fame,/ I sought I know not what be- sides a name." But even without these lines the image's deep pessimism should be recognized. The Traveller is walking away from the luminous, New Jerusalem-like town with its spire in the distance (which may also, as Robert Essick thinks, suggest Chichester and its cathedral); his back is to the cruciform roadsign. The tombstone-shaped marker is inscribed LXII Miles/ London, and Blake was sixty-two when he received the Virgil commission from Dr. Thornton. In all, this design seems a poignant rendering of Colinet-Blake on his deathward journey. Blake may also have been thinking here of the verses he had inscribed for the Traveller figure in the expanded Gates of Paradise of c. 1818: "Thro evening shades I haste away/ To close the Labours of my Day" (269).

In 10, 11, and 12 (figure 23) the pessimism of the series continues. In the first of these, the roller being employed on the grounds of the estate is, metaphorically, Colinet-the "rolling stone," who in Thenot's words "is ever bare of moss." Number 11 shows Colinet uncomfortably bedded down; "the damp cold green sward for my nightly bed, /and some slant willow's trunk to rest my head." Although the Gothic spires of Cam- bridge gleam in the distance - one of the many beautiful white line effects of light shining through darkness in this series -they are distant from the shepherd, who complains of cold, want, and calumny. There is contras- tive merriment in the next picture, but it isn't Colinet's. "Untoward lads, the wanton imps of spite/ make mock of all the ditties I indite." Colinet is the butt of the two dancing youths, and once more we may glimpse an autobiographical element for Blake, who had so often felt mocked by his contemporaries. Only in the last image on this sheet, the thirteenth of the entire series, is there relief, as Manalcas, the lord who reigns over shepherds, is celebrated in music and dance. The last sheet (figure 24) continues this sudden vein of optimism with Thenot inviting Colinet into his cottage, the shepherds at supper, and two memorable images of men and oxen returning from the fields at sunset. Thus the series does end happily, or at least elegiacally, but, as we have seen, most of it is very dark in tone. The Ancients, especially Palmer21 and Calvert, either misunder- stood or chose to ignore this aspect of Blake's work even as they drew upon the Virgil designs for their own pastoral art.

Of course Blake was not the only formative influence on the Ancients. Among the artists of the past, Durer, Van Leyden, Van Eyck, Elsheimer,




and Claude were of special importance; among living artists, there were also Henry Fuseli and John Linnell. It is often impossible to distinguish these various strands. The Ancients encountered Fuseli, for example, at about the same time as they did Blake or perhaps even earlier, but there are of course many direct similarities between Fuseli's art and Blake's in its grander aspects. Furthermore, the influence of the past artists was often mediated through the living ones, as Palmer's sensitive recollection of "Blake's Claudes"22-that is, Claudes re-created by Blake in conversation-attests. In this respect, John Linnell was, despite differences of sensibility and of artistic goals, of particular importance.

Linnell was of course not an Ancient. His artistic aims were consistently more naturalistic than theirs or Blake's. Binyon for example calls attention to the irregular disposition of the sheep and the natural shadows in Lin- nell's Sheep At Noon (figure 25) in contrast to the almost iconic represen- tation of sheep by Blake23 (figure 26); and Robert Essick has demonstrated that as far as engraving techniques are concerned, it was Blake who learned from Linnell rather than vice versa.24 Differences of age and temperament-Linnell was born seven years before the eldest Ancient (Calvert) and was inclined to be dogmatic-also made a considerable difference. As Samuel Calvert put it, "He had his resources within himself, and was confessedly out of touch with the peculiar sentiment which was the bond of union with the 'ancients.' tt25 That Linnell felt excluded and resented it is evident in a letter written to Palmer much later: "I ought to remember that I was not one of the monthly-meeting elite-when at the platonic feast of reason and of soul only real Greeks from Hackney and Lissom Grove were admitted."26 Linnell was nevertheless important to the Ancients both in his own right and as an opener of doors to the earliest art of Northern Europe. The impossibility-and indeed undesirability- of separating such varied influences is illustrated by an early memoran- dum Palmer made to himself: "Let me remember always, and may I not slumber in the possession of it, Mr. Linnell's injunction (delightful in the performance) 'Look at Albert Diirer.' ,,27

One of the signal services that Linnell rendered both to Blake and, un- doubtedly, to the younger artists was to introduce them to the Northern European paintings in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Karl Aders (see Ap- pendix below, "The Aders Collection"). For the Ancients, seeing the Ad- ers' paintings must have been much like Blake's experience of the Truchsessian Gallery a generation before,28 both a revelatory and a con- firmatory experience. Of particular importance was the Aders' copy of the Van Eyck Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,29 after which Linnell was engraving in 1825-1826. Here the clarity of the forms, the celebration of nature in all its rich detail, and the harmonious inter-




relationship of the human, natural, and spiritual worlds represented, must all have been of importance to the young artists. Blake had his place here as a practitioner of "ancient" artistic values, one whose example the Ancients were eager, very selectively, to follow.

The first of the three principal Ancients to meet Blake was Samuel Palmer. Although he became known chiefly as a painter of poetic landscape, Palmer was at first drawn to figure-centered designs on Biblical subjects. This inclination must have been reinforced by his seeing, among other things, the first copper plate of Job on his first visit to Fountain Court,30 but the influence of Fuseli may at first have been as strong as Blake's. Pages 58-71 of Palmer's surviving sketchbook (c. 1824) in the British Museum are largely devoted to an ambitious Crucifixion subject, and it is interesting that a quotation from Fuseli's Royal Academy Lecture on Composition and Expression follows on page 72.31 Palmer's sketches for subjects from the Book of Ruth on pages 133-136 (figure 27) also recall in their distortions of the human figure both Fuseli and Blake. Palmer evidently considered executing five subjects from Ruth, which he listed on page 136, and he carried at least two of these further; for, although untraced, they are acidulously described by A. H. Palmer. One, showing "two inordinately brawny females," is probably The parting of Naomi and Orpah; the other, in which "a woman points towards a symbolic city which is half concealed by the flaming rays of a portentous sun" may be Naomi in Bethlehem.32 In the younger Palmer's view, "The wildest concep- tions of Blake and Fuseli combined with the most extravagant symbolism of early art could not be more wild and extraordinary than this."33 On the basis of the sketchbook, at least, the joint influence if not the crucial judgment can be conceded.

Blake had much earlier executed Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Re- turn to the Land of Moab (figure 6, Victoria and Albert Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum), but in their expressive physical distortions Palmer's sketchbook drawings seem to have more in common with those found, for example, in Jerusalem 47. Such elements did not, however, long remain characteristic of Palmer's art. By the time we get to his only known finished Ruth picture, the chalk and wash drawing Ruth Returned from the Gleaning (Victoria and Albert Museum) of c. 1826-27, there is less distor- tion. A certain disorienting quality persists, however, in this heroic female figure seen from behind, armed with a javelin-like flail. Perhaps the ambiguity here has something to do with Palmer's transition from a figure-centered, heroic art to the pastoral-landscape mode of his most memorable productions.

As is well known, during the late 1820s and early 1820s Palmer created a brilliant group of paintings and drawings in and around Shoreham in



THE ART OF "THE ANCIENTS'' 105

Kent, "that genuine village," as he later put it, "where I mused away some of my best years,"34 and where he was joined at times by the other Ancients and at least once by William Blake. To discuss influences in such pictures would be a fatuous undertaking if it were not directed in the end to showing what is most original about them.

A Rustic Scene (figure 28, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) is typical of the remarkable sepia, pen, and wash drawings that Palmer executed at Shoreham. Heavy black ink outlines and different kinds of hatching give this picture something of the feeling of a wood engraving,35 and the moon of Beulah and heifer or bullock recall, respectively, the sixth and final two designs of Blake's Virgil. Palmer seems also to have followed Blake in es- tablishing the effect of shadow without chiaroscuro. "Remember that most excellent remark of Mr. B's," he had written in his Sketchbook, "- how that a tint equivalent to a shadow is made by the outline of many little forms in one mass, and then how the light shines on an unbroken mass near it, such as flesh &c[.]-_"J36 Tipped in by way of illustration is a profile of a man between a church tower with bricks delineated and an artichoke-like tree with minutely drawn leaves. In A Rustic Scene this same principle applies to the hide of the bullock or heifer and the upper area of the man's arm. (On page 114 of the Sketchbook Palnmer refers to "the prints of the Georgics" -which Martin Butlin persuasively suggests is a slip for Blake's Virgil engravings37-as a precedent for such effects.)

All of this is not to detract from what is so obviously true: in pictures such as these Palmer creates a pastoral vision that is uniquely his own in its intensely rendered perception of the natural world and humanity in harmony. This is all the more true of his works in color. It is not of course that Palmer painted as if Blake had never existed. He continued to lay his grounds, according to his son, with a white pigment for which Blake had given him the recipe.38 Visual motifs reappear, as in The Magic Apple Tree (figure 29, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), where trees form a natural cursive arch as in the frontispiece to Songs of Innocence. Nevertheless, the influence of Blake has been entirely assimilated here in the service of a poetic revisualization of nature that is entirely Palmer's own. "So fervent an empathy with the forces of organic growth," Robert Rosenblum re- marks of another Shoreham picture, "would not be found again until the work of Van Gogh."39

In A Shoreham Garden (Victoria and Albert Museum), Palmer creates a sense of mystery by placing a woman in a long red gown at the end of a vista, her formal dress contrasting with overgrown domestic flora. The roof visible to the left is shingled, suggesting a simple house or overgrown hut. As generally in Palmer's Shoreham pictures, and in contrast to Blake's typical mode of procedure, there is no suggestion here of an iconographical program. The mystery is not to be resolved but to be ex-




perienced. Landscapes are presented as archaic unities, dwellings and churches seeming to come out of the ground like organic growths, fields and hills suggesting the contours of the human body. Since we know that this visionary gleam fled after a few precious years, it is tempting to see premonitions of this in pictures of c. 1833 such as Harvest Moon (figure 30, Yale Center for British Art) and The Gleaning Field (Tate Gallery). Do these possess an "elegiac" quality? The huge trees in the background of The Gleaning Field could be seen as either menacing or protective, and the wheatfield itself, into which most of the reapers blend because of their light colors, suggests a similar ambiguity. Yet this is after all a night scene, and the harvest moon is by definition autumnal. Again, in The Gleaning Field the sheaves with the fallen tree trunk to the left form a barrier between us and the human figures, the sky is clouded, and there is a sense of emptiness at the center. Would we be tempted to see this scene as a farewell to the Shoreham vision if we did not know what followed? What- ever the answer to this question, "the magic," as Raymond Lister puts it, "had begun to depart."40

Two or three years later, Palmer painted The Waterfalls, Pistil Mawddach, North Wales (Tate Gallery). Certainly a competent painting, it is also a very conventional one, almost a throwback to the aesthetics of Uvedale Price with the picturesque effect of the gloom at the left contrasting with the white froth of the waterfall. The red cap of the figure in white is striking, considering the muted palette of the picture as a whole, but it is also a very deliberate effect, and we are conscious of the artist's skill as we never are earlier. The Shoreham period is over. Although it is always hazardous to speculate about the reasons for an artist's decline, it can hardly be co- incidence that this transition coincides with events in the Kentish coun- tryside and in the nation as a whole to which Palmer reacted with such fearful anxiety.

The life of the Ancients in Shoreham was made possible by Palmer's having acquired property-possibly four different sites-there, as a re- sult of his having inherited about three thousand pounds after death of his grandfather in 1825.41 Palmer's daily life was frugal because he regarded his capital as a God-given sum, the income from which was meant to support his artistic life. Much as he idealized the rural workers around him, he and his friends seem to have had little contact with them. The Ancients idealized rural work but knew little about it and did not care to learn: as A. H. Palmer pointed out in a letter, judging from their pictures, "None of the Ancients seemed to know how reaping was done; or its deft manipulation."42 Palmer's understanding of the living conditions of the laborers he depicted must have been at least as limited. In 1830, when in




their desperation for a living wage, workers burned ricks, broke thresh- ing machines, and sent (or passively endorsed) "Swing" letters, Palmer's reaction was fear and outrage. Two years later, he gave vent to these feel- ings in An Address to the Electors of West Kent (London, 1832), a document that gives considerable insight into Palmer's state of mind at the close of his Shoreham period.

An Address to the Electors of West Kent43 was written and published in the time between the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 and the elections in that year for the first reformed parliament. In what can only be described as a melodramatic diatribe, Palmer excoriates the French, who had dethroned the Bourbons in 1830, as "Jacobinical hyenas" (62), and quotes Wordsworth: "Ye men of Kent, 'tis Victory or Death!" However, Wordsworth's poem "To the Men of Kent" was written in October 1803, when there were genuine fears that Napoleon's "Army of England" was about to land on the coast; Palmer's attempt to appropriate Wordsworth's use of the tradition that Kent remained unconquered by the Normans and that its charter was instead confirmed by them44 makes, to say the least, an unconvincing argument for supporting the pauperization of workers on the land.

As for English Radicals, they are denounced as responsible for the agricultural disturbances of 1830:

They were the wretched leaders of this wretched faction, who, during the late dreadful fires, strenuously encouraged the incendiaries: Some of the most abandoned of them published cheap tracts for dis- tribution among the poor, stimulating them to fire their master's property. (67)

As E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude show in Captain Swing, there was some overlap of interests between laborers and Radicals, but the former were uninterested in the Radicals' program of abolishing sinecures and placemen, while the Radicals generally did not support machine- breaking or incendiarism. "This was," the authors conclude, "essentially a labourer's movement with essentially labourer's ends."45 This is precisely what Palmer could not accept, and a culling from Captain Swing of material about Palmer's corner of Kent46 will suggest how terrifying the events of 1830 must have seemed to him.

First of all, the Swing movement started in Kent, and so Palmer was so to speak on the front line. The first outbreaks occurred in the Orpington-Sevenoaks area of which Shoreham, situated about five miles from each, was a part. Four Swing letters were received near Sevenoaks in August, later that month there was incendiarism there, and farmers'




machines were broken early in September. On 1-2 September there was incendiarism in Orpington as well, and two Swing letters (one to a Justice of the Peace) were sent. Rick-burning reached Shoreham in the first week of September. The victim was a Mr. Love, and he is almost certainly the farmer of that name with whom Palmer's father had discussed the price of hops, according to a letter Samuel Palmer wrote to Linnell in 1827.47 Palmer's Valley of Vision had become a Valley of Decision, and he could not allow himself to believe that the agricultural workers, whose figures he depicted in his Shoreham pictures almost as natural outgrowths of the terrain, could themselves have chosen such desperate means. Neverthe- less, it must have been difficult to maintain a pastoral vision under such circumstances. In 1832, the year in which he fired his rhetorical salvo to the electors, Palmer received another bequest and bought a cottage in St. John's Wood in London.

The transition from Shoreham did not occur all at once and neither did Palmer immediately abandon the subject matter he had developed there. What can be said is that his distinctive Shoreham style had disappeared by the mid 1830s, that Palmer made sketching tours in Wales in 1835 and 1836 attempting to find a new vein of subject matter, and that this period of transition was marked by fearfulness and bitterness associated with political change. Henry Crabb Robinson, after meeting Palmer by chance in Wales, wrote in his journal: "He is so much behind in moral subjects as to disapprove of the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts."48 (What would Robinson, himself of a dissenting background, have said had he known that Palmer was advocating a program would have disenfran- chised Palmer's own Baptist father?) At this point Palmer's period as an Ancient is, in any meaningful artistic sense, over, although later in life he would make a brilliant artistic recovery in another direction.

The career of Edward Calvert resembles Palmer's in several interesting respects. He too synthesized stylistic elements derived in part from Blake in creations distinctively his own, and he too created a group of dazzling productions during his period as an Ancient. Unlike Palmer, however, he was primarily a printmaker at this time, although he later would turn to painting with disappointing results. Before Calvert ever met Blake (but not necessarily before he had seen any of Blake's work),49 Calvert had drawn the gemlike Primitive City (figure I, British Museum), signed and dated 1822. The word gemlike is not merely laudatory, for here and in his graphic works of the next nine years, Calvert seems to have had in mind the sort of casts of antique gems that, according to Richmond's recollection, he studied and collected.50 Such attention to gems was another characteristic of the Ancients. According to Blake, antique gems were of




as much artistic value as much larger works, and as we have seen, Cum- berland links "antique gems, bas-reliefs, and statues. "51 Palmer likewise connects the grandest and most minute art in recalling that when Blake "approached Michael Angelo, the Last Supper of Da Vinci, the Torso Bel- videre, and some of the inventions preserved in the Antique Gems, all his powers were concentrated in admiration."52 Although Calvert is said to have come to London in 1824 with "massive and sculptured drawings" that received Fuseli's encouragement,53 he appears quickly to have real- ized that his particular genius lay in seeing the world in a grain of sand, and he must have found support for this in the high value placed upon gems among his friends.

The Primitive City exhibits an almost miraculous delicacy of outline and colors which Binyon compares to the style of medieval illuminations, "rich in detail, with pure tones of variegated colour."54 This makes an interesting contrast with the style of Blake's illuminated printing, which never strives for the magical illusoriness of Calvert's designs. (Compare, for example, the otherwise similar renderings of shepherd and flock at the left in The Primitive City and in "The Shepherd" (figure 31) of Blake's Songs of Innocence.) In content The Primitive City portrays ancient humanity, as Blake puts it, "happy & Rich"55 with the central figure suggesting both a Venus of the Bath and a prelapsarian Eve. Are there intimations of a Fall about to occur? A beautiful naked woman next to a tree laden with fruit has some inescapable associations for us, and the sinuous forms in this design suggest the otherwise absent serpent.

The prints that Calvert produced during the next nine years or so were, according to Samuel Calvert, known as his father's "Blake-engravings, "56

but they would never be mistaken for actual Blakes. These have qualities distinctively their own, gemlike characteristics similar to those of The Primitive City. In them Calvert gave marvellously sensuous expression to his apprehension of the natural world, while at times at least suggesting an allegorized spiritual dimension. The latter is explicitly part of the picture only in The Ploughman (figure 32), where, according to Samuel Cal- vert, the figure of Christ at the far right is "much after the manner of Blake."57 One would be hard put, however, to think of a Blake design in which Christ appears to be so incidental. There are, to be sure, some "Blakean" details, such as the form-fitting costume that so many of Blake's male figures wear, cut short at the elbows and knees (cf. the looser short trousers worn by the "WILLIAM" (figure 33) and "ROBERT" figures in Milton). The descending angel to the left could be modeled on similar ones in Blake's Night Thoughts engravings (figure 34), while the jagged lightning bolt scotching the serpent may derive from plate 50 of Jerusalem. However, the dramatic emphasis is on the heroic body of the Plowman gripping his plow.




The Plowman is of course an important symbolic conception in some of Blake's works. There is something Herculean about Calvert's, and he may just possibly have thought of Blake's statement in A Descriptive Cat- alogue that "The Plowman of Chaucer is Hercules in his supreme eternal state. . ." (536). Any further extension of Blake's characteristically apoc- alyptic symbolism of plowing is, however, unlikely. To the extent that Calvert's Ploughman is an allegory, it is an allegory of personal redemp- tion, possibly suggested by Luke 9:62, where Jesus says "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."58 Calvert's Ploughman goes resolutely on past the three dancing nymphs in the background, toward the Savior while the symbol of original sin is destroyed by an angel behind him. Yet it seems not for nothing that these spiritual presences are forced out to the extremities of the picture. The eye keeps circling back, led by the right-hand horse's turned head, to the Michelangelesque figure plowing in a lush landscape.

In The Ploughman Calvert tried to combine what his son called his delight in "the idyllic and the pastoral-mythic"59 with the spiritual. The latter element was accentuated by later accretions to the title. Samuel Palmer referred to it in 1868 as The Christian Ploughing the Last Furrow of Life, although there is nothing to indicate that Calvert intended this.60 He did inscribe on the block "Seen in the Kingdom of Heaven by Vision through Jesus Christ Our Saviour," but this was expunged at some later date. It may be, as Geoffrey Grigson has suggested, that the cutting away of these words are due to Calvert's "wavering back to Pan."'61 In any event, he did not portray supernatural beings in his other graphic works, and whatever other worldly meaning they have is contributed by inscriptions. The Cyder Feast, for example, seems a decidedly this-worldly bacchanale cel- ebrating natural abundance, but in its first and second states it bears the epigraph "By the Gift of God in Christ." These words were later removed from the block, as was "THE WATERS OF THIS BROOK SHALL NEVER FAIL TO THE MARRIED WIFE OF THE LORD GOD" from The Brook. Without its inscription the subject of The Brook too becomes fertility, as embodied in the giant bees, the hives with honey running out of them, and the shapeliness of the women with their urns. In contrast, Blake's The River of Life (Tate Gallery), to which The Brook is in some ways similar, con- veys a sense of representing something other than this world.

As has frequently been pointed out, Calvert's imaginary land has much in common with the dimension of being that Blake called Beulah. As one who walked with Blake, Calvert may well have known the sources of this name in Bunyan and in Isaiah, and its meaning in the latter-"married." Calvert was the one Ancient who at this point actually was married, and this personal element in some of his prints should not be overlooked. The Bride (figure 35), his splendid copper engraving of 1828, is a celebration




of marriage. Here again there is an attempt to allegorize a sensuous subject, its physical allure embodied in the curvilinear forms of the stream and of the Bride (another Venus of the Bath) herself. Traditional notions of the soul as the Bride and Christ and of the sinner as a stray lamb are brought together in Calvert's inscription: "O GOD! THY BRIDE SEEKETH THEE. A STRAY LAMB IS LED TO THY FOLDS." However, problems arise when we try to relate this iconography to what is going on in the picture.

The male figure jauntily going off to the right under the morning star is carrying a shepherd's crook and so could be, as in The Ploughman, Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In that case, why is he going away from the Bride and the Lamb? Is the Soul leading the stray lamb, or are they both aspects of a single being? (The presence of the Lamb itself may be an echo of the copy of the Van Eyck altarpiece in the Aders Collection.) Also, as in The Primitive City, there are curious suggestions of an incipient Fall, once more suggested by the constellation of female nude, fruitbearing tree, and snaky vines. This scene could almost be an illustration of Paradise Lost, with Adam as a shepherd rather than a gardener.

The iconographical confusion of The Bride suggests something about the relation of Calvert's art to Blake's. "It was the natural mythic," as Samuel Calvert put it, "that gladdened Calvert's soul.... With Blake, on the other hand, if earth was not a hindrance and a mistake, it was but the basis for transcendent vision; it was the domain of sorrow and ret- ribution, demons and angels."62 While biased toward Calvert, the com- parison is nonetheless to the point. For Blake,

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True. This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep.

But to The Sons of Eden the moony habitants of Beulah Are from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant Rest.63

This mild and pleasant rest is the focal point of Calvert's art. In close association with Blake and fellow Ancients, Calvert tried to bring his vision into harmony with theirs by superimposing Christian elements. As this was done largely through secondary means-inscriptions, secondary figures, suggestions of allegory in the imagery-his art nevertheless main- taned its own characteristic, "natural mythic" qualities.

Calvert's "Blake engravings" cannot be mistaken for genuine Blakes either in technique or in content. Technically, they are superior to the Virgil wood engravings that are their model. Binyon goes so far as to say "Blake




had spent his whole life engraving, but nowhere attains Calvert's felicity in the craft."64 How Calvert attained such felicity in such a short time is a mystery, but his judgment of the Virgil shows that he too thought of himself as il miglior fabre: "They are done as if by a child; several of them careless and incorrect, yet there is a force in them, humble enough and of force enough to move simple souls to tears."65 With that force, however, Edward Calvert's art had little to do. In content even the happier images of the Virgil series have none of the sensuousness of Calvert's art. One would be hard put to find anywhere in Blake's oeuvre a celebration of sexual desire like The Chamber Idyll. The fact that for this, his last known wood engraving, Calvert did not find a religious inscription necessary -

one can imagine a suitable one from the Song of Songs-suggests that by 1831 he no longer felt it necessary to square his art with his friends' con- victions.

It is not possible to say precisely when the tenor of Calvert's work changed. After the Shoreham period, the Ancients continued to hold monthly meetings at Palmer's house in St. John's Wood, and to these Cal- vert brought drawings that Richmond thought "had a savour of antique pastoral that I have never seen surpassed."66 It was probably after the An- cients as an artistic movement came to an end with the departures of Rich- mond and Palmer for Italy in 1837 that Calvert assumed the rather insipid, pseudo-Arcadian style of his later works. One of these pictures is nevertheless of interest to us here, as it evidently represents Calvert's last pictorial comment on Blake. It is an adaptation of Blake's Virgil design of the Traveller to which Binyon gave the title A Young Shepherd on a Journey (figure 36). The colors are drab-mostly olive green and brown, which Samuel Calvert takes to be indicative of his father's late style.67 One hardly knows what to make of it. Is it a valetudinary gesture toward Blake's memory? Or perhaps a correction, showing how this image should have been rendered? Whatever its motive, the curiously lumpish quality of this design combined with its relatively larger scale (5.6 x 2.2 inches) contrasts sadly with Blake's original. Whatever Calvert intended it to be, this picture is a memorial of sorts to his own earlier work.

George Richmond was the youngest of the Ancients, sixteen when he met Blake in 1824. He entered the Royal Academy schools that same year and so, like Palmer and Calvert, he was exposed to Fuseli's influence at an early point in his career -so much so that he had to write a memoran- dum to himself: "Don't make bad imitations of the faults of Fuselli"(sic).68 Richmond was the one Ancient who attempted-for a short time-to follow Blake by rendering in his art an heroic, human-figure-centered my-




thology. At least in intention he was the most "Blakean" of the Ancients, although his art was to change its course dramatically just a few years later. Although primarily a painter, he also imitated Blake's example- again for a short time-in practicing engraving as well.

Richmond is known to have produced only three engravings, of which two are dated 1827. The first of these is The Shepherd, which inevitably re- calls "The Shepherd" of Songs of Innocence in its basic design and iconography. In graphic technique, it reflects the study of Durer, the very late engravings of Blake, and perhaps (as Lister suggests)69 Linnell's engravings of the Ghent Altarpiece. The distortions of the human figure here, however, suggest that Richmond had not yet mastered the craft. He appears to have given up on the plate after the second state, which is not quite finished.

Richmond's next attempt, in which the influence of Northern engraving is again evident, shows considerable fluency in the medium. In size close to the prints of Calvert, The Fatal Bell-man (figure 37) measures 2.5 x 1.75 inches in its design area. The print bears at its top the inscription "It was the owl that shriek'd the fatal bell-man-MACBETH." The connection is evidently atmospheric rather than illustrative, for in Shakespeare's play it is Lady Macbeth who says, while Macbeth is off- stage murdering Duncan, "It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman/ Which gives the stern'st good-nights." (II, ii, 3-4). Richmond shows an outdoor scene in which the victim is evidently a woman whose head is visible on the ground near the right knee of the sinister-looking male figure in Renaissance costume. (Similar half-buried heads may be seen in Jerusalem 92.) The Fatal Bell-man may be seen as the antithesis of The Shep- herd, paralleling Blake's Innocence and Experience. Richmond's second engraving also has an interesting relationship to the frontispiece to Songs of Innocence (figure 38). Both males wear form-fitting costumes that reveal the musculature beneath; the Piper looks up at the Child as the murderer looks up at the owl. Furthermore, if Richmond made his initial drawing freely after Blake's etched page, the positions of the figures would have been even more similar, as Richmond's would of course have been re- versed in engraving.

Despite his progress in the art, Richmond seems quickly to have lost interest in engraving-only one other, much later, example by him is known. Perhaps the process was too slow for an artist of his facility. The influence of Blake continued, however, to mark his paintings and drawings from the time of their meeting into the early 1830s. During these years, Richmond seems to have regarded himself as Blake's successor. Unlike Calvert and Palmer, he executed several ambitious paintings which embodied the Blakean heroic, human-figure-centered ideal. His




accomplishments in this mode are impressive, yet at the same time they illustrate the limits of Blake's art as a direct example, demonstrating why in the most literal sense there could be no "School of Blake."

As there are only relatively few finished paintings by Richmond in a "Blakean" mode, the degree to which the very young Richmond emu- lated Blake was not fully appreciated until a number of early sketches in the possession of one of his descendants were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1976 and 1977.70 One of these, Plague (figure 39, San Francisco, Achen- bach Foundation) could be indebted to the full-page "Plague" design of Europe with its black-hatted Bellman. A pen, pencil, and wash drawing illustrating Paradise Regained (figure 40, coll. Robert N. Essick) seems closely related to Blake's rendering of the same subject, Christ Tempted by Satan to Turn the Stones Into Bread (figure 41, Fitzwilliam Museum), and both may, as Essick suggests, be indebted to Lucas van Leyden's engraving, The Temptation of Jesus in the Desert.71 We can assume that Richmond knew Blake's picture because the whole Paradise Regained series was in Blake's possession until 1825, when it was acquired by John Linnell. An- other Miltonic subject, Satan on His Voyage to Paradise (figure 42, Art Gal- lery of Ontario), features a winged, muscular, male figure without gen- itals, reminiscent of Satan in Blake's Job,72 with a symbolically functionless Moon of Beulah in the background (Satan is not in Paradise, which would make a difference, but voyaging through space as in Book III of Paradise Lost). This horizontal Satan is especially similar to the up- right one in Blake's Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils (figure 43), a design which Richmond would have known in various forms: the engraving, the watercolor in Linnell's possession, and the tempera of 1826 that Rich- mond himself acquired.

Richmond's first painting was, according to an inscription on its back, Abel the Shepherd (figure 44, Tate Gallery), executed in 1825 and shown that year at the Royal Academy. A tempera on oak centering on a naked male figure, it is both in subject and in medium closer to some of Blake's most typical works than anything produced by the other Ancients. The connection is made even closer by the tradition that in Richmond's sketchbook one of the arms of a study for this figure was corrected by Blake himself.73 The subject, a powerful male figure in repose, is a Mich- elangelesque transformation of one of the Towneley Marbles much ad- mired by the Ancients: Endymion the Shepherd Boy Asleep on Mount Latmos (British Museum). Palmer's painting The Sleeping Shepherd (c. 1833-34) was also based on this statue,74 which he alludes to, though under the wrong title, in a letter to Richmond of 1834: " 'There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.' The sleeping Mercury in the B Museum has this hard-to-be defined but most delicious quality to perfection-so have the best antique jems and bas reliefs and statues-so




have not the Elgin Marbles graceful as they are . . . ."i75 The fact that a very similar figure is featured in Fuseli's The Shepherd's Dream (Tate Gal- lery) illustrates once more the futility of seeking single sources among the Ancients and the extent to which they fused different elements in their own creations.

Two details in Abel the Shepherd should make us pause a moment: the moon and the bat. The moon is of the sort the Ancients freely appropri- ated from Blake, the moon of Beulah. Here it may perhaps be related to Abel's repose. The bat in Blake's works is often a symbol of the Spectre, as in plate 6 of Jerusalem. Does it have such a meaning here? Has this bat "left the Brain that wont believe," as in Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (490)? Is the bat Abel's Spectre? Even to pose these questions shows that the picture cannot support such a symbolistic interpretation. The bat is there for atmospheric purposes-as is, probably, the moon as well. This tendency to use Blake's symbolic images without their symbolic reference was common among the Ancients, but for Richmond, who alone of them attempted to render a mythology, it posed, as we shall see, some special problems.

Richmond's most daring attempt to emulate Blake was executed in 1826: The Creation of Light (figure XII, Tate Gallery). In this picture the Cre- ator is seen bringing the sun into being, contrary to Genesis, over already existing water and land. Richmond's central figure is loosely based on its correlative in the "Raphael Bible," although there may also be an echo of John Martin's Paradise Lost mezzotint of 1825, as Grigson suggests.76 White garment and flesh tones stand out dramatically against the deep blues of sea and sky and the richly variegated colors of the landscape while the sun, differentiated into areas of white, orange, and gold, rises in magnificence at the right.

Recent conservation work by Rica Jones at the Tate Gallery has increased our appreciation of Richmond's techniques.77 This tempera with pen-and-ink outlining is painted with the use of egg white (glair) on a mahogany panel. Gold leaf is employed on the hills to the right and the ground beneath, and there are brushstrokes of silver and gold on both figure and landscape. Bright and dark areas have been built up in layers; for example it was found that in one of the hills "gold underlies the whole hill and ... the blues, yellows, and brown lines that make up the veg- etation are on top of the gold."78 Some very similar features appear in pictures by Blake c. 1826, and it seems likely that the same techniques were not only employed by Blake but were taught by him to Richmond. For example, The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve (Tate Gallery), is also in pen and tempera, some of it over gold, on mahogany. Count Ugolino and His Sons in Prison (Fitzwilliam Museum) employs pen, tempera, and gold on panel. Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils (Tate Gallery),79 executed in tem-




pera on mahogany, was, as mentioned, acquired by Richmond, and he evidently modeled his sun with its spikey flames and sharply differentiated areas of color after Blake's. As we think of these three pictures in relation to The Creation of Light, we can imagine the old artist teaching his seventeen-year-old protege "the Ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored.",80

We can only speculate as to whether Richmond saw Blake's own Cre- ation of Light, then owned by Thomas Butts. It seems at least possible that since Blake borrowed Butts's job watercolors in 1821 to make copies for Linnell, he could have taken Richmond to see Butts's collection. Butts was certainly in contact with Blake in 1826; Blake wrote to Linnell in April "Mr. Butts is to have a proof copy [of Job] for Three Guineas this is his own decision quite in Character he called on me this Week" (777). However, such speculation is airy because we do not even know what the Butts picture, now untraced, looked like. What is clear is that recognizable elements of Blake's pictorial vocabulary appear in Richmond's painting. In addition to the sun, there appears (once more) a new moon with the old moon in its arms and attendant stars, suggestive of Beulah. Most important, the figure of the Creator is very like the subject of The Book of Urizen, plate 27 (figure 45) (also issued in A Small Book of Designs, plate 11). Note especially the exposed right foot, the right leg curving upward, the semi- transparent white garment, and the reticulated pattern of veins and/or muscles. Richmond has of course changed the attitude of the upper part of Blake's figure, turning the head to the viewer's right, and completely altering the position of the hands and arms. In so doing he has also changed the total effect: Blake's subject is Urizen rushing off into clouds and darkness, while Richmond's is sweeping away the clouds and dis- pelling the darkness by the powerful creative gesture of his right arm. In this sense, the subject could be said to be Blake's Los, who does create the sun in The Book of Los, although it is always dangerous to assume that any of the Ancients understood the symbolism of Blake's illuminated books.

The presence of such symbolic images without a mythological frame of reference that would give them meaning is a problem in Richmond's early work. The visual quotations from Blake constitute an iconography in search of a meaning, and since that meaning is not forthcoming, they became decorative details. Despite their brilliance of The Creation of Light, it is hard to see it as leading to anything further in Richmond's artistic development. He may have sensed this, or he may have drawn a practical conclusion when the Royal Academy rejected the picture in 1826. In any event, Richmond did not again attempt such a cosmic subject in a painting.




In Christ and the Woman of Samaria (figure 46, Tate Gallery), Richmond went further toward developing an individual style, although Blake's influence is still manifest. The medium is once more tempera on panel, and Richmond referred to the picture as a "fresco" in his notebook.81 The highly stylized sheep at the left and the wheat at the right, suggestive of Christ as Good Shepherd and Good Farmer, are motifs frequently employed by Blake. So are the Soloman's Seal and some of the other plants in the foreground.82 A most interesting detail is the Gothic church in the background. This does not appear in Richmond's preparatory drawing (figure 47, Tate Gallery), which instead shows "oriental" domes, and of course Richmond was aware that the change was ahistorical. However, he also knew that Blake used Gothic churches for thematic purposes in the Job series, and he introduced one similarly here as underlining the spiritual content of the scene.

In the Gospel account (ohn 4: 6-29), Christ at Jacob's well reveals to the Samarian woman his knowledge of her true state: "For thou has had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband" (18). She is therefore depicted as a transgressor of the Law, one breast bared, but in a pensive attitude as she receives the message "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerus- alem, worship the father" (21). Such a theme would of course be at home in Blake's work, but the clarity with which the figures are represented is unlike Blake and suggests that Richmond profited from studying early Netherlandish pictures, possibly in the Aders collection. The composition appears to be indebted to Annibale Carracci's treatment of the subject (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which Richmond could have known through a print by the seventeenth-century Dutch engraver The- odor van Kessel (figure 48). (The likelihood that Richmond's design is based on an engraving83 is increased by the reversal of figures: Jesus is to the viewer's left in the Carracci, to his right in van Kessel and in Rich- mond.) Thus we can see a certain eclecticism in Christ and the Woman of Samaria, but the various elements are fused gracefully, and the whole may be seen as indicating a direction in which Richmond might have gone.

The direction in which he actually did go is prefigured by his beautiful miniature portrait of Samuel Palmer (National Portrait Gallery), executed in 1829. Palmer is shown as a Christ-like being, much in the manner of Durer's famous self-portrait (Munich, Pinakothek). The lush background is no doubt a reference to Palmer's landscapes; the picture could have been called "Christ in Shoreham." Only by retrospective knowledge might we discern here Richmond's uncanny ability to intuit his sitters' self-idealizations, a trait that was to make his subsequent career as a portrait artist so successful. Although Richmond from time to time would




commemorate his Blakean origins-he named his son after Blake in 1842 and in 1863 exhibited at the Royal Academy a painting called "Little boy lost (see Blake's Poems)" -these gestures had little to do with his real con- cerns as an artist. And we hardly need imagine what Blake would have thought of his disciple's career, given Blake's note near the end of Rey- nolds' fourth Discourse; "Of what consequence is it to the Arts what a Por- trait Painter does" (652).

Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond were, to be sure, followers of William Blake. But how far did they follow? In the early works of each, as we have seen, the heroic, which occupied a central position in Blake's art, jostled uncomfortably with the pastoral, relegated by Blake to a subordinate place. Palmer began by attempting the heroic only to find his true vocation in the pastoral; Calvert miniaturized the heroic and in so doing made it equivalent in value to the pastoral; Richmond alone engaged heroic themes in a "Blakean" manner but, paradoxically, abandoned both heroic and pastoral to become the flatterer of his age in portraiture. Yet for about a decade these young artists produced works that continue to compel our admiration, and during this period they prac- ticed a kind of artistic brotherhood that Blake had imagined as taking place in the studio of Raphael. The drawing ascribed to Palmer of George Richmond engraving The Shepherd (figure 49, Huntington Library and Art Gallery) typifies the Ancients' intimacy and commonality. That the An- cients failed to realize a mythological program similar to Blake's should not be a matter for regret. It was not their m6tier. What is perhaps to be regretted is the worldly-wise rejection of youthful aspiration expressed by Richmond in a letter to Samuel Palmer: "We all wanted thrashing when in a dream of sentiment we thought we were learning art."84

University of California, Berkeley

N O T E S 1. See A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer (London, 1892), 42; E. Finch, Memorials of the Late Francis Oliver Finch (London, 1865), 43; Samuel Calvert, A Memoir of Edward Calvert Artist by His Third Son (London, 1893), viii.

2. See Binyon, The Followers of William Blake (London, 1925). Cf. exhibition catalogue, The Followers of William Blake (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1972); and Essays on the Blake Followers (San Marino, Calif.: Hunting- ton Library and Art Gallery, 1983).

3. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London, 1880), 1:344.

4. In Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1:343.




5. Calvert, Memoir, 23.

6. In Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1: 345.

7. Letter dated 2 July 1862, The Letters of Samuel Palmer, ed. Raymond Lister (Ox- ford, 1974), 2:662-663. See also letter to Anne Gilchrist dated 27 June 1862, 2:657, 661.

8. In Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1:366.

9. Calvert, Memoir, 27.

10. A. M. W. Stirling, Richmond Papers (London, 1926), 14.

11. References to Blake are by page number to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles, rev. ed., 1982).

12. See Geoffrey Keynes, "Blake and George Cumberland," Blake Studies: Essays on His Life and Work (Oxford, 2nd ed., 1971), 247; and G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), 286-287.

13. Blake Records, 287.

14. Outlines from the Ancients (London, 1829), xxiii.

15. Descriptive Catalogue, 531.

16. The Pastorals of Virgil, with a course of English Reading, Adapted for Schools (3rd ed., 2 vols., London, 1821).

17. As quoted by A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters, 15.

18. See Andrew Wilton, The Wood Engravings of William Blake for Thornton's Virgil (London, 1977), 30.

19. David Bindman in Blake as an Artist (Oxford, 1977), interprets the series as a journey through Experience (204-205), and Robert N. Essick in William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, 1980) follows Binyon in relating the themes of the Virgil to Blake's Felpham years (230-232). These interpretations have much in common with my own.

20. On Blake's wood-engraving techniques here, see Essick, William Blake, Print- maker, 224-230 and 232. I have also profited from discussions on this subject with Dr. Essick and with Bo Ossian Lindberg.

21. As Bindman points out, the imagery of 6 is used by Palmer to create a benign mood alien to Blake's meaning here.

22. This was another reminiscence produced for Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1:355.

23. Binyon, Followers, 6-7.

24. See Essick, "John Linnell and the Printmaker's Craft," in Essays on the Blake Followers, 18-29.

25. Memoir, 50.

26. Letter dated 24 March 1839, from Alfred T. Story, The Life of John Linnell (Lon- don, 1891), 1:215.

27. A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters, 15.




28. See M. D. Paley, "The Truchsessian Gallery Revisited," Studies in Romanti- cism, 16 (1977): 165-178.

29. See M. Passavant, Totur of a German Artist in England (London, 1836), 1:201- 204.

30. In October 1824, but Palmer had previously been with Blake at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition of that year (see Blake Records, 280).

31. My discussion of the sketchbook is based on an examination of the original, but the excellent facsimile edition edited by Martin Butlin is to be recommended: Samuel Palmer's Sketch-Book 18241 An Introduction and Commentary (Paris: The Tri- anon Press for the William Blake Trust, 1962).

32. See A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters, 37.

33. Life and Letters, 38.

34. From a letter, according to A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters, 377-378; see Letters, ed. Lister, 2:970.

35. See Raymond Lister, Samtuel Palmer and 'The Ancients,' exhibition catalogue (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 1984), no. 6, p. 6. Lister also suggests the influence of engravings after Pieter Bruegel.

36. Sketchbook, British Museum, p. 128.

37. Sketchook, p. 138.

38. See A. H. Palmer, Life and Letters, 51.

39. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (Lon- don, 1975, repr. 1983), 62 (of Pear Tree Blossoming in a Walled Garden).

40. The Paintings of Samuel Palmer (Cambridge, 1985), 17.

41. See Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (London, 1947), 49.

42. To Martin Hardie, 20 July 1920, quoted by Raymond Lister in Samuel Palmer, 63-64.

43. Long known only through fragmentary quotations, this pamphlet was published by David Bindman in 1985. See "Samuel Palmer's An Address to the Electors of West Kent, 1832 Rediscovered," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 19 (1985): 56-68. On this subject, I am also indebted to recent discussions with Dr. Bindman.

44. See notes to The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, ed. Ernest De- Selincourt, (Oxford, 1946), 456.

45. Captain Swing (London, 1969), 220.

46. See 84, 89. 100, 198, and "Table of Incidents."

47. See Captain Swing, 99, and The Letters of Samuel Palmer, ed. Lister, 1:14. Bind- man, "Samuel Palmer's An Address," 59, notes the identity of Mr. Love, whom Palmer refers to as "one of the best farmers hereabout."

48. See Geoffrey Grigson, "Samuel Palmer: The Politics of an Artist," Horizon, 4 (1941): 323, quoting Robinson's Journal entry for 12 December 1836.




49. Calvert subscribed to the not-yet-published Job on 2 October 1823 (Blake Records, 599), which suggests that he knew something of Blake's work by then at any rate. 50. Letter to The Athenaeum, no. 2913, 25 August 1883, 251. 51. Outlines from the Ancients, xxiii.

52. Gilchrist, Life of Blake, 1:346.

53. See Samuel Calvert, Memoir, 16.

54. Binyon, Followers, 19.

55. Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by Bishop Richard Watson, Complete Poetry and Prose, 612.

56. Memoir, 27.

57. Memoir, 28.

58. As suggested by Raymond Lister, Edward Calvert (London, 1962), 66. This may be contrasted to plowing as a prelude to a universal Last Judgment, as in The Four Zoas, IX, 124: 25: "The limbs of Urizen shone with ardor. He laid his ha[n]d on the Plough" (p. 393). 59. Memoir, 27.

60. Letters, 2:779 and private communication from Raymond Lister. Richmond called it Ploughman ploughing the Last furrow (Athenaeum, p. 251).

61. Samuel Palmer, 41. However, it should be noted that The Bride kept its inscription (see below) and also that inscriptions of a purely informational nature and not bearing any doctrinal comment were removed from several other wood engravings.

62. Memoir, 24.

63. Milton, 30(33):1-3, 12-14, p. 129.

64. Binyon, Followers, 17.

65. Quoted by Samuel Calvert, Memoir, 19.

66. Anthenaeum, p. 231. Richmond supposes most of these to have been destroyed.

67. Memoir, 29. Another, perhaps earlier, version in colored chalks was sold at Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, on 13 November 1980; see Robert N. Essick, "Blake in the Marketplace," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 16 (1982): 94 and repro- duction, p. 95.

68. Quoted by Raymond Lister, George Richmond: A Critical Biography (London, 1981), 124). 69. George Richmond, 126. 70. 18 November 1976 (lots 171-188) and 24 March 1977 (lots 25-45). I thank Rob- ert N. Essick for this information. 71. Exhibition catalogue, William Blake and His Contemporaries and Followers (San Marino: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1987), no. 59, p. 70.




APPENDIX: THE ADERS COLLECTION

The Northern paintings in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Aders1 must have been of particular interest to William Blake, and to the Ancients as well.

Blake was introduced to the Aders by Linnell by the summer of 1825, and it was at their house in Euston Square that he met Henry Crabb Rob- inson in December 1825, the young German painter Jacob Gotzenburger in 1827, and, possibly, Coleridge.2 Palmer is thought to have been introduced by Linnell by July 1824,3 and although there is no record of the pres-

72. Another resemblance, as suggested by Susan Douglas-Drinkwater, is with the flying figures in Blake's Dante illustration The Baffled Devils Fighting, drawn for Linnell and engraved in 1827. See exhibition catalogue Blake and the Ancients, ed. H. B. de Groot (Toronto: University College and Thomas Fischer Rare Books Li- brary, 1983), p. 38 (no. 35).

73. Stirling, Richmond Papers, 26.

74. See Grigson, Samuel Palmer, 13.

75. 16 and 20 October 1834. Letters, 1:67. Lister identifies the quotation as from Francis Bacon.

76. Samtuel Palmer, 47.

77. The following sentences summarize parts of the "Report on Structure and Condition" kindly supplied to me by Miss Jones.

78. Jones, "Report on Structure and Condition."

79. See Binyon, Followers, 19.

80. Descriptive Catalogue, 529. Blake signed The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve "fresco W. BLAKE."

81. Lister, George Richmond, 131.

82. For the identification of Solomon's Seal I would like to thank Frances Butlin. Solomon's Seal would be appropriate here both because it was also known as Lad- der to Heaven and because its root was supposed to heal wounds (OED, s.v.).

83. Michelangelo's Christ and the Samaritan Woman, now known only through the engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet (see Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo [Princeton, 1975], pl. 380) is similar in conception to Richmond's but not as close as Carracci's. I thank Bo Ossian Lindberg for bringing this design to my attention.

84. Quoted by Lister, George Richmond, 46, as a letter written from Italy (presum- ably 1837-1839).




ence of either Calvert or Richmond, both young artists could have at- tended the Aders' weekly open house without their presence being recorded.

For Blake, the Aders collection reinforced a sense of the tradition to which he belonged, as indicated by his comparing a figure in one of the Aders pictures to one in his Canterbury Pilgrims, executed over a decade before.4 For the Ancients, the opportunity to see genuine Northern art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have had a significant effect on their conception of the purity of "primitive" art.

Johann David Passavant's Tour of a German Artist in England 5 gives us an idea of what the collection was like. Passavant called particular attention to an old copy of the van Eycks' Ghent Altarpiece,6 as well as to pictures then attributed to artists such as Roger van der Weyden, Hans Mem- ling, and Martin Schongauer. Because some of the Aders pictures have since been re-attributed, it should not be thought that the collection as a whole was inferior. For example, the Portrait of a Man (National Gallery, London) that Passavant ascribed to Memling is now attributed to Dieric Bouts, and The Deposition thought to have been "school of van Eyck" is assigned by the National Gallery to Gerard David with The Adoration of the Kings.7 The Aders collection clearly deserved its contemporary reputation. It was entirely dispersed in three sales in the 1830s,8 but not before it had had a profound effect on those who saw and appreciated it.9

N O T E S 1. See M. Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England (London, 1836), 1:201-219; M. K. Joseph, Charles Aders, Auckland University College Bulletin, no. 43. English Series, no. 6, 1953; Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art (London, 1976), 42, 87; David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton, [19781), 31, 164; William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (New Haven and London, 1979), 20-23, 269-270 n.91. 2. See Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, ed. Ruthven Todd (London, rev. ed., 1945), 330-332. The meeting with Coleridge remains conjectural but not at all unlikely, since Coleridge was a close friend of the Aders and visited them frequently. 3. See Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (London, 1947), 14- 15. 4. According to Henry Crabb Robinson-see Blake Records, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. (Oxford, 1969), 539. 5. Passavant saw the collection in 1831 and first published his account in German in 1833.




6. Totir of a Gernmani Artist, 201-204. Because the wings of the original had been dispersed, this copy, as Passavant observed, alone gave the effect of the whole.

7. See National Gallery Catalogue by Martin David, Early Netlierlanldisli School (2nd ed., 1955), nos. 943, 1078, 1079. Other former Aders pictures in the National Gal- lery include nos. 1081, 1082, 1083, 1084, 1085, 1087, and 1939.

8. The prints and drawings were sold at Fosters on 22 May 1833. There was an exhibition of Aders paintings at the Suffolk Street Gallery in 1832, but this was a prelude to their sale at Fosters on 1 August 1835. The third sale, at Christie's on 26 April 1839, was conducted for the Aders Trust under the aegis of Henry Crabb Robinson.

9. One of many possibly significant details is that Blake's most important paintings on wood date from the mid-1820s and that many of the Aders' Northern primitive paintings, such as the three named above, were painted on wood. In the advertisement for his exhibition of 1809 Blake had offered to paint "portable Fresco" on "Canvas or Wood, or any other portable thing" (p. 527), but the chief works of the exhibition itself were on canvas. Richmond's early paintings were also on wood.



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The Art of "The Ancients"