Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/164

 Royal Academy in 1840 and 1842. They seem to have spent most of their time in Rome, but made some stay at Naples. Palmer's first contribution to the Royal Academy after his return was ‘Pompeii, the Street of the Tombs’ (1840), which was followed by other Italian drawings in 1841 and 1842. In the latter year a son was born to him. He had confined himself almost, if not entirely, to water-colour while he was abroad; and though he resumed painting in oils after his return from Italy, and never lost the desire to work in that medium, he practically abandoned it after 1843, when he was elected an associate of the (now Royal) Society of Painters in Water-colours. After this he left off exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, and contributed only to the exhibitions of his society. In the first year or two he exhibited many Italian drawings, delicate in colour and carefully drawn, but not strongly distinguished from the work of other men. Henceforth his subjects were mostly English pastorals—aged oaks and cornfields, gleaners and nutting-parties, gipsy-dells, and rising storms—or belonged to the classes of ‘Romantic,’ ‘Classic,’ or ‘Ideal.’ Among the latter were illustrations of the ‘Pilgrim's Progress’ and Spenser, and such designs as ‘St. Paul landing in Italy,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe guiding his Raft up the Creek,’ ‘Farewell to Calypso,’ or ‘Mercury driving away the Cattle of Admetus.’ In 1855 he exhibited for the first time a drawing from Milton, ‘The Dell of Comus,’ which was followed by two other illustrations from the same masque in 1856. His favourite effects were twilight, sunsets, and moonlights; and once he went out of his usual course to record in a striking drawing an unusual phenomenon, ‘The Comet of 1859, as seen from the skirts of Dartmoor.’

During these years he eked out his slender income by giving drawing lessons. In 1843 he again visited North Wales. In 1845 he was at Margate, and spent some time at Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. In 1846 he made some drawings, which were engraved on wood, for the illustration of Dickens's ‘Pictures from Italy.’ In 1847 he lost his only daughter (born 1844), an event which he felt intensely, and which caused him to leave Lisson Grove for Kensington (1A Victoria Road) in the spring of 1848. In December of this year his father died. At Victoria Road and at 6 Dover Place, Marlborough Place, Kensington, whither he moved about 1850, he commenced the practice of etching. Among his neighbours and friends in that locality were T. O. Barlow, R.A., and C. W. Cope, R.A.—the former an engraver, and the latter as clever with the etching-needle as the paint-brush. He was elected a member of the Etching Society in 1853, his probationary etching being a beautiful little plate called ‘The Willows.’ Ten out of Palmer's thirteen etchings were executed at Kensington.

In 1854 Palmer was elected a full member of the Water-colour Society, to which he continued to contribute from two to eight drawings annually. In 1856 he undertook nine illustrations to Adams's ‘Sacred Allegories.’ In 1857 he sketched in Cornwall, and in 1858 and 1860 in Devonshire. On sketching excursions, with no luggage but one spare shirt, and associating much with the country folk, he travelled a great deal on foot, and often walked throughout the night.

He still found it hard to make a living, and grew despondent and tired even of his work, and in 1861 he sustained a very severe blow in the death of his eldest son at the age of nineteen. He removed from London, and after a year's stay at Reigate, took up his residence at Furze Hill House, Mead Vale, Redhill, where he spent the remaining twenty years of his life. Although he did not produce much, partly through failing health and partly from his excessive care and deliberation, it is to this period that his finest work belongs.

It was due to the sympathetic suggestion of a stranger, Mr. L. R. Valpy, that Palmer found a field in which he could exercise all his finest faculties and employ them to realise the dreams of a lifetime. This was a commission for drawings in illustration of ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso,’ two of those ‘minor poems’ of Milton, a brass-clamped copy of which, given to him by his nurse on her death-bed, he had carried with him wherever he went for twenty years. ‘I never,’ he once wrote, ‘knew such a sacred and home-felt delight as when endeavouring, in all humility, to realise, after a sort, the imagery of Milton.’ Fortunately the growing infirmities of his body seem to have been accompanied by an increase in the clearness and completeness of his imagination, and though he took long about these drawings, fearing to part with them till they had received those ‘final gossamer touches and tendernesses’ which he compared to the ‘few last sunglows which give the fruits their sweetness,’ they may be regarded as the supreme expression of the man and the artist. Brilliant, rich, and powerful in colour, they are finished to a degree seldom attained, and yet, despite their elaboration, contain no touch unfelt or useless.