When the artist Samuel Palmer died at the age of 76 in 1881 he was just beginning to rally from decades in the doldrums. A humbuggy London solicitor had recently paid him to produce illustrations to two of Milton's minor works, and the commission, while hardly starry, had unleashed the kind of creativity that looked back to Palmer's glory days 50 years earlier. In images such as The Lonely Tower, done to accompany a line from "Il Penseroso", Palmer turns a rural Surrey scene into an unsettling arcadia, complete with a phantasmagorical night sky. For anyone who cared to look closely – and by this time there really weren't that many who did – Palmer's last work was a reminder of how great and strange he had once been.
Biography loves an overlooked genius, especially one of whom it can be said that he was "ahead of his time", and in Palmer, Rachel Campbell-Johnston has picked a peach of a subject. She does an excellent job of putting right old unfairnesses by reinstating him to the pantheon of great 19th-century landscapists. In doing so, though, she has been careful not to smooth out Palmer's oddness. For whereas Turner and Constable gave their contemporaries a vision of England that tactfully harmonised the new and the old, Palmer did something quite different. His landscapes are not only innocent of the signs and tokens of the coming industrial age, but they bear only a fleeting resemblance to what you might have seen if you had stood by his elbow at the moment of their making.
In the wonderful In a Shoreham Garden (c1830) the pale apple blossom froths and bubbles in a way that would be positively alarming if you happened on it down a country lane. Meanwhile The Magic Tree (c1830) is, as Campbell-Johnston rightly says, a work of "mad splendour" in which it is the artist's pleasure in paint rather than the bountiful Kentish harvest that becomes the real subject of the work. It makes you think of Van Gogh – an artist to whom Palmer would later be compared.
This work, the work that makes Palmer matter, was done when he was in his 20s. He was part of a group which gathered around William Blake, the elderly cockney seer who had spent a lifetime pursuing his vision of a new Jerusalem. The youngsters called themselves the Ancients in recognition of the fact that they were in love with an art that felt as old as time itself. Taking their lead from Blake, they hungered for the austere purity of Fra Angelico, the chastity of Mantegna, the innocence of Raphael. The rough-hewn gothic was to be preferred every time over the chilly perfection of the renaissance. The arch-enemy was the Royal Academy, with its simpering academic painters still in thrall to the late Sir Joshua Reynolds (or Sir Sloshua, as he would soon become rudely known).
Led by Palmer, the Ancients founded an artistic community in rural Kent, happening on a village called Shoreham where the rents were sufficiently low and the locals correspondingly accommodating. On fire with the wonder of nature, these mainly middle-class Londoners turned the Garden of England into a Garden of Eden, insisting on seeing God at work in every lovely tree or passing breeze. Campbell-Johnston matches her prose beautifully here to Palmer's vision, making a joyful noise as she describes him sketching out a poetic landscape where the peasants were plump and happy, the orchards full of apples and the sheep obligingly biblical.
"Visionary" is an overused and under-defined term, but it perfectly describes the way that Palmer took the raw stuff of the real world and turned it into something his own. It was also, of course, a gigantic fiction. The peasants whom he painted were living on subsistence, the sinister machine-breaker Captain Swing stalked the impoverished agricultural southern counties, and the new Poor Law was about to overturn the centuries-old system of parish relief in favour of the hated workhouse. Even Palmer had the sense to see that his paintings were too wayward for conventional understanding. Refusing to try them on the open market, he locked the best away in his "curiosity portfolio", where they languished for decades.
After that early high, Palmer's life started to stall, then slide. He made the mistake of marrying the wrong woman. On paper, Hannah Linnell seemed perfect, a little doll of a girl who would stretch his canvases and sit patiently in the beating sun while he did his work. But her early admiration gave way to resentful scorn when she realised that the man who could go into a trance of wonder at a harvest moon was not going to be the kind of artist who could provide her with a mansion in Piccadilly and a carriage to match. The pity of it was that Palmer tried, taming his style in an attempt to make it more palatable to the new middle-class art market. But he missed the mark woefully, overshooting to produce landscapes of Rome that managed to be both garish and tepid – the sort of thing any talented amateur could knock up for themselves.
Things got worse. The death of the Palmers' infant daughter was followed by that of their elder son, a promising boy of whom much was expected. "My whole life . . . has been little more than one continued punishment – flogging upon flogging," Palmer proclaimed. What's more, his early indifference to money was harder to sustain now that he hadn't actually got any. To support his dwindling family, Palmer embarked on the dreary business of giving lessons to young ladies, bulking out this meagre income with hand-outs from his father-in-law, the highly successful landscapist John Linnell. Linnell had always been quick enough to announce Blake a genius and to support him in his unworldly splendour. But genius is less palatable when it lives close to home, and Linnell delivered his doles to Palmer with a bristling quiver of nasty quips about what a disappointment his son-in-law had turned out to be.
Biographies of overlooked artists work best when there is redemption waiting in the wings, and Palmer, thank heavens, got the last laugh on men such as Linnell and the other second-raters. By the mid 20th century his work was beginning to appear startlingly suggestive to painters such as John Piper and Paul Nash, who wanted to find a way of reconciling romanticism with modernity. The curator Kenneth Clark got behind Palmer too, and came up with the "English Van Gogh" tag, which was once a useful shorthand but now perhaps obscures more than it reveals. The poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, meanwhile, toured art rooms looking for overlooked Palmers and produced a biography covering those early Shoreham years. The artist's renaissance was finally sealed in 2005 with an important exhibition of his work in London that travelled to New York.
Campbell-Johnston has a written a lovely book, gusted along by her obvious empathy for her subject. Indeed, at times it feels as if she is looking at Palmer's favourite landscapes of Kent and Surrey through his eyes, providing a verbal equivalent of his enchanted vision. Perhaps appropriately for a biography of a man who often failed to read his own times very well, the historical background here is rather broadbrush, with dates and details sometimes scrambled. Particularly exasperating, though, is the publisher's meanness with illustrations. There are just eight pages of prints here, which means that the only satisfactory way to read the book is with a laptop by your side to access the images that Campbell-Johnston writes about so well. A biography as good as this deserves better.
Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.
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