Monday 26 January 2009

Birthdays


Today is the birthday, the 204th, of the fitfully great painter and etcher Samuel Palmer - let him provide the picture. It is of ancient oaks at Lullingstone, near Shoreham in the Darenth valley - the Valley of Vision, where Palmer did his most extraordinary work. Poor Palmer suffered much - the loss of his daughter in childhood, and later of the son in whom he had reposed all his hopes, endless professional frustrations and thwarted projects, the tyranny of his father-in-law, the hugely successful painting machine John Linnell, the neuroses of his wife - and he ended his life in a depressing respectable mock-Gothic 'cottage' outside Redhill. I began a novel about him once, long ago - appropriately enough, in view of its subject, it came to nothing...
It's also the birthday of Mozart (1756) and Jerome Kern (1885) and that strange man known to posterity as Lewis Carroll (1832) - and of Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi (1741), known to posterity chiefly through her intimate friendship with Johnson - a friendship vehemently broken off by him when she married her Italian. Their relationship has been the subject of much speculation - was it masochistic? Did it have something to do with his fear of madness? Does it matter (even if we could know)? Beryl Bainbridge deals with it with due delicacy in her novel According To Queeney, which gives, I think, as true and living a picture of Hester Thrale as could reasonably be hoped for. How wonderful that Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald (very different writers in so many ways) should both have switched, late in their careers, from writing out of their own lives to writing out of the material of history - and thereby found their real genius. Something which, sadly, Palmer by and large lost as his career went on - but for a blaze of sunset glory in his late etchings.

11 comments:

  1. Good heavens, Nige - the breadth of your cultural understanding is startling.

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  2. That's not understanding, Brit...

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  3. All right, knowledge then. Knowhow. Proficiency. Discernment. Cognition.

    Ok, passing acquaintanceship with.

    Whatever.

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  4. Lovely picture though isn't it - I can't stop looking at it... To think that was done in the 1820s....

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  5. Very. I thought it was Van Gogh at first glance.

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  6. The painting has a touch of the Vincents about it, now are we absolutly sure about its pedigree chaps, oops it's all down to the brush strokes.

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  7. Absolutely gorgeous picture -- thanks so much for posting it! In a forest in the center of Philadelphia (Andorra it is called) there is a magnificent tree known as the "Great Beech." I have a druidical passion for huge trees and go there to meditate. This painting reminds me of it. Palmer must have also loved trees and forests.

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  8. Thanks Malty - I hadn't seen the Goya story - thought you might be linking to this guy, who had a nice line in Palmers. And yes Susan - no one got the treeness of trees quite as strongly as Palmer. He loved horse chestnut trees...

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  9. Or the sheepness of sheep, Nige.

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  10. True Sophie - and once, in that astonishing early self-portrait, the Palmerness of Palmer.

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  11. Good name for a band that.

    The Sheepness of Sheep present their latest concept triple-album, 'The Palmerness of Palmer'.

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