Mysterious Wisdom by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Praise for Mysterious Wisdom
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    Shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize
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    â€˜One of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic, with an understanding of the human heart, has produced this masterpiece. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read of anyone: it captures the tragedy of Palmer’s life, and brings out the shimmering glory, the iridescent secrets of his Shoreham phase’ A.N. Wilson   Spectator
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    â€˜She tells in detail the story of his long and often sad personal life, skilfully interweaving it with the many changes in his professional interests and outlook, and in the process illuminating hitherto obscure aspects of his career. Th is is a valuable study ... excellent’   Literary Review
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    â€˜The neglected artist Samuel Palmer is well served by this richly perceptive life’   Sunday Times
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    â€˜Triumphantly captures such ardent early Victorian piety with a vividness and an energy that carry the reader to the luminous heart of Palmer’s work … Campbell-Johnston deploys her talent as an art critic to delineate the technical as well as philosophical progressiveness of Palmer’s work, yet the figure who emerges from Mysterious Wisdom is too exuberant and vivid for tragedy. He strides from the pages, as warm and tenderly eccentric as the paintings from his “Curiosity Portfolio”’   Times Literary Supplement
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    â€˜The compelling strangeness of Campbell-Johnston’s book, however, is that it doesn’t depend on a claim to Palmer’s artistic greatness. Rather, it’s carried by the almost shockingly polarised light and shadow of his life’   Daily Telegraph
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    â€˜A brilliantly written book. Rachel Campbell-Johnston brings a novelist’s eye to the life of Palmer’ John Wilson,   Front Row
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    â€˜[A] vivid new portrait’   Evening Standard
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    â€˜Excellent … A hugely remarkable story engagingly told’   Sunday Times Ireland
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    â€˜This gentle, sympathetic book will encourage people to discover a visionary’ Eileen Battersby,   Irish Times
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    â€˜Yet if Palmer doesn’t quite live up to our expectations of the Romantic artist, the close society the author describes is as rich in detail as his paintings and vivid with the life of its personalities, the now neglected first movement in Britain, The Ancients’ ****   Metro

Mysterious Wisdom
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    The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer
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    Rachel Campbell-Johnston
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For Will whom I love and for Sebastian whom I have lost.

‘The painter’s and the poet’s struggles are solitary and patient,
    silent and sublime’
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    from an 1881 letter from Samuel Palmer to his son

Preface
    The young man in the picture looks straight out at the viewer. But he is also at the same time staring into himself. His gaze is so distant that it seems almost drugged. What is he thinking? The spectator can’t help but wonder about the world that lies beyond that broad, high brow.
    Samuel Palmer was barely out of his teens when he drew his defining self-portrait. It’s hardly the image you would expect from an upcoming artist at that time. He does not strike the pose of the ambitious young professional; make a bid for new clients by parading palette and brush. He hasn’t bothered to shave or to straighten his collar; no comb has been run through his thick tousled hair. This is not a picture that presents a public persona. It is a portrait that asks you to look into a mind.
    How can he conjure the visions that move through his entranced imagination, speak of the feelings that swell like an organ fugue in the heart? These are the problems that Palmer faced all his life as a painter. To try to understand them is to enter