EDWARD

See also:

• EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888)

LEAR (1812-1888)  , English artist and humorist, was born in London on the 12th of May 1812 . His earliest drawings were ornithological . When he was twenty years old he published a brilliantly coloured selection of the rarer Psittacidae . Its power attracted the attention of the 13th earl of Derby, who employed Lear to draw his Knowsley menagerie . He became a permanent favourite with the Stanley family; and Edward, 15th earl, was the child for whose amusement the first Book of Nonsense was composed . From birds Lear turned to landscape, his earlier efforts in which recall the manner of J . D . Harding; but he quickly acquired a more individual style . About 1837 he set up a studio at Rome, where he lived for ten years, with summer tours in Italy and Sicily, and occasional visits to England . During this period he began to publish his Illustrated Journals of a Landscape Painter: charmingly written reminiscences of wandering, which ultimately embraced Calabria, the Abruzzi, Albania, Corsica, &c . From 1848-1849 he explored Greece, Constantinople, the Ionian Islands, Lower Egypt, the wildest recesses of Albania, and the desert of Sinai . He returned to London, but the climate did not suit him .

In 1854-1855 he wintered on the

Nile, and migrated successively to Corfu, Malta and Rome, finally building himself a villa at San Remo . From Corfu Lear visited Mount Athos, Syria, Palestine, and Petra; and when over sixty, by the assistance of Lord Northbrook, then Govenor-General, he saw the cities and scenery of greatest interest within a large area of India . From first to last he was, in whatever circumstances of difficulty or ill-health, an indomitable traveller . Before visiting new lands he studied their geography and literature, and then went straight for the mark; and wherever he went he drew most indefatigably and most accurately . His sketches are not only the basis of more finished works, but an exhaustive record in themselves . Some defect of technique or eyesight occasionally left his larger oil painting, though nobly conceived, crude or deficient in harmony; but his smaller pictures and more elaborate sketches abound in beauty, delicacy, and truth . Lear modestly called himself a topographical artist; but he included in the term the perfect rendering of all characteristic graces of form, colour, and atmosphere . The last task he set himself was to prepare for popular circulation a set of some 200 drawings, illustrating from his travels the scenic touches of Tennyson's poetry; but he did not live to complete the scheme, dying at San Remo on the 3oth of January 1888 . Until sobered by age, his conversation was brimful of humorous fun . The paradoxical originality and ostentatiously uneducated draughtsmanship of his numerous nonsense books won him a more universal fame than his serious work . He had a true artist's sympathy with art under all forms, and might have become a skilled musician had he not been a painter . Swainson, the naturalist, praised young Lear's great red and yellow macaw as " equalling any figure ever painted by Audubon in grace of design, perspective, and anatomical accuracy." Murchison, examining his sketches, complimented them as rigorously embodying geological truth .

Tennyson's lines " To E.L. on his Travels in Greece," mark the poet's genuine admiration of a cognate spirit in classical art .

Ruskin placed the Book of Nonsense first in the list of a hundred delectable volumes of contemporary literature, a judgment endorsed by English-speaking children all over the world . See Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carling ford, and Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1907), edited by Lady Strachey, with an introduction by Henry Strachey . (F .