by Edward Lear
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 30th 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.
San Remo, Liguria, Italy — Lear’s final resting place
