Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  This curious vegetable production I found, May 1st, 1828 on a flower bed – On the upper surface the striae are beautifully fine and regular, the ground being of a pale, silvery, ash, as is also the ground colour of the lower side, but the striae being very black and fine and close cause it to appear much darker.

  The little disc in the centre had a yellowish cast, he noticed, and the stem was white and silvery, and very fragile.

  Botany was the feminine face of natural history: ‘You are interested in botany?’ Napoleon allegedly asked the explorer Alexander von Humboldt. ‘So is my wife.’ Women read and wrote books, went to lectures, collected plants, examined them through microscopes and learned their Latin names. Lear’s lovely fritillary, for example has its Linnean label, ‘Hexandria Monogynia’, with common names beneath: ‘Fritillaria Miliagris. Common Fritillary or Chequered Lily, Snakes Head, or Spotted Daffodil’. This was the taxonomic pigeonholing that he would mock affectionately in his nonsense botany, in the surreal Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis, and Phattfacia Stupenda, and Manypeeplia Upsidownia, like Solomon’s seal with tiny suspended people. These were his own inventions, but they reflected reports of travellers and plant hunters, of plants full of mimicry and odd relations with the animal and insect worlds. Amid all this, why should there not be a Bong Tree, or a fly-guzzling Bluebottlia Buzztilentia?

  He ridiculed the exaggerated passion for flowers in an early nonsense rhyme, where the flower-lover’s waistcoat matches the lily’s marks, rousing the bees:

  There was an old person so silly,

  He poked his head into a lily;

  But six bees who lived there, filled him full of despair,

  For they stung that old person so silly.

  Yet athough he laughed Lear rejoiced in flowers and trees all his life: wild flowers like a Turkish carpet, cypresses against blue sky, palms on the Nile.

  After they moved to Gray’s Inn Road, Ann and Edward shared large, leather-bound scrapbooks, sticking in some of Sarah’s paintings as well as their own. There were drawings and paintings of shells and exotic birds: a pair of Indian bee-eaters on a branch, doves on a nest, a golden pheasant (signed ‘A. Lear’) before a landscape that looks like the South Downs with palms. A smaller notebook, with different coloured pages, contains the usual amateurish sketches and pasted-in butterflies with tissue-paper wings: then suddenly, there is a dynamic watercolour of a duck in flight.

  The duck, and other elegant, delicately careful bird paintings from the late 1820s, were very different in style from the stylised hummingbirds. They showed how far he had moved on. Yet models for these too could be found in the sisters’ magazines, which had embraced natural history eagerly for a generation, printing articles that were unafraid to give technical details. Birds figured large when Ann was a girl, in Ann Murry’s serial ‘The Moral Zoologist’ in The Lady’s Magazine, which laid out clearly the current debates about classification, drawing on a mass of ornithological experts: Edwards and Latham, Buffon, Albin, Brisson and Sloane. One set of Murry’s articles was on parrots: lorys, macaws, and red-headed and blue-headed parakeets, with details of plumage, size, colour, habits and habitat, accompanied by large, clear engravings. These were the kinds of pictures that Edward copied. This was the kind of artist he was going to be. His education with the girls was far from frivolous: by his late teens he had an eye for detail that would make him one of the finest natural history painters of his day.

  3: ‘O SUSSEX!’

  In contrast to Gray’s Inn Road, Sussex was light and air and views and space, broad fields of corn, grassy slopes, clumps of trees, with farms nestling beneath. Edward spent many holidays with Sarah and her husband Charles Street in Arundel, in their tall red-brick house on the quay, at the foot of the High Street that climbed from the river to the walls of the castle grounds. In summer he walked through lanes like green tunnels, emerging high on the downs to see the Arun snaking across the plain to the sea. In winter he strode along the muddy river bank, where frost silvered the reeds and teazles and the castle shimmered across the water meadows like a mirage.

  Sussex meant family and friends, free of constraints. To call on the wealthy Lears at Batsworth Park, a mile or so east of Arundel, he crossed the fast-flowing river, where flocks of seagulls flew up with the tide, walked along the flood-plain and then took a steep lane into the woods. If he followed the curving loop of the Arun before he reached the Batsworth lane he could visit new friends, the Drewitts, who lived at Peppering House just beyond the small village of Burpham. All these families were involved in the town’s finances, Charles Street as a clerk, Jeremiah Lear as a trustee of the Savings Bank and John Drewitt in the bank formed with his brother-in-law in 1827: Hopkins, Drewitt and Wyatt.

  Edward met the Drewitts when he was eleven, the time of his unhappy stay at school: of their three children, Fanny, who took him under her wing, was then nineteen, Robert was fourteen and Eliza twelve. Their father, John, was a naturalist, an expert on birds, insects and plants, interested in geology and fossils. Six years before he had inherited a collection of eight hundred species of butterflies and moths, in their cabinet of forty-four drawers, from his cousin William Jones, a pioneering entomologist and one of the first members of the Linnean Society. To Edward the house was full of treasures, alight with happiness and new discoveries. Later, in a moment of nostalgia, he wrote to Fanny, ‘How clearly just at the moment is before me the first morning I was ever there – when I had so much delight in looking over the Cabinet – & when I fancied one would always live in the sunshine one felt then!’ A drawing of Peppering House, with its plain Georgian front shaded by trees, is his first surviving landscape. It was, and still is, a beautiful, open place, on a spur of the hill above the river with views on three sides, north up the valley to the downs, west across the river to the wooded slopes, and south towards the sea with the castle silhouetted against the light.

  Peppering opened his eyes to the natural world. He walked and looked, high up into the great trees, and for the first time, he remembered, he heard the voice of the rooks. But it was also a place of stories, like that of the Knucker, a dragon who crept from a bottomless pool to slaughter livestock and people. Legend and reality seemed to touch, too, in the discovery of bones nearby: the Lewes doctor Gideon Mantell, who uncovered giant lizards and iguanodon in central Sussex, noted that ‘the bones, and several grinders of elephants, have been found in a bed of gravel, on the estate of John Drewett, Esq., of Peppering’. Lear could also feel more recent history: in 1826 a rare coin turned up in a field on the Drewitts’ farm, bearing the head of Edward I, as Duke of Aquitaine. With its busy farm and evocative past, Peppering was a rich second home throughout Lear’s adolescence, where he could be as moody and wild and odd as he pleased. He grew fast, with long thin legs and flailing arms. The tolerant Drewitts knew about the family troubles, and about his illness – a few years later he sent an unembarrassed message to Eliza, apologising for not seeing her off in the coach, explaining, ‘I was taken ill – with my old complaint in the head – so much as to be unable to walk home.’

  *

  Arundel widened his horizons. He was throwing off his family’s chapel-going zeal, and as a fan of Byron and Shelley, he was scathing about political corruption and attempts to ‘christianize the nation’. At fourteen, he wrote an accomplished parody, part radical drinking song, part spoof evangelical hymn: ‘Ye who have hearts – aloud rejoice,/For Oligarchy trembles’. In that summer’s election the Tories under Lord Liverpool had trounced the Whigs and Lear’s song echoed the appeal of radical candidates like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt and William Cobbett ‘to strike always at the head of that insolent and rapacious oligarchy who make us burn with shame and indignation at the disgrace and bankruptcy and misery’ they have heaped on the nation. But while Lear mocked this rhetoric, he was parodying the language of Methodist or Universalist/Unitarian hymns – ‘Rejoice aloud! Rejoice aloud!’ – and of charismatic preachers like Edward Irving, who was drawing huge crowds to
his Caledonian chapel in London. Lear often heard Irving preach, remembering him walking round the square, ‘reading a Bible over the head of his baby’. An odd prophetic note sounds here too: one election song of this year had the tune ‘Derry Down’, close to the mummer’s name ‘Derry down Derry’ that Lear later chose for his nonsense, and its refrain was loud in defiance of the powerful ‘they’ who stifled the people: ‘Derry down, down, oppression lie down’.

  As a teenager in Sussex, however, Lear was drawn into conservative rather than radical circles, and was more concerned with his future as an artist than with religion or politics. The Drewitts and the Batsworth Lears were important local families, welcomed at assemblies at the castle (Robert Drewitt would later lead the young Queen Victoria up the narrow winding stairs of the keep). Through them a web of connections spread outwards. Lear made a lasting friend in George Cartwright, son of the vicar of Lyminster. They went sketching together, and through the Cartwrights he met the young Robert Curzon, who would one day become Baron Zouche and inherit nearby Parham, a golden stone Elizabethan house dreaming in its deer park. Lear came to understand the use of such a chain of connections, and as he walked the countryside, in love with the great trees and downland views, he began to think, idly, of drawing landscapes.

  He was already considering an artist’s life and was on his best behaviour at Batsworth Park on a bitter Sunday morning in November 1829, where he told Ann in a long verse letter:

  Called at Lyminster – John at home

  Looked at the plates of Rogers’ Italy –

  Talked of reform and Chancellor Brougham –

  Back to Arundel made a run, –

  And finished a lunch at half past one.

  Reform was the topic of the day: a month before, an article in the Westminster Review had attacked the proposals for law reform put forward by Jeremy Bentham and Henry Brougham (soon to be Lord Chancellor). But ‘Rogers’ Italy’ intrigued Lear more. Samuel Rogers had visited Italy after the Napoleonic wars, celebrating it in a long poem weaving his own ecstatic response with stories from history. Its reception was flat, and to gain more attention a disappointed Rogers commissioned vignettes for a luxury edition. Early copies appeared in late 1829, and the publishers also produced separate portfolios of the plates. These included twenty-five engravings of watercolours by Turner, whom Lear came to admire more than any living artist, from Lake Como and the Roman Campagna to the Temples of Paestum under lightning-rent skies – all places that Lear would later see and sketch.

  As it happened, when Lear looked at Rogers’s Italy, Turner was not far away. George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont, who owned the great house at Petworth in West Sussex, had first commissioned him to paint landscapes twenty years earlier, but it was not until 1829 that Turner became almost part of the household, using the library as his studio, painting the lake, grounds and distant views. Petworth was packed with glorious paintings, including Van Dycks and Claudes, and the genial, lackadaisical earl opened his house to friends, artists and musicians, as well as his own entangled family, too diverse to count. (A few years before, Lord Blessington had written: ‘Nothing will persuade me that Lord Egremont has not forty three children … when quarrels arise, which few days pass without, each mother takes part with her progeny, bursts into the drawing room, fights with each other, with Lord E., his children, and I believe the Company, and makes scenes worthy of Billingsgate or a Madhouse.’)

  Egremont was a model of the eccentric aristocratic patron, and Lear also came into the orbits of two more Turner patrons. One was John Leicester, Lord de Tabley, co-founder in 1805 of the ‘British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom’ – or ‘The Pall Mall Gallery’, as it was known – where shows of living British artists alternated with old masters. Leicester also opened his own house in Berkeley Square to the public, but such a passion was expensive – when he died in 1827, a year after the fourteen-year-old Lear met him, his finances were in tatters and his executors immediately sold his great collection.

  The other Turner connection was with the family of Walter Ramsden Fawkes, Turner’s friend and patron for sixteen years. By the mid-1820s Fawkes, like Leicester, was almost broke: when his daughter Anne married her cousin Godfrey Wentworth in 1822 he had to borrow £8000 from a neighbour for her dowry. ‘Anne and Godfrey married,’ wrote his wife Maria. ‘A very long day. Had a large party to dinner. All tipsey.’ Turner was one of the guests. Mrs Wentworth was a friendly, open woman, interested in art and in natural history – her husband’s relation Lord Fitzwilliam had a famous menagerie at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire. She admired the young Lear’s drawings and used her London connections to get him introductions. He always believed that she had started him on his way, and in April 1830 he gave her an album with seventeen paintings of birds against pencilled landscapes with a grateful inscription.

  *

  This was almost the last period when artists could hope to make a living through painting for patrons, and Lear, a young amateur still in his teens, would of course try to find financial backing. He already had a facility for fitting into any group, any situation. By 1829, when he was seventeen, Sarah and Charles Street had two children, Charles Henry, now five, and Fred, who was two. That winter he sent Ann a verse diary from Arundel, beginning with the freezing coach journey from London. Cleverly, he mimicked Moore’s comic ‘intercepted letters’ from an Irish family in ‘The Fudge Family in Paris’, a satire of the tourists rushing to France after the Napoleonic wars. Other writers transported the Fudges to Edinburgh, Dublin and Washington, but Lear felt Arundel would do just as well. He wrote of walks beneath leafless trees, boys skating, tea and backgammon, party games with neighbours, children and a new baby:

  Saw the baby – that unique child

  Who squeaked – and stared – and sniffed – and smiled.

  With the Streets and their friends Lear was the high-spirited uncle, who jokes and plays and throws shrieking children in the air. At Batsworth Park, by contrast, he was the polite young visitor, interested in politics, engravings and art. At Peppering he was like a beloved cousin, flirting with Fanny and Eliza, running races with Robert, charming the older generation with his interest in the farm, the village and their natural history pursuits. He amused the family with poems like ‘Peppering Roads’, a sharp picture of his struggle to see them on a winter holiday, his coach jolting on the steep rutted roads:

  The coachman who opened the door

  Found us tangled so very topturvy –

  We rolled out in a bundle, – all four.

  And then we were so whisped together,

  Legs – dresses – caps – arms – blacks and whites

  That some minutes elapsed before ever

  They put us completely to rights! –

  Nonsense is almost here. He wrote too, of slithering in the melting ice and claggy chalk of the lane:

  Oh the Peppering roads! Sure ’tis fit there

  Should be some requital at last

  So the inmates you find, when you get there

  Amply pay you for all you have passed.

  They did repay him. The Drewitts’ concerns became his; he composed a sad poem when their King Charles spaniel Ruby was shot by accident, with a little watercolour that they kept carefully among their letters. He wrote about the turkeys attacking gulls in the garden – to the tune, he said, of the song ‘Shades of Evening’ – catching the household chaos:

  Down rushed Fanny and Eliza; –

  Screams and squawks and yowlings shrill, –

  Gulls and turkeys with their cries a-

  round them echoed oer the hill: –

  At Peppering Lear was allowed to play the fool, ‘3 parts crazy – & wholly affectionate’. At seventeen he was a bundle of mobility, physically and mentally restless. But sometimes when he was leaving Sussex he stopped and looked back. In a verse letter to Eliza, sending some magazines from London, he described watching her set off home from the ridge of Bury Hill. He
missed the Drewitts when he was away, especially Fanny. In another poem he wrote of the view from the same ridge at sunset ‘on a calm summer’s eve’. In times of grief, he wondered,

  Will not memory turn to some thrice hallowed spot,

  That shines out like a star among years that are past?

  Some dream that will wake in a desolate heart,

  Every chord into music that long has been hushed.

  Mournful echo! – soon still – for it tolls with a smart,

  That the joys which first woke it, are long ago crushed.

  He was borrowing phrases from ‘Troubadour’ by Laetitia Landon, the massively popular ‘L.E.L.’, who described the singer’s burial in ‘a thrice hallowed spot’, but the sentiment that he often mocked is serious here.

  The following September he wrote to Fanny begging for a letter – he had heard nothing from the Drewitts for two months – putting her silence down to the work of ‘that wretched little fat Person, who has lately made so much confusion in Sussex’, adding a drawing of a plump Cupid with bow and arrow and an ironic PS: ‘Of course you have heard of my marriage.’ That year Fanny married George Coombe, a local landowner. (For her wedding Lear wrote a comic poem about the cracked church bell.) She moved from Peppering to another romantic house, Calceto, in the marshy valley of the Arun, where Queen Adelisa had established a priory on the causeway seven hundred years ago. A chapter was over, but the friendship was not lost. Lear remained close to Fanny and to her husband George, a keen bird-watcher and fossil collector. He was godfather to their son Percy, an adopted uncle to their daughter Laura, and he kept in touch with Fanny all her life.