by Jenny Uglow
In his poem, as he looked down from Bury Hill over the plain to the sea, an enduring emotional geography, a map of longing, began to take shape. Returning here in 1862, when he was fifty, climbing to the top of the downs, Lear wrote in his diary, ‘O Sussex! – & what a sunset!! … – Ai! – E! come passano, i dì felici!” said I – remembering years – nearly 40 – ago!!’ How they pass, the happy days.
II. PERCHING
4: TO THE ZOO
There was a Young Lady whose bonnet,
Came untied when the birds sate upon it;
But she said, ‘I don’t care! all the birds in the air
Are welcome to sit on my bonnet!’
Surely this is the most joyful of all Lear’s limericks. Like the young lady, he was always happy with birds. In the middle of one of his early sketchbooks, solid on the page, sits a pair of green parrots, bold and companionable, looking slightly bored. Further on there is a watercolour of a blue macaw, and two carefully painted feathers. A pencil sketch shows another parrot perching on a branch against flowing, willow-like foliage; other drawings, more careful still, are of a greater bird of paradise and a citrus-crested cockatoo from Indonesia.
In the summer of 1830, parrots were Lear’s companions. In the hazy mornings, in his narrow trousers and frock coat, he dashed across town from Gray’s Inn Road, past Coram Fields and north through Bloomsbury to the ivory Nash terraces by Regent’s Park. He was heading for the zoo, and the parrot house, where, that June, the London Zoological Society had given him permission to sketch. If botany was for women, ornithology was for men: birds opened the way for Lear to join them. Soon after he and Ann moved to Gray’s Inn Road, he presented himself as an artist that naturalists could turn to, making a fine trompe l’œil painting of his card, with a tiny black feather from a Siberian rubythroat and a large jay’s feather, miraculously real.
If he wasn’t at the zoo he was at the society’s museum at Lord Berkeley’s town house, 33 Bruton Street, where some birds were kept until new aviaries were built, and where the skins and specimens were stored – by 1828 these had reached an astonishing six hundred mammals, four thousand birds, one thousand reptiles and fish, and thirty thousand insects. At the end of 1830, writing a quick verse to a friend, Harry Hinde, accepting an invitation to tea, Lear broke off to ‘go to my dinner’:
For all day I’ve been a-
way at the West End,
Painting the best end
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots, –
(They are at the museum, –
When you come you shall see ’em, –)
I do the head and neck first; –
And ever since breakfast
I’ve had one bun merely!
So – yours quite sincerely
E.L.
The appetite for books on birds and animals had grown since the voyages of Captain Cook in the 1760s and 70s, as more and more expeditions brought back unfamiliar plants and specimens of animals, birds, reptiles and fish. Passionate devotees worked to keep pace, diligently labelling species, trying to tie down the profusion, grotesqueries and marvels of the natural world. System was all; from Linnaean categories of flora and fauna to Lavoisier’s ordering of elements and gases, from the mapping of land to new standards of measurement and weight. The world expanded before the eyes of Western savants and they wanted not only to order and name new species but to see them, and even to possess them. The public had always been thrilled by wild animals, as ferocious as possible: they could see these at the Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London, and at ‘Exeter Change’ in the Strand, now run by Edward Cross. In Lear’s early teens this was famous for its great elephant, Chunee, who turned violent in 1826 and was executed by firing squad – a great London drama. Two years later all the beasts were paraded down the Strand to the King’s Mews, when the old Exchange was demolished. At around the same time, the Surrey Zoo opened next to Vauxhall pleasure gardens, with lions, tigers, kangaroos, and a giant tortoise giving rides to children, as well as a lake and a model of Vesuvius: a site of spectacle and entertainment, of balloon ascents, concerts, fireworks and panoramas.
With a very different approach, in April 1828 the Zoological Society of London opened its zoo as a serious centre for research. The society was founded in 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles, former governor of British territories in South East Asia, and Humphry Davy, successor to Joseph Banks as president of the Royal Society – empire and science hand in hand. The Crown Estates allotted a triangular plot in Regent’s Park (the same area covered by the zoo today), and in 1829, when the Crown granted a Royal Charter and transferred the Royal Menagerie from the Tower, Regent’s Park stood out as the pre-eminent British zoo. Members of the society, their families and friends and holders of special tickets, could wander along gravelled paths between low-built animal houses and aviaries, past ponds filled with wildfowl. There were kangaroos and llamas, monkeys and bears and even a hippopotamus, not seen in Europe since the Romans. But if the zoo showed off the beautiful, sensuous emblems of empire and exploration, it also stressed Britain’s civilising mission: the most ferocious animals, even lions and wolves, the society claimed, were milder when bred in captivity. A guide for children proclaimed that the zoo’s animals were ‘not only beautiful but happy … gentle, tender, compassionate, sympathising and benevolent, or at least innocent, like the best, and like the fairest, among ourselves’.
Mrs Wentworth managed to get Lear an introduction as soon as the zoo opened – a rare privilege, as other artists were denied entry – and at once he began to draw. A lemur and his favourite blue-and-yellow macaws were both used for wood engravings in The Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society Delineated, a small two-volume work for the general public, edited by the society’s secretary, Edward Bennett. This was another chance to learn, as the leading London illustrator William Harvey – a former apprentice to the great wood engraver Thomas Bewick and a kindly, hard-working man, always generous to young artists – was in charge of the illustrations. Whenever he could Harvey drew from living creatures rather than stuffed specimens, and dropped the conventional side view of birds and animals, making them lively as well as lifelike. In both approaches Lear would follow him. Perhaps persuaded by the publisher Rudolph Ackermann, he even considered publishing lithographs of his own sketches of the animals, like those used in Bennet’s book, and on a proof title page he included the study of the lion, camel, tiger and other creatures that he had pasted into one of his notebooks, the ‘peaceable kingdom’. But he then set this aside, and decided to create a more ravishing work and publish it himself. The subject, he decided, would be parrots.
It was a move of astounding ambition. First, he had to find subscribers to fund such an expensive work. He approached friends, who in turn roped in others: the list began with Mrs Wentworth, followed by her daughter and sisters; then came the Zoological Society’s key figures, including Nicholas Vigors and Lord Stanley, President of the Linnean Society and soon of the Zoological Society, and leading naturalists such as Sir William Jardine and the Northumberland squire Prideaux John Selby. Selby’s fellow grandees from the north-east were there, including the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, and the Sussex connection was strong too, from the Earl of Egremont and the Duke of Norfolk to the Wardropers and Mrs Hopkins, the Streets’ Arundel neighbours. Old friends from Holloway signed up, and parents and teachers of his pupils, like Madame Zielske of Tavistock Square. But the seriousness of the enterprise showed in the subscriptions from societies: the Linnean, the Society of Arts and the Zoological Society itself.
To satisfy them Lear had to produce something special. His plan was that Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots would appear in fourteen numbers between 1830 and 1832, with subscribers paying ten shillings for each of the promised parts: all of this showed a surprisingly entrepreneurial, practical-minded side to his nature. Even bolder, he chose a large folio size, a format no one had used before: Parrots was a t
urning point in ornithological illustration. The only man to go further was Audubon, with his huge ‘elephant folio’ plates for Birds of America, which had just begun publication in 1827. When Lear got to work, Audubon, now in his fifties, was lecturing in Britain and Europe, hunting for good printers and drumming up his own subscribers, including many of those named in Lear’s list. He met Lear at the zoo, and his example may well have inspired the idea of Parrots: they became friends and Lear was especially close to Audubon’s sons, Victor, three years his senior, and John, exactly his age. When Parrots was published as a book in 1832, Audubon bought a copy, admiring Lear’s art in comparison to the new flood of popular bird books, ‘cheap as dirt and more dirty than dirt’.
As well as using a novel format, Lear was a pioneer in concentrating on a single species. The choice of parrots was inspired: decorative and entertaining, brilliantly coloured, admired for their mimicry, they were fashionable pets, seen in many contemporary portraits, and their shimmering feathers nodded from the headdresses of fashionable women. The Parrot House was one of the biggest draws at the zoo and if Lear could not find a species there or in Bruton Street, he begged entry to private collections, especially those of Lord Stanley, the dealer Benjamin Leadbetter and the naturalist Vigors. As a last resort, he turned to the stuffed birds of the taxidermist John Gould, the zoo’s first ‘Curator and Preserver’. The final touch of novelty was Lear’s insistence, following Harvey, in drawing from live birds wherever possible. At the zoo, he measured wingspan, length and legs while the young keeper Goss held the birds still. He chose their most striking, defining pose (and in his paintings they do seem to pose), then he sketched them – perched on branches, preening, nodding and blinking at the artist before them – in countless rough drawings, surrounded by jotted notes. He caught the arc of movement and the tilt of heads and drew their graduated feathers and soft down with painstaking accuracy, noting the smallest gradations of colour and texture. He made test sheets of colour, dabbing the tints around the sketches as a guide. But he also gave the birds character: the green and red Kuhl’s parakeets seem to talk to each other; the salmon-crested cockatoo appears blushingly vain; the great red and yellow macaw turns its head with a wary, arrogant glance and the blue and yellow macaw leans forward, its feathers ruffled and high. It is hard to tell who is the observer, artist or bird. ‘A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say – “finish me”,’ he groaned in one letter, looking at the uncompleted work filling his room.
To save money Lear decided to produce his own lithographic plates, another brave move. Lithography, invented in the mid-1790s by the German Alois Senefelder, was hardly used in Britain until 1819 when Rudolph Ackermann published Senefelder’s A Complete Course of Lithography, and the landscape painter and printer Charles Hullmandel set up a studio. Hullmandel’s The Art of Drawing on Stone of 1824 became ‘the Bible for budding lithographic artists’. Artists liked the technique, based on the simple fact that oil and water repel each other, because they could make the plates themselves, without employing an engraver. Using a greasy wax crayon or chalk they could draw or trace directly on to the smoothly ground piece of limestone. The stone was ‘cooled’ with a mix of nitric acid and gum arabic, so that the parts not covered by the greasy drawing were etched away, then moistened so that when an oil-based ink was applied the water repelled it and the ink stuck only to the crayoned lines. Hullmandel kept the blocks at his studio at Great Marlborough Street, off Regent Street, hiring them out at rates from 4d. to 18d. per month, according to size. The studio became another place that Lear dashed to: drawing, supervising proofs, getting specialist letterers to add the titles. Here too he was a trendsetter: so far, lithography had been used for landscapes and portraits but only in a handful of natural history books.
Lear had to learn many things: how to use the different grades of crayon, making sure they did not break; how to avoid smears; how to put a bridge – a piece of wood – across the stone to prevent smudging; how to mix crayon and ink for dark areas or lines; how to create highlights by scraping with a sharp tool. He shrugged his first failures off and carried on. He liked the freedom; he liked the ‘sculptural’ feel, using the grain and grit of the stone; he liked drawing directly so that his plates kept their liveliness. Once the prints were made – mirror images of the drawings – Hullmandel’s assistants applied watercolours to match Lear’s original, ending with a whisk of egg white to give sheen to the plumage and glint to the eye.
On 1 November 1830 Lear published Parts I and II. The next day three distinguished zoologists, Nicholas Vigors, Thomas Bell and Edward Bennett, put his name forward as an Associate of the Linnean Society: he was still only eighteen. As the following parts came out his subscribers were thrilled. William Swainson, once a pupil of Audubon, asked for duplicates of two plates, which ‘will then be framed, as fit companions in my drawing room to hang by the side of a pair by my friend Audubon’. Prideaux John Selby went further, finding Lear’s plates ‘beautifully coloured & I think infinitely superior to Audubon’s in softness and the drawing as good’.
Lear had designed wrappers to send out the separate parts, changing these when he obtained permission to dedicate the book to Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV. He sent some parts out himself and distributed others through Ackermann or local booksellers, but the cost was horrendous and since he couldn’t afford to hire the stones for long, he erased the drawings as soon as he had made the 175 prints he needed. ‘I have pretty great difficulty in paying my monthly charges,’ he told the Newcastle bookseller Charles Empson in October 1831, ‘for to pay colourer & printer monthly I am obstinately prepossessed – since I had rather be at the bottom of the River Thames – than be one week in debt.’ Many subscribers paid late, and though Lear exaggerated for comedy’s sake, his panic conveyed the state of his life. ‘Should you come to town,’ he told Empson, ‘– I am sorry that I cannot offer you a home pro tempore’:
– pro trumpery indeed it would be, if I did make any such offer – for unless you occupied the grate as a seat – I see no probability of your finding any rest consonant with the safety of my Parrots – seeing that of the six chairs I possess – 5 are at present occupied with lithographic prints: – the whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement in fact overflows with them, and for the last 12 months I have so moved – looked at, – & existed among Parrots – that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.
By this time he was exhausted. That autumn, to make it easier to run back and forth to the zoo, he moved to 61 Albany Street, tucked behind the smart terraces on the east of the park. But early the next year the money finally ran out and his Parrots ground to a halt. He had promised to bring out fourteen numbers, but had to stop at twelve, having published forty-two plates, without any accompanying text. As he later told Sir William Jardine, ‘Their publication was a speculation which – so far as it made me known & procured me employment in Zoological drawing – answered my expectations – but in matters of money occasioned me considerable loss.’
*
For two years Lear had been preoccupied with parrots. He turned his back on the political storms preceding the Great Reform Act of June 1832; he ignored the debates about the Poor Law; he shrugged off the fear of a cholera epidemic sweeping down from the industrial cities of the north. At London Zoo, safe from mobs and disease, he found a home and a bevy of patrons.
His work was part of the drive to describe, present and label the natural world. Watching eager label readers on a visit to the zoo in 1836, the journalist Leigh Hunt described one typical species spotter dashing from beast to bird, ‘and giving little self-complacent stops at each’:
‘Hah!’ he seemed to be saying to himself, ‘this is the panther is it? Hm – Panther. What says the label here? “Hyaena Capensis.” Hm – Hyaena – ah! A thing untameable. “Grisly Bear.” Hah! – grisly – hm. Very like. Boa, “Tiger Boa” –
ah! – Boa in a box – Hm – Sleeping, I suppose. Very different from seeing him squeeze somebody. Hm. Well! I think it will rain. Terrible thing that – spoil my hat.’
The parakeets and macaws, Hunt thought, seemed the happiest birds there, flaunting and chattering: ‘Does their talk mean to say anything of this?’ he asked. ‘Is it divided between an admiration of one another, and their dinner? For assuredly, talk they do, of something or other, from morning to night, like a room-full of French milliners.’ Lear too felt the birds talked to him, and that in some sense he belonged with them, an exhibit himself. Visitors gawped at the gangly young man with his large spectacles and furrowed brow. ‘Hm – an artist – hm.’ Often, as he made his preliminary drawings, he included their curious, peering faces. They were outside the cage: Lear was inside, with the birds.
Birds gave Lear joy all his life, not in cages but in the freedom of the skies, lakes and rivers, forests and gardens. Every journey he made was crowned with birds. In Albania, twenty years later, he dashed down to look at some white stones by a lake:
when – lo! on my near approach, one and all put forth legs, long necks, and great wings, and ‘stood confessed’ so many great pelicans, which, with croakings expressive of great disgust at all such ill-timed interruptions, rose up into the air in a body of five or six hundred, and soared slowly away to the cliffs to the north of the gulf.
Again and again, birds left him speechless. He counted them and gave them characters wherever he found them, in Greece, in Italy, in Egypt: ‘4 black storks – one legged: apart – 8 pelicans – careless foolish. 17 small ducks, cohesive. 23 herons – watchful variously posed: & 2 or 3 flocks of lovely ivory ibis.’ And he used his compulsive counting in his nonsense.
