Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  There was an Old Man with a beard,

  Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

  Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,

  Have all built their nests in my beard!’

  There the birds are. (In 1860 Lear asked Holman Hunt, ‘How, my dear Daddy, is your paternal beard? Do the little birds nest in it yet? & if so, is their innocement & periseminating twitter pleasant to your benevolent heart?’) They nest and fly and swim through Lear’s rhymes and alphabets, stories and songs. And just as he renders the birds human, so people begin to look like birds: the long-legged Old Man of Dunblane, ‘Who greatly resembled a Crane’; the Old Man of El Hums, who ate nothing but crumbs, ‘Which he picked off the ground,/With the other birds round’; the depressing Old Man of Crowle, who lived in a nest with an owl; the long-necked Old Person of Nice:

  There was an old Person of Nice,

  Whose associates were usually Geese;

  They walked out together, in all sorts of weather,

  That affable Person of Nice!

  Wherever they appear, the birds’ sidelong glances make them look considerably wiser than the men. And just as Lear perched in the aviary so in his drawings he took on avian shape. In doodles in his letters he leans forward with his frock coat flung out like a tail and his long nose a beak; he hovers in the air, a rotund bird with feathery wings and tiny legs; he swims solemnly on with the geese from Corfu; he nests in a tree, or struts and bends his head as if to peck.

  When he finished Parrots, the young Lear, with his domed head and his spectacles perched on his large nose, was feeling hard pressed, hopeless in matters of money. Others, like the ambitious John Gould, were far shrewder. Gould had started a taxidermy business in Windsor in 1824, beginning work for the Zoological Society three years later, and publishing A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, based on a hundred skins of Indian birds that he had been sent, in 1830–1. Noting the success of Parrots, Gould planned a series of works on Lear’s model, using Hullmandel as his printer – he eventually produced forty volumes over twenty years. He was not an artist or a naturalist but he was determined and enthusiastic and had a good business head. He was, Lear told George Coombe in 1833, ‘a man who without any prospects or education, has by dint of a singularly active mind, good talents, & uncontrollable perseverance (not to say impudence backed by no little good luck) – risen in the world beyond belief for the last ten years’. Eager for work, Lear helped Gould with illustrations for the five-part Birds of Europe, from 1832 to 1837. He also taught lithography to Gould’s wife, Elizabeth, who drew the smaller birds while Lear took on the larger, more striking ones and did all the backgrounds and touchings up. He was fond of Elizabeth, ‘an exceedingly pleasant & amiable woman’, and drew a little study of her own pet vole, inscribed ‘Portrait of Mrs Gould’s Pet’. (When she died in 1841, Lear was genuinely saddened, asking for a sketch of her, as a person he ‘esteemed & respected so greatly’.)

  In March 1833, when Lear was desperate to get rid of unsold copies of Parrots, as he still owed money for their printing and ‘they were always before me like a great nimbus or nightmare or anything else very disagreeable & unavoidable’, Gould bought the stock and all rights in the plates for £50, on condition that Lear went to the Continent with him, to draw in the zoos of Rotterdam, Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Then came delays – Elizabeth went into premature labour, the whole Gould family had flu, and the trip was put off. Suddenly, Lear collapsed. He went down to Arundel, where Sarah stuffed him ‘with puddings – chops – cutlets – and pies’, as he told Ann:

  Exceedingly careful were they of my health,

  And I scarcely left home at all, saving by stealth;

  – They never allowed me to walk by the river

  For said they – ‘Lest the fogs disagree with your liver!’ –

  When he wrote this he was at Peppering with the Drewitts, drawing ‘a very magnificent pigeon’. He came back fatter and better, ready to work again. Finally, in July, off he went with Gould to all those places, the first time he had been abroad. In Amsterdam he made a more binding agreement to complete a specific number of drawings, which he later regretted. In all he contributed sixty-eight plates to Birds of Europe, for which Gould acknowledged his help, and at least ten more for Gould’s book on toucans, 1833–5, including some of his liveliest, most mischievous birds: but although he signed several plates in the first edition, in the second edition of 1854 his signature was silently erased.

  While Lear felt disgruntled he also felt obliged to Gould, who employed him and paid him well. And although he was often hasty and careless, Gould was in the centre of this world – he was the one who identified Darwin’s bird specimens from the Galapagos not as a mixed lot but as thirteen distinct kinds of finch, setting Darwin on his long musings about their adaptive evolution. In later life Lear was less impressed, and less grateful. Gould was ‘always a hog’, he decided, and it was a wonder ‘as to how such a man could portray humming birds or anything refined’. When Gould died in 1881 Lear dismissed him as ‘one I never liked really, for in spite of a certain jollity & Bonhomie he was a harsh & violent man … ever the same, persevering, hard working toiler in his own (ornithological) line, – but ever as unfeeling for those about him’. Yet the birds he drew for Gould are wonders: fat pigeons and fierce marsh harriers, long-legged storks, great pelicans with huge beaks and the majestic eagle owl, with its ear-like tufts of feathers and soft ruffs around piercing golden eyes.

  *

  Gould was not his sole employer. Soon he was much in demand. The members of the Zoological Society who saw his drawings and admired his Parrots turned to him for help with their current work, and soon he was drawing reptiles and animals as well as birds. He contributed, for example, to the illustrations for accounts of great expeditions such as Captain Beechey’s three-year voyage across the Pacific to the Bering Straits and Alaska.

  Lear already had connections in this world, particularly with the gentleman naturalist and collector Prideaux John Selby, a friend of Mrs Wentworth’s brother Walter Ramsden Fawkes. Since Lear was sixteen, he had been sending Selby watercolour sketches for his British Ornithology, which was published in nineteen parts, mostly plates, between 1821 and 1834. In the past generation Thomas Bewick’s exquisite History of British Birds had introduced native species to a wide general public, but rich families with large libraries wanted more lavish volumes, leather-bound and finely printed, with hand-coloured plates on thick paper. Selby worked on this grander scale, and his British Ornithology was an airy and elegant production with characterful, life-size illustrations. After he began work at the zoo his reputation spread. Nicholas Vigors introduced him to Selby’s collaborator, Sir William Jardine, and Lear painted delicate watercolours for their Illustrations of Ornithology, which appeared from 1825 to 1843, and for Jardine’s work on the duck tribe. He also made drawings for the wood engravings in Jardine’s popular Naturalist’s Library, especially of pigeons and parrots: ‘Parrots are my favourites,’ he told Jardine, ‘& I can do them with greater facility than any other class of animals.’ His continuing fondness and familiarity show in his work, like this conversation between two macaws, painted in May 1836.

  Selby and Jardine were both enchanted with his work, and took his scientific expertise seriously, as well as his art: he always remembered their kindness. And while he worked at the zoo other experts sought him out. In July 1832 he wrote comically to the Coombes’ baby daughter, begging her to ask for a letter in return (‘If you cannot yet speak your ideas – my love – you can squeak them you know’) and appealing for specimens from Fanny Coombe’s brother Robert Drewitt:

  only because I feel more pleasure in drawing from those given me by my intimate friends – than I could do from those otherwise come by – not from my being unable to get at specimens. – Having rather a Zoological connexion – & being about to Publish British Quadrupeds – I have now living – 2 Hedgehogs, all the sorts of mice – weasels �
� Bats &c – & every beast requisite except a Pine Marten, – all of which, my dear child, – I should be glad to present you with – did I suppose you could make the slightest use of them whatever.

  Tortoises were also on his mind: Eliza Drewitt’s tortoise had just died and he was making lithographs from James Sowerby’s sketches of tortoises and terrapins, with their wonderfully patterned shells and beady eyes, for Thomas Bell’s great study A Monograph of the Testudinata. He also worked on Bell’s 1837 History of Quadrupeds, writing across several plates in his own copy, ‘drawn from nature also on wood by me’. Bell was one of the trio who had put his name forward to the Linnean Society and Lear felt a true affection for him, often visiting him in later years, especially after Bell moved into Gilbert White’s old house in Selborne.

  *

  This was a good, sociable time. Lear had work, and a growing reputation. ‘I am up to my neck in hurry’, he told George Coombe in April 1833, ‘– & work from 5AM – till 7 P.M without cessation: – my lute & my flute are locked up.’ He saw his old friends, as well as his new ones from the zoo and the artists’ studios. One Sussex friend, Bernard Senior (who later took the name of Husey Hunt, for inheritance reasons), a year older than Lear, was now at the law firm of Ellis and Blackmore’s in Gray’s Inn, where George Lear worked. Lear often went on the town with him and Henry Greening, a young lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn. Almost fifty years later, when he saw a notice of Greening’s death in The Times, he wrote, ‘What days, (& what nights) we used to share so long ago as 1830 or even earlier. Harry Greening was in those times the life of all our parties, albeit through him partly I got into bad ways.’ There are other hints that around this time Lear’s life became tangled. When he set off with Gould to the Continent he mentioned ‘some circumstances which had just occurred’ that made him glad to leave England. In a late diary, when he found his servant Giorgio’s son crying from shame because he thought he had syphilis (it turned out to be a plain abscess), he commented, ‘Considering that I myself in 1833 had every sort of syphilitic disease, who am I to blame others, who have had less education & more temptation.’ Lear was consistently evasive about his sex life, even in his diary: this is one of the rare occasions that he even mentions having one. He doesn’t say if he went to brothels, or picked up rent boys – or both. He doesn’t specify the nature of his ‘disease’ and it is likely to have been bacterial gonorrhoea, treatable with arsenic and mercury, rather than the more deadly syphilis (at the time the two were thought to be connected, with syphilis a later stage), but this would still be enough to cause years of problems and to make him anxious in the future, especially about marriage.

  In 1833 his father Jeremiah died of a heart attack, aged seventy-six, but Lear’s relationship with his mother remained cool. He was dutiful, went down to Gravesend to see her and later sent money when he could, but there was no warmth between them. In his view, he and his sister Ann were still on their own. In the New Year of 1834 Lear moved to rooms at 28 Southampton Row which soon became as crammed with books, prints, plates and drawings as his old lodgings: ‘It must be a very thin man to live in these rooms as there are only a few weasel like corners not filled up,’ he told Fanny Coombe later. One escape was Hullmandel’s labyrinthine studio. Acutely intelligent and a fine linguist, Hullmandel liked to encourage young artists, though he was ‘decidedly caustic’, Dan Fowler thought: ‘If you made a blot in his presence, he was sure to find it; withal, as it was his business to be, an excellent judge of art.’ This summer, feeling he needed proper formal training, Lear also enrolled in Sass’s School of Art in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury. Started by Henry Sass, a friend of Turner and Landseer, the school prepared students for entrance to the Royal Academy Schools, copying old masters, studying perspective and drawing from antique sculptures. Pupils included William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg and John Everett Millais, and like Hullmandel’s studio, Sass’s was a social hub. Frith, who was there that summer, remembered ‘A series of conversazioni, at which great artists and other distinguished men were present … Etty, Martin (certainly one of the most beautiful human beings I ever beheld), and Constable were frequent visitors. We had dinners and dances, too. Who that had once seen Wilkie dance a quadrille could ever forget the solemnity of the performance.’ The lithographer George Barnard also noted these conversations, ‘and the society of most of the Royal Academicians, such as Stanfield, Turner, Westall, Landseer &c’. Lear heard Turner singing at one party, belting out ‘And the world goes round a-bound, a-bound’.

  But Lear did not stay long at Sass’s; he was older than most of the pupils and had no cash or time for a long, expensive course. He had proved himself at London Zoo, with his work for the naturalists, and with his own amazing plates of the parrots – and now he had new commitments, to his most important patron so far, Edward Smith Stanley. Lord Stanley had chaired the meeting of the Zoological Society that granted Lear permission to draw the parrots in the zoo, and had become president of the Society in 1831, a post he held until his death. Lear had included two of his birds in the Parrots, an iridescent green and pink Stanley parakeet and a red-capped parakeet, and had also made several drawings for him at Knowsley, the Stanley family’s Lancashire estate just north of Liverpool. And now, after Stanley inherited his father’s title in 1834, becoming the thirteenth Earl of Derby, they would work even more closely together.

  5: KNOWSLEY

  At Knowsley everything was on a grand scale. When Lear went up for an extended stay in the summer of 1835, he looked out from his window over fields and copses, across the plain to Liverpool and far beyond to the west, to the marshes and dunes where the Mersey met the cold Irish Sea. He painted this view, his first known landscape in watercolour, a pattern of brown and gold cornfields and clumps of dark trees under a huge, billowing sky. It was not picturesque: ‘The rain is coming down in torrents,’ he wrote to George Coombe, ‘and the vast pancake of landscape from here to Liverpool is all in a beastly grey mist.’

  All that flat pancake belonged to the Stanleys. They were staggeringly rich – by far the richest family in the north-west – with money pouring in from coal mines and from property in the growing industrial towns of Preston and Bury, and on the Liverpool quays. The house was a vast pile, a jumble of styles from Tudor times on, its Georgian front and portico mixing with new neo-Gothic additions. The twelfth earl was a rip-roaring liberal Whig, a close ally of Charles James Fox and a great gambler and man of the turf, founding the Oaks (named after his Epsom estate), the Derby, and the Grand National at nearby Aintree. By contrast, the new Lord Derby was quiet, even shy, finding animals and birds easier to deal with than people. He had been an MP for over thirty years, from the age of twenty-one, but his reputation and his spirits were badly bruised by his support of his local yeomanry at the inquiry after the massacre of Peterloo in 1819, and as soon as he entered the House of Lords in 1834 he stood back from politics. He hated London and avoided the season. His son Edward made up for this: ‘a lively rattling sportsman’, according to the gossipy Charles Greville, ‘apparently devoted to racing and rabbit shooting’, he entertained the Fancy, the sporting aristocracy, for the Liverpool races and would become prime minister three times in the 1850s and 60s.

  Derby’s passion for natural history baffled his rackety father: he rarely went racing and instead, said Greville, ‘spent a million on kangaroos’. Knowsley’s 170 acres were a vast private zoo, for which Stanley sent collectors across the globe, to South Africa and India, South America and Australia; at Knowsley at dawn the screeches and hootings of the birds almost drowned the bellowing of the wild Brahmin cattle. The collecting was not without mishap: one hungry ship’s crew devoured the precious birds; a vicuña tried to eat paint; efforts to send kiwi birds from New Zealand ‘by shipping them with a supply of worms mixed with chicken entrails’ failed entirely. The animals that did arrive needed a large staff to undertake odd tasks: the blacksmith pared the zebra’s hooves; a local surgeon operated on an antelope’s cataracts; g
angs of men clipped reluctant alpacas; garden boys tended reptiles and tropical fish in warm tanks in the plant houses. Derby also employed taxidermists, including Gould, and his museum on the first floor of the house was full of stuffed birds and animals, cabinets of skins, trays of insects and plant specimens. He became an expert in identifying species and amassed an extraordinary collection of rare books, botanical and zoological paintings and engravings, hiring artists to paint his living specimens.

  When Lear was asked to contribute to this great visual filing system, he began, not surprisingly, with a bird: a tiny chestnut-belted gnateater from the Amazon, sketched in 1830. Many ravishing watercolours in the great folios of his work at Knowsley are dated 1831, among them Stanley’s golden parakeet and a pretty blue and green bird from eastern China, soon named ‘Lord Derby’s parakeet’, Paleornis Derbianus: when Lear painted this from a skin at the Knowsley museum it was the only example of the species in Britain. Derby paid him well, far better than Gould had, beginning at £3 for each painting, and Lear was touched by his open acknowledgement, as he told Fanny Coombe, ‘such as at the Gardens & Zoological Meetings – shaking hands with me before all the great bodies – & in calling & sitting for a long half hour at 28 Southampton Row’. He was wryly grateful for such attentions ‘from people of rank – to us small fry of artists’. The gulf was bridged by Derby’s humanity. Lear told Fanny of ‘an opportune misunderstanding when Lord D called – through his dreadful deafness: “My Lord” – said I – “I hope your head is better” – for he had had a bad headache the day before. “Oh” – replied he – “I have found a remedy for that. I have taken out all the little birds & put in one Cockatoo & three large Red Macaws.”’ The absurdity, and Derby’s vulnerability and generosity, won Lear’s devotion.