by Jenny Uglow
He had managed at least six sketches a day, and had learned how to convey hazy distances, wind and storm, clouded heights and shimmering lakes. ‘Really it is impossible to tell you’, he wrote to John Gould, ‘how, & how enormously I have enjoyed the whole Autumn’:
The counties of Cumberland & Wstmd are superb indeed, & tho’ the weather has been miserable, yet I have contrived to walk pretty well over the whole ground, & to sketch a good deal beside. I hope too, I have improved somewhat – (hard if I haven’t after slaving as I have done) but you will judge when I get back.
He had improved. The sketches showed a young artist finding his way, deft, accurate and atmospheric – he found he could get a sense of the misty air and gradations of tone by rubbing the graphite with a finger or leather pad. Some views were delicate, others were bold, impressionistic notations of striking forms.
In theory the trip put money in his purse. Lake District prints were popular and lithographs would be a useful money-spinner. But although he made notes on colour and texture and planned to work them up over the winter, only one print survives, Wastwater & the Screes, from Wastdale, and only one finished watercolour, Wastwater, a variant of the same scene, a hazy view in brown and gold, textured with scratching and gum arabic, which he gave to the Hornbys of Windermere. He abandoned the idea of prints, and over the years he gave his drawings on their blue-grey paper to his old Holloway friend Bill Nevill and his sons Allan and Ralph. Within months, Lear had set the Lake District aside: he had other plans.
*
Winter set in early at Knowsley. On 31 October, when he told Gould about his trip, he painted two watercolours of the flat Lancashire view, with streaks of red in the sky and clouds piling in from the west. He headed his letter to Gould ‘hail-snow-frost- &desolation’, and ended it with a PS, ‘This place is colder than Kamschatka!’ He had a cold that made him feel half blind, as well as a cough and sore throat. He remained at Knowsley to finish some work for Derby, and was touched to be invited to stay on after Christmas and ‘to come when I please without being asked’. But he had work to do in London. He took the coach south through the New Year blizzards, ‘miles of a sort of lane between snow walls 10 or 12 feet high’; the coach overturned twice and he arrived in Southampton Row without his luggage, which was ‘still frozen up in a filthy Leicestershire canal’.
He saw no chance of getting down to Sussex. There was so much to do: a trip to Paris with Gould as well as orders for lithographs and watercolours. He was working by candlelight every evening, turning down invitations, and ‘leeching & sitting up with my old friend Hullmandel who is very ill’. Illness was all around: his sister Kate, the youngest of the Lear siblings, was suffering from consumption. She died by the end of the month. ‘I do not know when I have been so unhinged & miserable,’ Lear wrote. And he feared there would be another death too. ‘Before long I fear, for my sister Florence is but a shadow.’
By now he had moved again, to 36 Great Marlborough Street, just down from Hullmandel’s studio at no. 49. (Charles Darwin, back from his voyage, had rooms here at the same time: did they pass on the stairs?) But although the lodgings were comfortable, he was not well and the doctors advised him to go south, away from the chill east winds. The chance came within a month. Led by Derby and Robert Hornby, a group of thirty subscribers – or so his benefactors told him – combined to commission drawings ‘to be executed in Rome’. This hugely generous gesture was a measure of the Knowsley group’s fondness, showing how much they valued him as a person, as well as an artist. For Lear a long-nursed dream, of studying for two years in Italy, was on the verge of becoming a reality.
He paid farewell visits and travelled up to Knowsley ‘in a chariot drawn by four horses, accompanied by 2 postillions & 2 domestics, – & containing Lord Derby – myself – 6 cloaks – one jerboa – 3 pigeons – 20 or 30 books – some bread & biscuits, – a roast fowl & a bottle of wine’. As he looked around at the old red drawing room, the red-and-white-striped chairs, the bookcases and window seats with their fat cushions, the lawn sloping down until it was lost in the meadows, he suddenly felt sad. He would always look back on this as the best home he had ever met with, he told Fanny: ‘I don’t half like going out of England, now it comes to the point.’
He planned to travel with Daniel Fowler, and by midsummer their passage was booked. After stopping for two days with Ann, who was in Bath, he went down to Bovisand on Plymouth Sound to stay with Captain Phipps Hornby and his large family. They walked and swam, sailed up the Tamar and paddled in the sea, the women with their skirts gathered up around their knees. In the evenings they took their guitars down to the rocks: ‘& there we sate singing to the sea & the moon till late’. Back in London, where the city was agog at the death of William IV and the accession of his eighteen-year-old niece Victoria, Lear packed his bags. And then, he told Fanny on 7 July, ‘I sail next Sunday on the Antwerp packet.’
III. FLYING
9: ‘ROME IS ROME’
What did it mean to be a landscape artist? Who would he meet, and how would he live? When Lear sailed for Antwerp on 16 July 1837, the day after the funeral of William IV, it felt like the start of a new era for him, as well as for the country. With Dan Fowler and Robert Gale he set off to sketch first in Brussels and Luxembourg, but there Fowler became ill and from Coblenz he headed home. Gale left too, and from mid-August Lear drifted through Germany alone. He was happy being on his own, as he had been in the Lakes. He sketched the market squares of Coblenz and Trier, the timbered buildings of towns on the Mosel, the fairytale turrets of Eltz and the canopied shop-fronts of Frankfurt. Despite his yearning for training, his drawings were detailed and exquisite, full of atmosphere, as if they had simply sprung out of him, the product of a natural talent. In early September he reached Geneva. At last, white-capped mountains appeared in his sketches. Aged twenty-five, Lear crossed the Alps.
Ann was also now on the Continent: often in these years, through contacts in the local churches, she stayed in France or Belgium where life was cheaper. Now she was in Brussels, where, Lear joked, ‘by your praises of the Beer there, I fear you have taken to drinking’. His long letters were alive with new scenes. He reached Milan, and then, taking only his knapsack and sketchbook, he set off for Como, where he met a fellow pupil of his own age from Sass’s, Sir William Knighton (the son of George IV’s private secretary, who had been burdened with trying to control the king’s debts). Kind though the Knighton family were, Lear longed to be on his own again. He dashed off to Domaso at the head of the lake, where the scenery ‘was quite beyond anything I had seen; the dark blue lake reflects the white houses of Domaso – and over them enormous Alps, Jiggy-Jaggy – shut out the Italians from Switzerland’. He walked high into the mountains and back along the lake, watching peasants bring in the grape harvest, seeing his first olive trees and struggling to describe them: ‘I think they are very beautiful – more like a huge lavender bush – or a fine gray willow than anything else, and all over little shiny green olives.’ Then, after a trip to Lugano, he picked up his gear in Milan and drove slowly south along the poplar-lined roads across the Lombardy plains. From Bologna he joined a crowd of British tourists struggling over the snowy Apennines: their string of eight coaches were hauled up by oxen, ‘– and all the passengers walking. So much for the loneliness of mountain passes! – at the place we lunched – 32 people – all English, sat down together.’
All these English travellers were heading for Florence, where Lear found ‘cards and notes left as if one were in Sherrard Street still … The whole place is like an English watering place.’ (Ten years later, Anna Jameson warned the Brownings – in vain – against settling there as it was ‘British to the teeth and bursting at the seams with balls and hoopla’.) Lear found rooms and pupils and began to settle down. But November brought icy winds and despite the cheap roasted chestnuts – ‘I eat them perpetual’ – Florence, he felt, was no place for the winter. Defying rumours of cholera in the cities and robbers on
the roads, he would go on, as an artist should, to Rome.
He left Florence with regret, looking back at the magnificent bridges and tall medieval buildings, but remembering the cold above all:
the clear lilac mountains all round it – the exquisite walks on every side to hills covered with villages, convents and cypresses, where you have the whole city beneath you – the bustle of the Grand Duke’s court and the fine shops – the endless churches – the Zebra Cathedral of black and white marble – the crowds of towers and steeples – all these make Florence a little Paradise in its way – if it were but hotter. – Oh! How I used to go shivering about!
By mid-December Lear was in Rome. The sculptor William Theed, who travelled with him from Florence and had lived in Rome for ten years, helped him hunt for lodgings, and he found a study and bedroom, with a small balcony, at no. 39 Via del Babuino – ‘Baboon Street’, he told Ann happily. It was close by the Piazza di Spagna, the favourite area of the English and the artists, and he found friends there already, including the Knighton family. Soon his days fell into a pattern:
At 8 I go to the Café, where all the artists breakfast, and have 2 cups of coffee and 2 toasted rolls – for 6½ d. and then – I either see sights – make calls – draw out of doors – or, if wet – have models indoors till 4. Then most of the artists walk on the Pincian Mount (a beautiful garden overlooking all Rome, and from which such sunsets are seen!) – and at 5 we dine very capitally at a Trattoria or eating house, immediately after which Sir W. Knighton and I walk to the Academy – whence after 2 hours we return home.
Joseph Severn – Keats’s friend, who had been at his deathbed next to the Spanish Steps in 1821 – had started ‘the Academy’ with the support of the Royal Academy, anxious to rival the French in Rome after the Napoleonic wars. Artists collected tickets before they left England, but, as Lear and Knighton discovered, the Academy was small, an evening school offering only a life class, a few models and casts and skeletons: the real meeting places were informal, in trattorias and studios, galleries and parks. In Rome, instead of attaching himself to a particular family or clan, as he had in Sussex and Lancashire, Lear found the closeness he needed in the international community of artists.
British artists had come to Rome for many years, to learn from the great paintings and sculpture that filled the churches and palaces and to fulfil commissions for collectors and aristocrats on their Grand Tour, recording scenery and antiquities and making copies of Italian old masters. From the mid-eighteenth century, the British public, whose vision of Italy had been previously governed by the idealised scenes of Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and Nicolas Poussin, began to see it afresh in the topographical paintings of Richard Wilson and William Pars and the evocative views of John Robert Cozens – ‘all poetry’, as Constable called Cozens’s work. In Lear’s youth John ‘Warwick’ Smith, Samuel Prout and others had exhibited their Italian watercolours in London, while engravings of scenes by Turner and many others appeared in works like Rogers’s Italy, which Lear had pored over in Arundel.
The sculptors, in particular, came and stayed for years, inspired by Canova and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, who lived near the Spanish Steps until his return to Denmark in 1838. Lear’s new friend William Theed had trained under Thorwaldsen and his marble statues and busts were soon bought with enthusiasm by the British royal family. Through Theed, Lear met Richard James Wyatt and John Gibson – ‘Gibby’ as Turner affectionately called him. Now in their forties, admired for their elegant neo-classical statues – Venus, Aurora, Pandora – and for their modern portraits, with clear profiles and flowing drapery, Wyatt and Gibson had studios opposite each other in the Via della Fontanella Barberini: ‘I thank God’, wrote Gibson, ‘for every morning that opens my eyes in Rome.’ A model for other artists, their life was simple: rising early, breakfasting in the Caffe Greco, reading the newspapers and walking in the Pincian gardens before a long day in the studio. And although they were shrewd businessmen they set a casual style. Meeting Gibson in Naples, William Dean Howells described him as ‘dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did not know that he had none’.
Painters and sculptors from Britain, France, Germany and Scandinavia clustered around the Piazza di Spagna: in 1834 it was reckoned there were over five hundred foreign artists, musicians and writers in Rome. The French, notorious for dallying in taverns and downing the sparkling white orvieto, had their academy in the Villa Medici: the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes had their own book clubs and reading rooms; the Germans and Scandinavians formed the ‘Ponte Molle’ society, laying on parties on the river banks near the bridge and running the Cervarofeste, a boozy annual fancy-dress procession to the Cervaro caves. Hans Christian Andersen, remembering his arrival in 1833, described Italy as ‘the country of my longing, and of my poetical happiness … a new world of art’. The Caffe Greco, a fug of tobacco smoke with separate rooms for Germans, French and the English, rang with arguments over art and politics. This was an easy-going world, tolerant of affairs with both sexes and marked by intense friendships. It was coloured, too, by a tendency – which Lear shared at first – to romanticise the Italian peasantry, embodied by the local women paid to pose in their studios, ‘an unfortunate class of females who make a trade of attitudinizing to artists’.
This was a speciality of the Welsh painter Penry Williams, ten years Lear’s senior, who set up his studio in the late 1820s, attracting British visitors with his views of Italy and scenes of Roman life. Lear came to know him well, ‘always the same even & quiet man’, and praised him as the most conscientious painter of the Italian peasantry, whose colour ‘was always truthful & lovely, & his delineation of scenery on the Roman Campagna & in the neighbouring mountains absolutely perfect’. With his guidance, Lear began to work in oil, and although he came to feel that Williams’s appreciation of other artists was too narrow and regretted blindly following his lead, in these golden years his teaching was an inspiration.
Established stars like Wyatt, Gibson and Williams drew younger artists into their orbit, like the landscape painter Charles Coleman, the sculptor Frederick Thrupp and his friend James Uwins, the quiet, good-tempered nephew of the watercolourist Thomas Uwins who had lived here in the previous decade. ‘The artists especially are a delightful set,’ Lear told Ann, ‘Gibson, Wyatt and Theed, Williams, Coleman and Uwins particularly.’ As an artist, Lear was small fry, with his Hardingesque sketches, but he was keen to learn. His health was better, he told Derby, and ‘For improvement – I say little as yet: I try hard enough & if improvement in art must necessarily follow, I shall be sure to have it, – but I think sometimes, one bird drawing was worth 2 landscapes – I go on hoping nevertheless.’ The Derby connection served him well and he went to assemblies and balls in rambling old palaces with wealthy British families wintering in Italy. He made firm friends, like the kindly Lady Susannah (‘Susan’) Percy, niece of the Duke of Northumberland who had subscribed to his Parrots, who had lived in Rome for forty years, and Charles Knight and his sisters: Isabella, an invalid who languished stylishly on her couch until a fine old age, and Margaret, who married the Duke of Sermoneta, from the great Caetani family.
As in Florence, the British community was insular. They read the London papers – admittedly rather late – in the reading rooms in the Piazza di Spagna, held their own parties and ran their own excursions. Gentlemen went to the English Club, whose membership excluded professionals such as doctors and artists. They also had an English chapel near the Via Condotti, where Lear went on Sundays: most remained firmly Protestant, although they did accept tickets from the Vatican for special services (a few years later English ladies gained a reputation for whispering and eating biscuits, and the Vatican sent round a notice asking for decorum in Holy Week). They left their money in English banks, and shopped at the English shoemakers, bakers, tailors and saddle-makers who clustered in the nearby streets. In the coming years Murray’s Hand
book to Italy noted: ‘we would advise our countrymen to employ English tradespeople when possible; they are more to be relied upon for punctuality, good attitudes and honesty, than the native shopkeepers.’ Arthur Clough, who came to Rome a few years later, at the age of nineteen, caught the mood exactly in the breathless letters of Georgina Trevellyn in his Amours de Voyage – very much Lear’s tone when he describes the arrival of exuberant English visitors:
At last, dearest Louisa, I take up my pen to address you.
Here we are, you see, with the seven-and-seventy boxes,
Courier, Papa and Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan:
Here we all are at Rome, and delighted of course with St Peter’s,
And very pleasantly lodged in the famous Piazza di Spagna.
Rome is a wonderful place, but Mary shall tell you about it;
Not very gay, however; the English are mostly at Naples;
There are the A.’s, we hear, and most of the W. party.
George, however, is come; did I tell you about his mustachios?
Dividing his time between the artists and the British residents and visitors, the people Lear did not get to know were the Romans themselves – he didn’t even know his landlady’s name; ‘very likely she has none at all,’ he joked. Ten or twelve families shared the tall house he lodged in, with its seven floors, but they rarely spoke: ‘All strangers they call only “Forestieri” – unless they have lived many years in Rome, and then they say “Signor Riccardo Scultore” – “Sign. Giovanni Pittore” – or “Sign. Giorgio Inglesi,” but they never take the trouble to learn surnames.’
