Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  we are perched on a mountain and look down into a most lovely fertile valley bounded on one side by a wooded mountain and on the other by rich little hills on whose tops and sides stand other little wild villages and over them you can see the campagna of Rome bounded by more distant mountains and then stretching far away the glittering Mediterranean.

  The artists copied the locals, rising at dawn and taking long siestas, and it was easy to lose track of time. One day Anny was up at four, ready to sketch, thinking it was a Saturday, until ‘Mr Lear, an artist here who keeps a journal’, told her it was Sunday. But it made little difference:

  The sentiment here of a quiet Sunday is not to be found – there were 12 or 14 artists and one lady here last Sunday and at night I was asked at dinner to join in a Ball which I declined – but Mr M. looked on and said it was capital fun and well done. Mr Lear plays very well on the flute so altogether they got up a row.

  Penry Williams, Civitella Gazette, 1 July 1839. ‘View of the Serpentara’. Samuel Palmer is on the rock at the left, with Anny in her bonnet. Lear, with his long legs and large nose, is at the foot of the rock in centre right.

  Lear’s life developed a pattern: winters in Rome, spring and autumn in the mountains and summer spent travelling. But he still struggled with his landscapes and regretted his lack of training, unable to see exactly how good his work already was. ‘I hope ultimately to paint something or other,’ he told Gould. ‘It takes a long while to make a painter – even with a good artist’s education – but without one – it tires the patience of Job: – it is a great thing if one does not go backward. – Meanwhile I am extremely happy – as the hedgehog said when he rolled himself through a thistlebush …’

  The winter and early spring of 1839–40 passed with feasts and carnivals, rainstorms and pale sun, and strange days, like one in March that brought a sudden blizzard, turning the whole land white and forcing Lear and a friend to trek back from the Campagna through blinding snow. By now, to justify his Italian stay to his patrons, he had decided to put together a book: a tangible thing, a testament to what Italy had done for him. With his book in mind, Lear made more trips, painting Roman remains, castles on rocks, lakes in the old volcanic craters. His sketches piled up, annotated with jottings. On a drawing of Roccagorga in the Sabine hills he dashed down ‘snow’, ‘thick wood’, ‘brown earth’, ‘road’, ‘foot path’, ‘dark’, ‘red’, ‘weeds grass’, ‘all mist’, ‘trees’, ‘shrubs’, ‘red earth bank’, ‘stream’, ‘stones’. Increasingly, he used his own phonetic shorthand: ‘rox’ for rocks, ‘flox’ for sheep. And for Lear words and pictures were never quite separate. His notes seemed part of the drawing: ‘Olive’ waving like branches, ‘O! path!’ leading along a track, ‘River’ written flat so that the word forms, in itself, a ripple of water.

  He kept putting off his return to England. In the summer he was at Civitella again. He did not want to leave Italy, and he did not want to leave his friends: ‘I know all the English artists – who are universally kind to me – as well as everybody else,’ he wrote.

  ‘Everybody else’ included the Danish painter Wilhelm Marstrand, who came to embody this time in Lear’s memory. Small and blond and witty, ‘Willi’ Marstrand, later a leader of Denmark’s ‘Golden Age’ painters, had arrived in Rome in 1836 and was now painting exuberant scenes of festivals and peasant life. Twenty years hence, revisiting Lake Nemi, where a great hoopoe suddenly flew up before him, Lear was touched to see the landscape unchanged, ‘all as when W. Marstrand & I used to be always together!! – It seems indeed but a week ago – yet it was in 1839!! & 1840!!’ Later, on a fine sunny day, he thought again of ‘Those Civitella days of old. When one sate from noon to 3 listening to songs coming up from the great silent depths below the rock!’ As Marstrand knew no English they spoke Italian, the language ‘soft as kisses’, as Byron called it, that ‘sounds as if it should be writ on satin/ With syllables which breathe of the sweet South’. Lear felt that he was cutting quite a dashing figure. ‘Do you know I wear very considerable moustaches now?’ he asked. ‘But I cut them off in the winter.’ His floppy moustache is there in Marstrand’s pencil portrait, his thick hair pushed back, his gaze pensive behind his oval spectacles.

  In 1840, when Marstrand left to study in Munich before returning to Denmark, Lear burnt his diary, giving no reason. Marstrand does not figure in his letters to Ann or to Fanny Coombe: Lear did not spill all the details of his Roman life. And although his escape to Italy felt like a flight from the restrictions of English society, any serious sexual encounters went unrecorded. Lear was good company, with an infectious capacity for fun, and on the whole, it seems that however intense his attachments were most of his friendships remained just that, alliances of pure enjoyment, with physical desire suppressed. He hardly mentions the handsome Swiss guards or the young boys lolling by the Tiber who thrilled other artists and writers. ‘All kinds of young men,’ wrote John Addington Symonds, ‘peasants on the Riviera, Corsican drivers, Florentine lads upon Lungarno in the evenings, facchini at Venice, and especially a handsome Bernese guide who attended to the strong black horse I rode – used to pluck at the sleeve of my heart.’

  Lear never writes in this way: his fantasies are hidden, even from his diary. His homosexual longings are clear but he was also always drawn to elegant, intelligent women. His letters emphasise the grace of the peasant girls, their dress and hair, their walk and stature. In the same vein, always partly in jest, he presented himself as a man in need of a wife: ‘Though I be not yet arrived at that keystone of hope – matrimony, I anticipate firmly the chance of a Mrs Lear in 40 years hence at least.’ Writing to Fanny – apologising for his scrawl, but his eyes were sore, his ink mouldy, his pen like a pin – he exclaimed at the many marriages among their friends. ‘St Peter help me! – how the world does go on! Is Robert likely to marry? I wish he would: I am sure I shall, one of these days.’ Rome was lovely, he added, even in winter ‘when all the city is golden and lilac – beautiful Rome!’

  – There is only one thing wanting – my old complaynt – a wife. I have said to everybody that in 5 years I will be married – to my landlady even be she who she may – item very horrid, You may expect to hear of me rashly rushing into matrimony – some penniless governess – or ladies maid. I really think I shall marry some such person, because the refined peoples of rank & the rich lower ones are equally inaccessible & so I won’t wait, & I will have a mendicant wife – & in about 5 years time you will be all sitting at dinner at Peppering when a long beggar with a ragged woman all over small children will interrupt you – & that you’ll see will be me.

  He took refuge in nonsense, often a cover for anxiety. But even in jokes his fantasy wife resembled sisterly figures like Ann and Fanny – kindly and caring, hardly an object of desire. ‘I wish to goodness I could get a wife!’ he lamented to Gould in 1841. ‘You have no idea how sick I am of living alone! – Please make a memorandum of any Lady under 28 who has a little money – can live in Rome – & knows how to cut pencils & make puddings.’

  11: THIRD PERSON

  By early 1841 Lear was ready to return, although ‘What I shall do in England I have no idea,’ he wrote, except ‘run about on railroads – & eat beef-steaks’. He was in London by early summer, collecting stones for lithographs from Hullmandel. And he did run about on railroads: he was a man in a hurry, in tune with the spirit of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844. In years to come he hurtled around Britain and took long journeys across the Continent and later across India. Train travel annoyed him with delays and minor crashes, lost tickets and luggage, but it gave him freedom and often amused him: his letters and diaries were full of chance encounters and odd details, like the tins of hot water in French railway carriages in winter, a good idea, ‘but you are apt to sprain your feet if you don’t take care – for they are often round and rolly-polly’.

  The Grand Junction Railway from Euston to Warrington, with a link to Liverpool Lime Street, had opened in 1837 an
d Bradshaw’s first General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide, with timetables and maps, appeared two years later. Lear quickly became adept at timetables, and in August he puffed north from Euston towards Knowsley. He was keen to see Derby, who had suffered a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair, but was happy surrounded by his children and grandchildren and his animals and birds. In his old haunts, preparing his lithographs, Lear turned his Italian sketches into fine reversed drawings on the stone. In the autumn Hullmandel printed the plates, and in December Views in Rome and Its Environs, Drawn from Nature and on Stone was published in a luxurious folio edition by Thomas McLean, in the Haymarket, its title page bearing the artist’s name: ‘Edward Lear’.

  The twenty-five prints contained views that tourists would know well, with ripples of distant views. After scenes of Rome from the outskirts the journey stretched further out to the Campagna, Tivoli, Lake Nemi, and Civitella and Olevano. By now he had mastered a variety of effects in his lithographs, using tint stones – painted all over in cream or buff except for white areas where the colour of the paper showed through – giving a pale grey or warm, yellowish background, with subtle shading and highlights. As with the Parrots, the book was funded by subscriptions – 209 sets were printed – and Lear paid the costs.

  He wooed subscribers with a four-page prospectus, with short accounts of each view, and his efforts worked: the subscription list, headed by the queen and Prince Albert, was stuffed with earls and dukes. And unlike the Parrots, his Views in Rome and Its Environs made a profit. ‘My “publishing transaction” is all “signed and sealed”,’ he wrote in relief to Fanny Coombe as he headed back to Rome, ‘– & what is more I have £300 of the money – £200 of which I leave behind as clear profit – & £100 goes in bill paying and the journey.’ The book gave him confidence that he could pay his way in Rome. ‘I feel I ought to go, & I must go,’ he wrote; ‘staying among friends alone – however delightful – is quite against an Artist’s steady progress in his Art.’ He had a sudden attack of nerves on leaving, ‘as if I was about to be executed’ – but he set off, with Frederick Thrupp, at the start of December.

  *

  Lear’s return to Rome in late 1841 was a deliberate decision to make a life abroad, a voluntary exile. The reasons were not solely artistic: he wanted to escape the pressure of family and social life in England, to escape the shackles of convention, to find himself abroad. He used the word ‘exile’ in a long letter to Lord Derby the following June, a month after his thirtieth birthday. Derby was a patron but also a father figure, and in his letters to him Lear tended to emphasise his love of England and Knowsley. This time, he wrote, ‘I have not become so foreignized as before – that is – I hope I am always an Englishman.’ His great pleasure, he said, was news from Hornby friends, and he looked nostalgically at old Knowsley sketches of ‘the puffin geese –the darling old Spectacle owl – or the Stanley cranes’. ‘I sometimes please myself with thinking that I shall not be able to bear exile more than another year – & so that I shall perforce set off for the North – next – or the summer after – but this I know is wrong, & I ought to remain more settled for a longer time to come.’ Like the birds, Lear would never remain settled. He was always eager to fly further.

  He was also breaking old links, and his ‘exile’ had something of the cavalier brio of Byron in Beppo, the ironic rejection of corrupt politics, high taxes and prices, beef-steak and beer and rain:

  I like the weather – when it is not rainy,

  That is, I like two months of every year.

  But Lear was also genuine in his sense of loss. His deepest regret on leaving England, he told Fanny Coombe, was not having seen Peppering. But the idyllic Sussex of his youth had vanished. John Drewitt was ill and the family bank was in trouble: John would die bankrupt in 1842, leaving his son Robert to take over the farm. George Coombe was also ill – Lear recommended Buxton or Torquay – and the family were leaving Calceto. In the summer of 1841 Fanny was on her own in Arundel, with the four younger children, including Lear’s godson Percy. Looking back he was full of emotion, remembering the morning he met the family, reminding Fanny how he was amazed by the curiosities in the cabinet (which was included in the Coombes’ possessions put up for auction the following year).

  Most probably I owe a great deal to you – to all of you – for had I not then known you – my school companions would have led me into a different way of life. At thirty I see this clearer than in earlier days. I shall – if it pleases God to give me health – most probably be a successful landscape painter & have a number of friends given to but few in the world: – on the other hand, I am but too certain of living alone throughout life – a fate for which my sensitive mind ill enough prepares me –

  The vision of a life alone, which he had not formulated so clearly before, was a central, crucial confession. But again, when matters got personal, he tumbled into nonsense. He wrote this rigmarole, he said, because Fanny had known him so long, ‘& should have written more if 2 abominable housemaids had not entered the room & are poking & scratching & slapping the furniture about in a manner not to be believed’.

  From now on his letters were full of concern for Fanny’s health and the children, and he saw her almost every time he came back. But he no longer fitted into the old life. The same went for his own family. He loved Ann, and part of him genuinely wanted her to come to Rome, and when their mother died in 1844, at the age of eighty, his first instinct was to tell her to come out at once. But his eagerness was clouded: how would she fit in? Although they would be in mourning, he wrote rather brutally, ‘I hope you will dress very nicely.’ She should buy new boots and shoes in Paris, ‘and good warm clothing, and if you want any handsome, plain shawl or dress in Paris (not odd-looking, my dear old sister!) buy it, and keep it as a present from me. You know that I am very much known here, and live in the “highest respectability” – and so you must not be too dowdy.’ Ann did not come.

  Easing himself out of old bonds to family, to Sussex and to Knowsley, Lear began to draw a line around his own image, like a cut-out figure, a semi-cartoon. There were versions for different audiences. The public Mr Lear was a young artist, determined to learn more, taking on pupils and displaying his work to potential patrons and buyers. In 1839 Gladstone dropped by his studio, jotting in his diary that Lear ‘draws beautifully’, and four years later Murray’s Handbook for 1843, extolling the charm of visiting artists’ studios in Rome, mentioned him as ‘an artist of great promise’. The private Lear of his letters was a man lucky in his friends, happy in his travels but dreaming of domestic bliss – or at least of puddings and sharp pencils. Beneath this ran the admission that he was in essence a man who would live his life alone, and, perhaps, lonely.

  There was, however, a third Mr Lear, displayed to a wider circle to amuse and entertain: the outsider, the peripatetic artist, the court jester. Staying with Edward Penrhyn and his young family at East Sheen in October, he produced two comic Roman histories. Four surviving drawings of Romulus and Remus show the beaming babies floating on the Tiber, meeting a jovial-looking wolf in boots and spurs, and growing up to be remarkably unprepossessing shepherds.

  The other story was The Tragical Life and Death of Caius Marius Esqre late her Majesty’s Consul-general in the Roman states: illustrated from authentic sauces. In one scene in this nonsense history in twenty-three sketches, cooked up from dubious ‘sauces’, a lugubrious Marius, ‘not feeling himself comfortable, places himself in the marshes of Minturnum, all among the bullfrogs’ – with bull-headed frogs leaping around his half-doused head.

  These 1841 children’s stories were absurd and sweet, lacking the anger of many of the limericks. He sent similar letters to his kindly Rome patron, Lady Susan Percy, a talented artist herself. One was ‘Mr Lear recovers his hat’. In a flowing sequence of drawings the bespectacled author loses his hat in a gale, turns his umbrella upside down like a kite to fly after it and, as in Lear’s happiest dreams, flies with the birds, ‘j
oined in the chase of his lively hat by some familiar & affectionate jackdaws’. (Lady Susan, like Lear, loved birds, dying in a limerick-like way in 1847 while ‘feeding her canary birds’ before breakfast.) Finally two fat, eager ‘ingenious infants’ hand his lost headgear back, with a large hole turning it into a high collar, which ends up jammed round his knees.

  This was a dreamlike concoction, a forerunner of today’s children’s books. Lear would fly with the birds in other picture stories. But it was also a self-presentation: the most comical character was ‘Mr Lear’ himself. This persona turned into pictures the bungling, anxious figure of the letters – the boy in the topsy-turvy coach to Sussex, the nervous young man at Knowsley staring in horror at the fowls he was supposed to carve: ‘2 live tigers would have been a farce to it – I could eat nothing – drink nothing – do nothing but perspire with horror at those 2 boiled fowls!’ During his recent visit to Knowsley he had gone walking in Scotland with Phipps Hornby, recording their adventures in thirty drawings, like a cartoon strip: ‘P & L being hurried insert the remains of their lunch in their boots’; ‘L – on ascending the cabin stairs – nearly loses his eye by the abrupt and injudicious promission of a new broom in the hands of a misguided infant’; ‘L’s portmanteau rushes wildly about the deck’; ‘L endeavours to eat a piece of oatcake’. Lear as fool also appeared in a picture-apology for missing an appointment with Captain Phipps Hornby at Woolwich Dockyard. The drawings showed his thin, long-legged self being dragged off by a sentry and learning from harassed clerks that Captain Hornby was in the ‘basin’ – the slang term for the dockyard, an unmissable visual joke.