Orientalism | Edward Lear (1812–1888)
Mavi Boncuk |
Edward Lear (12 May 1812– 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularized. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making colored drawings during his journeys, which reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.
In the autumn of 1848 he travelled to Albania on an originally unplanned journey. He actually traveled through Greece toward Constantinople, but his journey took an unexpected turn in the wild territory deep in the Ottoman empire. He passed through Ohrid, Prespa, Bitola, Debar and went forward deeper into Albania.
It was the British ambassador in Constantinople who managed to get the requisite papers for him to travel through what was then considered the wilds of the Ottoman Empire. Starting from Salonika, he arrived in Monastir (Bitola) on 20 September 1848, accompanied by his temperamental Suliot Albanian dragoman and lover, Giorgio Cocali (Jorgo Kokali, 1817-1883). From there, they continued on to Ohrid, Struga, Elbasan, Tirana, Kruja, Lezha and Shkodra, which they reached on 2 October. After several days in Shkodra, they returned to Tirana and Durrës, and continued southwards to Berat (14-18 October), Ardenica, Apollonia, Vlora, the coast of Himara (21-30 October), Tepelena, Gjirokastra and on to Janina (5 November). The delightful account of the journey was published in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, London 1851, reprint as Edward Lear in Albania, London 2008. Many of the sketches he made on his harrowing trip were later transformed into watercolours and oil paintings, and provide a good record of mid-nineteenth century Albania.
The complete list of his Macedonian drawings and watercolors can be found in the Harvard University Library, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Monastir |
September 19, 1848
Edward Lear, View of Ohrid, Macedonia.
Signed with monogram, inscribed and dated ‘Akridha 1848’ (lower right). Watercolour, bodycolour and gum arabic over pencil. 11.5 x 17.8cm (4 1/2 x 7in).
Lear arrived in Constantinople in August 1848, still weak from an illness he had contracted in Greece. To help him recuperate, the British Ambassador and his wife, Sir Stratford and Lady Canning, invited him to stay at their residence at Therapia, and showed him the greatest hospitality, as Lear revealed in a letter to his sister, Ann: 'Lady Canning feeds me and spoils me in the kindest way possible.' (see Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear Selected Letters, 1988, p.84). In return, Lear gave drawing lessons to the Canning's three daughters, but rather than outstay his welcome he left Therapia on 1 September, and moved to the Hotel d'Angleterre at Pera, the European quarter of Constantinople. Feeling in better health, he began exploring the local sites and bazaars. He began to appreciate the beauty of Constantinople, and wrote in his journal: 'it is astonishing what a beautiful effect all the snow white domes and minarets have rising from the water; there can be no place so strange and lovely' (V. Noakes, op. cit., 1988, p. 86)
Lear immersed himself in the life of the busy city and hired a local guide ' ... and set out to explore the city, buying silks in the Stamboul bazaars, sampling the pastries and sweetmeats of the street vendors, and visiting the mosques and the Seraglio, the great walls and the vast champs de morts with the forests of cypresses and turbaned headstones.' (see S. Hyman, Edward Lear in the Levant, Travels in Albania Greece and Turkey in Europe, 1848-1849, 1988, p. 59).
Edward Lear | The Walls of Constantinople | signed with monogram l.r. | pencil and watercolour heightened with white
The walls of Constantinople which stretch from the waters of the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, were first built in the fifth century by Emperor Theodosius II, and resisted enemy attack for over seven hundred years until finally being breached by the Knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Repaired and re-strengthened they protected the city again until 1453, when the troops and cannons of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror brought sections crashing to the ground.Lear painted this view of the imposing watchtowers from the dry riverbed below, which sweeps through the composition and gives the wonderful sense of space which we expect from Lear. The composition is balanced by cypresses on the left and the overgrown walls on the right which were not restored until recent times. A trio of Turkish women are walking towards the viewer dressed in the local dress and white yashmak, in Lear's words; 'the women look like a bed of tulips afar off – clothed in all colours; but near, that dreadful 'tooth ache' wrapper makes them look like ghosts. They all wear yellow boots... and they walk miserably, and as if crippled, and in fact, I should recommend them all to go to bed directly.' (V. Noakes, op. cit., 1988, p. 61)
Watercolor of the cemetery above Ayoub's burial place looking out towards the Golden Horn in Constantinople an historic scene on which he later based an oil painting.
Lear's earliest training was as a natural history illustrator. In his volume Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or parrots, which appeared when he was just nineteen, he produced one of the finest works of ornithological illustration ever published. He also drew animals and reptiles, in particular for his patron, the 13th Earl of Derby, who employed him to illustrate the creatures in his extensive menagerie. It was a training which developed his powers of observation and gave him the strong sense of draftsmanship which is characteristic of his considered landscape drawings. This can be seen most powerfully in the strong, sculptural quality of his drawing of the hills and mountains that feature in so many of these works. It also gave him a particular authority when he painted animals and birds in his work. At the age of twenty-five he turned his back on this early success and became a landscape painter. Supported by Lord Derby, and Derby's cousin Robert Hornby, in the summer of 1837 he travelled across Europe to Rome. ... He soon realized, though, that the speed with which he needed to work, given the distances he so often covered in any day, and the heaviness and awkwardness of the equipment he had to carry, meant that this way of working was impractical. Instead, he endeavored to build all the information he would need into his drawings. This meant that he had to take only pads of paper and quantities of pencils, instead of a heavy easel, palette, boxes of oils and brushes. In order to take back with him to his studio the maximum amount of information, he wrote color notes and reminders about form of the scene on which he was working; this led to his characteristic annotation, a method he had used during his ornithological days when he had followed Audubon's advice to 'Leave nothing to memory, but note all your observations in ink, and keep in mind that the more you write at the time, the more you will afterwards recollect.' It was not until 1848 that he finally settled on this method which he was to use for the rest of his life. His friend Hubert Congreve has left us a description of his working methods. 'When we came to a good subject, Lear would sit down [he either used a three-legged stool or perched on a suitable rock, a frequently uncomfortable process], and taking his block from George [his man-servant], would lift his spectacles, and gaze for several minutes at the scene through a monocular glass he always carried; then, laying down the glass, and adjusting his spectacles, he would put on paper the view before us, mountain range, villages and foreground, with a rapidity and accuracy that inspired me with awestruck admiration. They were always done in pencil on the ground, and then inked in in sepia and brush washed in color in the winter evening.' Lear never sold his now highly sought-after travel watercolors. Instead, he regarded them as working drawings, the source of reference for his later works. Apart from private showings to small groups of friends and possible patrons, he did not exhibit them publicly, nor did he ever throw any of them away: they were done, often hastily and under difficult conditions, for his own reference. Some of them, sketchy and unresolved, represent no more than a few minutes' work, but although uncompleted they could revive in his memory some feature of the landscape through which he has passed on his travels, and to which he would later return in his studio. From the time Lear left England in the summer of 1837 until he built himself his home in San Remo, he seldom spent more than a few months in one place - indeed, during his more extensive travels he would move on from day to day. The purpose of his travel was two-fold: discovery, 'simply the love of seeing new places', and the collecting of landscape drawings from which he could later work in his studio. The collection of drawings justified the expense of his extensive journeys, but more than most artists he delighted in travel for its own sake.
The slow
wandering through new lands offered him a physical and spiritual freedom which
was essential to his well-being. A problem which any traveler must face, but
which for a landscape painter presented particular difficulties, was the
weather. Rain was the most trying, but during his six weeks' walking tour along
the Corniche, it was the cold that troubled him, especially
when it made holding a pencil difficult. He was generally up before it was
light. In countries where the midday heat was overpowering and the bright
sunlight flattened the countryside, robbing it of its color and its shadows, he
enjoyed working in the softer, more interesting early light with its 'beautiful
broad morning effect'. He had no difficulty in rising early, for it was the
time of day he most enjoyed. When he returned from his travels he would hold
studio open days, when potential clients - or the idly curious - could come to
see the work he had brought back with him and possibly commission a studio watercolor
or oil based on some view they particularly admired. There was often a
surprisingly long process of gestation in his oil paintings - a picture of
Turin, for example, based on the panorama of drawings here (lot 81), was begun
in early 1863 and not completed until March 1864. This was because he worked on
as many as five or six paintings at any one time, partly to give them time to
dry out between the different stages of his work, and partly to give himself a
change of scene. Some of his oils and studio watercolors are inscribed with
two dates; the earlier of these is the date of the original drawing on which it
is based, the later that of the finished picture. He prided himself on being
topographically accurate, but lest this should imply a lack of that imaginative
input which lifts a landscape drawing from mere topography into a work of art,
he thought of himself as a 'Poetical Topographer'. This was a necessary
qualification at a time when topographical artists were mere hacks, especially
since he once heard himself described as 'nothing but a d**d dirty landscape
painter' - though he subsequently mocked himself by taking this soubriquet as
his own - he called himself 'Edward Lear - Damned Dirty Landscape Painter'.
Certainly, he was not only interested in the thing seen. His ability to empathize with the landscape, to draw out its essence, gives his work a quality that goes far beyond the topographical. Echoing Byron, he once wrote: 'I sometimes think that trees, rocks, clouds &c have more in common with me than I with mankind'. Almost all his studio work is signed, either with his name or, from July 1859 onwards, with his characteristic monogram. These travel watercolors, however, never are. On many of them he inscribes the place and the date and the time of the drawing. Frequently there is a number which indicates its order in the sequence of drawings made during any tour. Lear returned to England, hoping to settle, in 1849. In 1851 he met William Holman Hunt, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who was to have an influence on his oil painting, in particular in his use of color. But his health meant that he could not survive the cold and wet of English winters, and so he began to winter abroad, returning to England in the summer to show his new work and gather commissions on which to work during the winter months. His first semi-permanent wintering place was the Greek island of Corfu, then a British Protectorate, and a place whose then unspoiled beauty enchanted him. Before the islands were returned to Greek rule in 1864, he spent two months exploring the nearby islands in preparation for his book Views in the Seven Ionian Islands, in which he recommends them to his readers for 'the beauty and variety of their form and color', their 'associations of poetical and historical antiquity', and 'the hearty welcome and joyous hospitality offered to travelers by the islanders'. He now had to seek other places in which to spend the winter. Among these were the French and Italian Rivieras. At the end of 1864 he spent six weeks walking along the Corniche road, returning to his rooms in Nice with a collection of 144 drawings. During this walk he made his first visit to San Remo, where, in 1870, he built a house - his first settled home - and where he lived for the last eighteen years of his life.
Select Oriental Chronological Table of Lear's Travels compiled from Vivien Noakes list
1848 via Malta to Corfu, Ionian Islands. June-July, Greece: Athens, Marathon, Thermopylae, Thebes. August , Constantinople. September-December, tour of Greece and Albania. December, Malta. 1849 January-February, Egypt, Sinai. March, Malta. March-July, tour of southern Greece, Yannina, Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus. 1853 December, Egypt. 1854 January-March, Egypt. 1855 November, Corfu. 1856 Corfu. August-October, Greece, Mount Athos, Dardanelles, Troy. 1857 Corfu. January, Albania (briefly). April, Albania. November, Corfu. 1858 Corfu. March, Alexandria, Jaffa, Jerusalem. April, Bethlehem, Hebron, Petra, Dead Sea. May, Beirut. June, Corfu. 1863 April-May, Ionian Islands. 1864 April-May, Athens, Crete. 1865 Nice. April, England. November, Venice. December, Malta. 1866 December, Egypt. 1867 Egypt. April, Palestine. 1872 sets out to India but turns back at Suez.
Lear travelled extensively before settling in San Remo in 1871. For much of his life, he suffered from epilepsy, depression and loneliness. He was a close friend of Tennyson's wife Emily and named his house in San Remo the 'Villa Tennyson'. One of his ambitions was to fully illustrate Tennyson's poems.
Lear never married but he was very attached to his Suliot chef Giorgio Cocali, who for 39 years his faithful servant- who is buried was next to him at San Remo. After Giorgio Cocali's death his sons would carry on his work for Lear.
His other important companion was his cat Foss who died in 1886 and was buried with considerable ceremony in the garden of his villa.
(Pictured below: Lear's grave in San Remo, Italy alongside Giorgio Cocali | Jorgo Kokali, 1817-1883 )
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