Scroobious Mr Lear BOOKS

PAUL GRINKE

Philip Hofer's Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman (Oxford University Press 70s) is the first serious attempt to take Edward Lear at his own valuation as a professional artist and not the irrepressible punster and familiar idol of the nursery. It invites comparison with, say, an estimate of Lewis Carroll as a mathe- matician or D. H. Lawrence as a painter, but the last ten years have proved that Lear draw- ings are a highly marketable commodity with an ever-increasing number of admirers. Mr Hofer's book is timely and as well considered as one might expect from Harvard's most dis- tinguished interpreter of the graphic arts.

Let Lear introduce himself, in his own inimitable style: `How pleasant to know Mr Lear Who has written such volumes of stuff Some think him ill tempered and queer But a few think him pleasant enough.

HL mind is concrete and fastidious His nose is remarkably big His visage is more or less hideous His beard it resembles a wig.'

He was more than pleasant, in fact it would be hard to think of a more lovable character in the nineteenth century, and his visage was honest rather than hideous. He had the kind of beard children could not resist pulling and a pair of gold granny glasses which com- pleted the resemblance to a benevolent owl. But he was not a happy man. His life was incurably nomadic in spite of great sensitivity to noise, discomfort and personal danger, and he was totally dependent with a naive trust on a handful of friends and one devoted sister for an intimate and lasting affection which most of them were incapable of giving. His loneliness was exacerbated by a form of constantly re- curring epilepsy, known as petit mal and ominously marked in his journal by an X, which confirmed his feeling 'of alienation from the human race.. From his youth, Lear seems to have resigned himself to a solitary, impecu- nious middle age and funnelled all his energies and ambition into his topographical drawing.

Lear's beginnings as an artist were auspicious enough. He had a gift for ornithological draw- ing which the astute John Gould was quick to make use of for his colour-plate books, and in the 1830s, thanks to a fortunate meeting at London Zoo, Lear was virtually adopted by the Stanley family at Knowsley Hall. For four years Lear drew the birds and animals at Knowsley and entertained the Earl of Derby's numerous offspring. Their friendship and en- couragement and the reputation earned by his book on the Knowsley menagerie and his Book of Nonsense (both appearing in 1846) gave him the necessary confidence to devote himself to his art.

`Foggopolis,' as Lear aptly described London, did little for his health and he began travelling after the Knowsley interlude for almost fifty Years, punctuated by intermittent visits to England. His topographical drawings must be considered in conjunction with his published

journals for any complete picture of Lear the artist. His travels were exhaustive and he never hesitated to put up with considerable hardship and discomfort to reach places like Mount Athos and Petra, or to tour the length and breadth of India for months on end. Strangely, he never seems to have received the acclaim that other Victorian travellers expected as their natural due. Everywhere he went he drew in- cessantly, covering all the most remarkable sights in Italy, Sicily, Greece and the Aegean, Egypt and India. For a man of frail health his fortitude was remarkable and his output almost unbelievable.

For his livelihood Lear was almost too de- pendent on the goodwill of well-connected friends—his business sense was chronically underdeveloped. Wherever he set up a tem- porary residence he held `eggzybissions,' and his success as a dinner guest at remote outposts of- the Empire was undoubtedly vital to his commercial success though he found them 'a norful bore.' Even in the 'little piggy wiggy island' of Corfu, which he loved, he found the demands of society a constant irritation and a spur to further travel. At Knowsley he had written to a friend: 'The uniform apathetic tone assumed by lofty society irks me dread- fully, nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg down the great gallery—but I dare not.' But all too often the big paintings he sold were direct pur- chases by friends or the result of a discreet nudge in high places at a public exhibition. With- out the lionisation he found so insufferable his permanent worriesva.absyn money would have been acute. Unfortunately, his shamelessly cheerful soliciting of commissions from intimates can hardly have helped the tempera- mental course of his friendships.

Viewed dispassionately, Lear could scarcely have chosen more influential friends; the Stanleys, Evelyn Baring, Fortescue, Frank Lushington, Lord Northbrook and the Tenny- sons, all were in a position to offer him patronage or to ease the intolerable burden of travel and a lonely life with hospitality. But the demands he made on their friendship were severe. He was court jester and father con- fessor to the Stanleys for three generations, Edward Lear: self-portrait.

travelling companion to many, confidant and fervent disciple to the Tennysons, and suffered unrequited love for both Lushington and the charming Augusta Bethell. His whole life was incredibly enmeshed with his friends, fuelled by a gargantuan correspondence which would have defeated a lesser man.

Mr Hofer's book is intended as a plea for the reinstatement of Lear as a major artist in the English watercolour tradition, and he derides the estimate of Lear in Bryan's Dic- tionary as a painter who 'can scarcely be said to have risen above the rank of a topographical artist.' This is the crux of the problem, for Lear never claimed to be more than a land- scape draughtsman and called his own work in both oil and watercolour 'Topographies.' Had he managed to bring himself to destroy more of his own work, as he had purged great trunkfuls of correspondence, our estimate would be less hesitant. Many of the finest eighteenth century watercolourists were pure topographical artists. never attempting or even considering an imaginary composition. But by Lear's time a revolution had taken place in the art of watercolour which his conservative nature rejected. The changes in his style over forty years were slight and took no account of the discoveries of other artists. He was never a watercolourist as the art was understood by Turner or Constable, and any contemporary comparison must be made with other topo- graphical artists such as David Roberts or per- haps Ruskin. Mr Hofer himself has some moments of frank hesitation—'stiffness and lifelessness characterised nearly all his large paintings and many of his smaller ones as well as certain highly finished drawings'—and else- where he refers to Lear's 'frequent lack of spontaneity.'

But, at his best, Lear was unequalled in the atmospheric rendering of panoramic landscape, the sweep of a great river or a distant moun- tain chain complete with geological faults, broad dry valleys and forests or spreading cedars or knotty olive groves. His figure draw- ing was largely unconvincing, and he made studious attempts to remedy this, but it rarely intrudes in his work. His colour varied from the soberest wash to riotously vivid hot colour where the magnificence of a tropical sunset proved beyond his means. Even the finest drawings find stiff competition in the best of his descriptive writing in the travel journals.

Mr Hofer devotes a long chapter to the 'Present status of Lear collections' which, though professionally intriguing, will be of minimal public interest. His thesis is that Hubert Congreve's estimate of 10,000 sheets of sketches bequeathed by Lear is exaggerated, but I do not think he proves his point by locating only about 5,500 in public and private collections. Disregarding the fact that 'the Metropolitan Museum in New York has two, the Worcester Art Museum has one and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts four'—I quote from page 5 of the survey—it would hardly be rash to claim that Lear was among the most prolific artists of the last century. By his own reckoning he completed 300 drawings in Corsica in two months, and 1,000 drawings in the winter of 1854 alone. During his working life he must have completed and sold or given away some- thing in the region of 20,000 drawings at a conservative estimate. Their survival rate should hardly concern us, as there are ample examples from every period from which to form an estimate of his art.

Far more interesting is the reason for this incredible proliferation. Lear worked in clearly defined stages, beginning with lightning sketches in pen or pencil from nature, with a complex and often whimsical notation for colour and detail, followed by the process he called `penning' out, whereby the preliminary frame- work was strengthened and watercolour wash was added. Both these stages were used for his oil paintings. For potential customers he pro- duced highly finished drawings with full water- colour entirely made in the studio. Even his enthusiasm for Holman Hunt and the Pre- Raphaelites never really persuaded him to work entirely from nature, and he loved to reconstruct scenes from his travels of decades ago in his studio, sometimes producing dozens of variant drawings of the same scene at different times of day and with subtle variations in the deployment of figures and landscape details.

As he travelled less, so he copied more, and the project of illustrating Tennyson's poems which obsessed Lear in the last years of his life was to be a representative corpus of all the places in Europe and the East that he had so faithfully recorded in the past. After 1875, the problem of reproducing the Tennyson illustra- tions 'by photograph, autograph or sneezigraph' became a tiresome and time-consuming fixation, and he died with this last most ambitious pro- ject unfulfilled. Going by those studies that survive, and they run into the hundreds, the book might well have been something of a disappointment.

In his own lifetime Lear was hard put to win the credit and financial reward he deserved. Strange gentlemen in railway carriages insisted that Edward Lear, the author of A Book of Nonsense, was merely a devious anagram em- ployed by the Earl of Derby, fashionable ladies besieged his studio wherever he set up residence and prevented him from working. Money worries beset him and his paintings never won the critical acclaim that he coveted. Only children seemed to value him at his true worth and I think it unlikely that Lear's fame will ultimately rest on his draughtsmanship, even the best of it. The drawings and the nonsense songs and alphabets march hand in hand and it takes a brave man to try and separate them.