Edward Lear | |
|---|---|
 Lear in 1866 | |
| Born | (1812-05-12)12 May 1812 |
| Died | 29 January 1888(1888-01-29) (aged 75) |
| Occupation | Artist, illustrator, writer, poet |
| Citizenship | British, Italian |
| Period | 19th century |
| Genre | Children's literature,literary nonsense andlimericks |
| Notable works | The Book of Nonsense, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" |
Edward Lear (12 May 1812[1][2] – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for hisliterary nonsense inpoetry and prose and especially hislimericks, a form he popularised.[3]
His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations ofbirds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books) and as a minor illustrator ofAlfred, 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.
Lear was born into a middle-class family atHolloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business.[4][5] He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars.[6] Because of the family's now more limited finances, when he was aged four, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home, Bowmans Lodge, and live together. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother to him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age.[7]
Lear had lifelong health problems. From the age of six, he had frequentgrand malepileptic seizures,bronchitis,asthma and, during later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate when with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. He felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition, and his adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood. He had periods of severemelancholia which he referred to as "the Morbids".[8]
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Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by theZoological Society and from 1832 to 1836 by theEarl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie at his estate,Knowsley Hall. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from life rather than the skins of specimens. Lear's first publication, published when he was 19 years old, wasIllustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830.[9] One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he taughtElizabeth Gould whilst also contributing toJohn Gould's works and was compared by some to the naturalistJohn James Audubon. In honour of Lear's bird illustrations,Anodorhynchus leari, popular nameLear's macaw, is named after him.
After his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with such precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, he turned to landscape painting and travel.[10]
Among other travels, he visitedGreece andEgypt during 1848–49 and toured India during 1873–75, including a brief detour toCeylon. While travelling he produced large quantities of colouredwash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil andwatercolour paintings, as well as prints for his books.[11] His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour.[12]
Between 1878 and 1883, Lear spent his summers onMonte Generoso, a mountain on the border between theSwiss canton ofTicino and the Italian region ofLombardy. Hisoil paintingThe Plains of Lombardy from Monte Generoso is in theAshmolean Museum inOxford.[13][14]
Throughout his life, he continued to paint seriously. He had a lifelong ambition to illustrateTennyson's poems; near the end of his life, a volume with a small number of illustrations was published.
In 1842, Lear began a journey into theItalian peninsula, travelling through theLazio,Rome,Abruzzo,Molise,Apulia,Basilicata,Calabria andSicily. In personal notes, together with drawings, Lear gathered his impressions on the Italian way of life, folk traditions, and the beauty of the ancient monuments. Of particular interest to Lear was theAbruzzo, which he visited in 1843, through theMarsica (Celano, Avezzano,Alba Fucens, Trasacco) and the plateau of Cinque Miglia (Castel di Sangro and Alfedena), by an old sheep track of the shepherds.
Lear drew a sketch of the medieval village of Albe with Mount Sirente, and described the medieval village of Celano, with the castle of Piccolomini dominating the vast plain of Lago Fucino, which was drained a few years later to promote agricultural development. At Castel di Sangro, Lear described the winter stillness of the mountains and the beautiful basilica.
More adventurous was the voyage to the regions of southern Italy in 1847, described in Lear'sJournals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, & c. The broadCalabria section in which Lear tells his itinerary among breathtaking landscapes and often surreal characters, is thought to be among the best in his travel literature.[15]
Lear primarily played the piano, but he also played the accordion, flute, and small guitar.[16] He composed music for many Romantic and Victorian poems, but was known mostly for his many musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. He published four settings in 1853, five in 1859, and three in 1860. Lear's were the only musical settings that Tennyson approved of. Lear also composed music for many of his nonsense songs, including "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat", but only two of the scores have survived, the music for "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò" and "The Pelican Chorus". While he never played professionally, he did perform his own nonsense songs and his settings of others' poetry at countless social gatherings, sometimes adding his own lyrics (as with the song "The Nervous Family"), and sometimes replacing serious lyrics with nursery rhymes.[17]
Lear's most fervent and painful friendship was withFranklin Lushington. He met the young barrister in Malta in 1849 and toured southern Greece with him. Lear developed an infatuation for him that Lushington did not wholly reciprocate. Although they remained friends for almost forty years until Lear's death, the disparity of their feelings constantly tormented Lear. Indeed, Lear's attempts at male companionship were not always successful; the very intensity of Lear's affections may have doomed these relationships.[18]
He proposed twice to another writer,Augusta Bethell, whom he had known for a long time, when he was 26 years her senior.[19] For companions, he relied instead on friends and correspondents, and especially, during later life, on his AlbanianSouliote chef, Giorgis, a faithful friend and (as Lear complained) a thoroughly unsatisfactory chef.[20] Another trusted companion in San Remo was his cat,Foss, who died in 1887 and was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson.
Lear eventually settled inSan Remo, on his beloved Mediterranean coast in the 1870s at a villa he named "Villa Tennyson".
Lear was known to introduce himself with a long pseudonym: "Mr Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph" or "Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla PolentillaBattledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps", which he based onAldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos.[21]
After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888 ofheart disease, which he had since at least 1870. Lear's funeral was described as a sad, lonely affair by the wife of Dr. Hassall, Lear's physician, none of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend.[22]
Lear is buried in the Cemetery Foce in San Remo. On his headstone are inscribed these lines about Mount Tomohrit (in Albania) from Tennyson's poemTo E.L. [Edward Lear], On His Travels in Greece:
— all things fair.
With such a pencil, such a pen.
You shadow'd forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.[23]
The centenary of his death was marked in Britain with a set of Royal Mail stamps in 1988 and an exhibition at theRoyal Academy. Lear's birthplace area is now marked with a plaque at Bowman's Mews, Islington, in London, and his bicentenary during 2012 was celebrated with a variety of events, exhibitions and lectures in venues across the world including an International Owl and Pussycat Day on his birth anniversary.[24]
In 1846, Lear publishedThe Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks which went through three editions and helped popularise the form and the genre ofliterary nonsense. In 1871, he publishedNonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included the nonsense song "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat", which he wrote for the children of his patronEdward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed.
Lear's nonsense books were quite popular during his lifetime, but a rumour developed that "Edward Lear" was merely a pseudonym, and the books' true author was the man to whom Lear had dedicated the works, his patron the Earl of Derby. Promoters of this rumour offered as evidence that both men were named Edward, and that "Lear" is ananagram of "Earl".[25]
Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffedrhinoceros becomes a "diaphanous doorscraper". A "blue Boss-Woss" plunges into "a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud". His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. One of his most famous verbal inventions, the phrase "runcible spoon", occurs in the closing lines of "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" and is now found in many English dictionaries.
— lines 27–33
Though known for hisneologisms, Lear used a number of other devices in his works in order to defyreader expectations. For example, "Cold Are the Crabs"[27] conforms to thesonnet tradition until its dramatically foreshortened last line.
Today, limericks are invariably typeset as five lines. Lear's limericks, however, were published in a variety of formats; it appears that Lear wrote them in manuscript in as many lines as there was room for beneath the picture. For the first three editions, most are typeset as, respectively, two, five, and three lines. The cover of one edition[28] bears an entire limerick typeset in two lines:
There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry;
So he made them a Book, and with laughter they shook, at the fun of that Derry down Derry!
In Lear's limericks, the first and last lines usually end with the same word rather than rhyming. For the most part they are truly nonsensical and devoid of any punch line or point. They are completely free of thebawdiness with which the verse form is now associated. A typical thematic element is the presence of a callous and critical "they". An example of a typical Lear limerick:
Lear's self-description in verse,How Pleasant to know Mr. Lear, ends with thisstanza, a reference to his own mortality:
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear![30]
— Stanza 8 (lines 29–32)
Five of Lear's limericks from theBook of Nonsense (in the 1946 Italian translation by Carlo Izzo) were set to music for choir a cappella byGoffredo Petrassi in 1952.
Edward Lear has been played in radio dramas byAndrew Sachs inThe Need for Nonsense byJulia Blackburn (BBC Radio 4, 9 February 2009)[31] and byDerek Jacobi inBy the Coast of Coromandel by Lavinia Murray (BBC Radio 4, 21 December 2011). He was portrayed on television by Robert Lang in "Edward Lear: On the Edge of the Sand" a special episode of The Natural World, BBC2 14 April 1985.
Lear's written work was used extensively in the short-livedThe Tomfoolery Show, a Saturday morning cartoon that was produced byRankin-Bass and broadcast on NBC from 1970 to 1971.A Beach Full of Shells, the 20th album by musicianAl Stewart pays tribute in the song "Mr. Lear", celebratingFoss and many events from Lear's life.
The largest collection by far of Edward Lear original drawings resides in the Printing and Graphic Arts Collection atHoughton Library. Additional major Lear collections may be found at theYale Center for British Art, the Liverpool Libraries, andGennadius Library in Athens.
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