Fresh and dreamy: Edward Lear, at Ikon Gallery, reviewed

‘It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature… English, or Southern… The latter – olive – vine – flowers… warmth & light, better health – greater novelty – & less expense in life. On the other side are, in England, cold, damp & dullness, – constant hurry & hustle – cessation from all varied topographical interest, extreme expenses…’

That choice was effectively made for Edward Lear in 1837 when he gave up the natural history studies by which he had made his name in his teens and headed south to Rome on doctors’ advice, aged 24. Prone to asthma and epileptic seizures, the myopic artist was now also suffering from eyestrain. ‘My eyes are so sadly worse,’ he wrote to a fellow ornithologist the year before, ‘that no bird under an Ostrich shall I soon be able to do.’

Having plumped for a career as a ‘dirty Landscape painter’, Lear fell into a lifelong pattern of wintering around the Mediterranean and summering in England, dashing from patron to patron, entertaining their families with nonsense songs. His love of birds remained, but the landscape took over. ‘O sugar canes! O camels! O Egypt!’ he hailed the Nile in 1867; ‘O wind! O cold! O stones! O sand!’ he scribbled under a drawing of Savona. His pencilled notes are peppered with exclamations. Lonely, depressive, never quite at home in the circles he moved in, he greeted landscapes as warmly as old friends: ‘The Elements – trees, clouds, &. – and silence… seem to have far more part with me, and I with them, than mankind.’

Not many people think of the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ as an artist, but it was as an artist that he thought of himself.