Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Old Man of Corfu

Happy 200th birthday, Mr Lear

‘The woes of painters!’ lamented Edward Lear in a letter to a friend in 1862. Earlier that day, he was pottering around his apartment in Corfu Town, when, glancing out of the window, he spotted a troop of soldiers marching past. One of them, a certain Colonel Bruce, spied Lear and saluted. At which, forgetting he had a clutch of paint-brushes in his hand, Lear saluted back — ‘& thereby transferred all my colours into my hair and whiskers, which I must now wash in turpentine or shave off’. As a cameo, it sums him up. In that age of pomp and protocol, he always had (or felt he did) paint in his bushy beard.

Edward Lear could hardly have chosen a worse time to live than the Victorian era, or a better place to lurk than this island of Corfu off the north-west tip of Greece. Corfu was (and is) beautiful; a painter’s dream. And now, for those who get the chance to see it, there’s a fine exhibition of Lear’s work on at the Palace of St Michael and St George, at one end of Corfu Town’s esplanade. The show marks the bicentenary of Lear’s birth, and Corfu grandees have made a point of going along to help celebrate.

This is just the kind of thing to have struck panic into the heart of the man himself. Lear was an outsider to his arteries. Born in Holloway, the 20th of 21 children, he was given up by his understandably exhausted mother to be raised by his older sister, and he never, some say, got over the sense of rejection. Plagued by bouts of depression, which he called The Morbids, and painfully shy about his appearance (fat, balding, bulbous-nosed), he scarcely felt fit for society half the time; the other half, he felt society wasn’t worth being fit for.

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