A Blog of Bosh

Edward Lear, The castle at Genazzano, south-east of Tivoli, Italy.
Extensively inscribed with colour annotations; titled and dated ‘Gennazzano. Oct. 09. 1840.’ lower right. Pencil. 21.5 x 42cm.

Provenance
Albany Gallery, London

Although the gallery label verso suggests a date of 1860, the date is more likely to read 1840, when Lear is recorded as being in Italy around Tivoli and Rome.

[On 9 October 1860 Lear was in London.]

The Saleroom.

Edward Lear, Capo Sant’Angeli, Amalfi.
Pencil with touches of white on paper. 11 x 17.5cm; 4 1/4 x 17 1/2in. 25 x 31.5cm; 9 3/4 x 12 1/2in (framed). Property from a Private Collection, Ravenscourt Park.

Provenance
Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd, London
Purchased from the above by the present owner in 1991

The present drawing of the dramatic cliffs of Capo Sant’ Angeli on the Amalfi coast was one of a series of works Lear completed to illustrate the poem The Palace of Art by Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) first published in 1832. Comprising twenty-four quatrains, Tennyson’s verses describe the construction of a vast pleasure palace for the soul.

Lear’s depiction of Capo Sant’ Angeli illustrates verse sixteen: ‘One showed an iron coast and angry waves / you seemed to hear them climb and fall / and roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves / Beneath the windy wall’. Variations on the drawing are in the collections of the National Gallery, Washington DC, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Lear lived in Rome, for a decade, from 1837-1847. Tennyson and Lear were friends over many years, frequently exchanging letters and verse. Lear was a frequent visitor to the Tennysons’ house Farringford, in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, which attracted a host of other Victorian luminories including the photographer Julia Cameron, critic and artist John Ruskin and the painter Danté Gabriel Rossetti.

Invaluable (Olympia Auctions).