Edward Lear, Ioannina, Greece.
Pen and brown ink with watercolour over traces of pencil; inscribed lower right in pen: Ἰωάννινα / Aug.. 1856 April 1857; and again in pencil: Aug 1856. Apr. 1857. 145 by 228 mm.
Edward Lear travelled extensively throughout Greece in the 1850s and 1860s and his watercolours are an important visual record of a nation in a state of transition from the period of Ottoman rule to that of the country known today. This sketch, which depicts a group of mounted travellers on the plains before the northern city of Ioannina, shows a scene which had all but disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
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