Edward Lear, Agia Paraskevi, 1857.
Pen and brown ink and watercolor over traces of pencil on paper. Inscribed lower left Agia Paraskevi / 13 April 1857 / 11 1/2 AM (lower left); further inscribed with Artist’s notes. 13 3/4 x 19 1/2 in. (34.9 x 49.5 cm.)

Edward Lear traveled widely throughout his life, visiting Italy, Greece, and the Middle East. He eventually settled in Sanremo, on the northwestern Italian coast, in the 1870s, at a villa he named “Villa Tennyson.” Lear aspired to visit and sketch all the Greek lands, and in April 1857, he made a short trip from Corfu, where he wintered from 1855 to 1857, to the mainland. He had already visited some of the places before, in 1848, 1849 and 1856, and had published an account, with lithographic plates, in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c. (London: Richard Bentley, 1851).
The present work was created during Lear’s three-week tour through northwestern Greece. Here he depicts a view north of the village of Monodrendi and the Monastery of Agia Paraskevi. The monastery is just out of sight, beyond an outcrop. The artist described the dramatic scenery in a letter, dated April 27, 1857, to his sister Ann:

“On the 13th we went to Manassís, & M?nodéndron, 2 large towns near a monastery [Agía Paraskeví] placed most surprisingly amid precipices of tremendous magnitude,—on a great gorge of Pápingo. The rocks rise clear—perpendicularly—more than 1,500 feet from the river, & the whole thing looked more like a dream than a reality.”

The watercolor captures the changing light on the complex rock formations and includes distant figures on a path and a woman in local costume in the foreground. The small figures emphasize the sheer, plunging cliffs and the intense majesty of the spectacular site.

Invaluable.