Edward Lear, An Olive Grove, Corfu, a sailing boat to the right.
Inscribed and dated ‘Corfu / December 22 / 1857’ (lower left); Inscribed and dated ‘Corfu December 22 1857’ (lower right); and further inscribed and dated ‘1857 / H. M. N. H.’ (on a label attached to the reverse). Oil on board. 18 1⁄2 x 24 in. (47 x 61 cm.)
Prevenance
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, London, 15 July 1992, lot 76, where acquired by the present owner.
Lear first visited Corfu in 1848, and then stayed for a longer visit from December 1855 until May 1857 staying with his friend Franklin Lushington. He returned from Trieste on 1 December 1857 and these two sketches were made shortly thereafter. In an early letter to is sister Anne dated 14 May 1848 he wrote: `I wish I could give you any idea of the beauty of this island – it really is a Paradise … The chief charm is the great variety of the scenery, and the extreme greenness of every place. Such magnificent groves of olives I never saw – they are gigantic’. On Christmas Eve 1857 he again wrote `Perfect calm has been the order of every hour since I came. I finished a drawing of Zante and have sent it off; besides this the 2 paintings for Mrs Empson are all that I have completed, and those 2 not quite’. This and the subsequent lot are in all likelihood the paintings referred to.
Doesn’t much lokk like a Lear to me; for sure the writing for the dating is not his.
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